Friday, May 7, 2010

Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing - Part II


Sorry I've been MIA. I guess I don't deserve to be in the Blogger's Club. My last blog was focused on the annoucment of the 2010 Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing Recipient, Mark S. Mikolajczyk, President and Publisher of FLORIDA TODAY. Today's posting is focused on the events surrounding the awards ceremony which was held on April 21, 2010.

When Isaiah Thomas' newspaper The Massachusetts Spy covered the growing resistance to British royal rule in the American colonies, handwritten notes were typeset, with each sheet printed one at a time and then the finished newspaper was put together and distributed.

"Today, the battles of Lexington or Concord would be covered by journalists uploading handheld video to the Web as they Tweet and Facebook about the combat," Florida Today Publisher Mark S. Mikolajczyk said Wednesday.

Even as the technology and techniques of delivering news have changed, and as the business of newspapering has stumbled under the weight of the economy and changing trends, "We've not given up and rolled over," said the winner of Rochester's Institute of Technology's Isaiah Thomas Award in Publishing. "We're transforming our business to meet the needs of our customers. Through innovation and risk taking, we're winning the battle."

The Thomas Award is arguably the biggest honor given by RIT's College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, and it goes to noteworthy people in the newspaper industry, said Twyla Cummings,Ph.D., interim associate dean of the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences. Past winners have included Washington Post Co. President Katharine Graham and New York Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. Mikolajczyk is the 26th winner of the award. A Cleveland native, he is a 1983 graduate of RIT.

During the awards ceremony, Mikolajczyk talked about how necessity — from the economy to the broad trend of readers seeking news in a widening variety of mediums — pushed Florida Today to change its operations over the past four years. Along with a daily newspaper and a variety of smaller publications, it also puts sizable resources into its Website, including staff responsible for getting breaking news online quickly. And Florida Today does a daily 30-minute televised news show five days a week.

So how long until Florida Today no longer comes out in paper form? "That's the $1 million question," Mikolajczyk said. "The news is the important part and the paper is just one of the delivery systems."

But given the 70,000 papers it sells daily, he added, "Print will be around for quite some time."

MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com

DD

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