From the February '08 Clarion.

By STEPHANIE HORVATH and DANIA RAJENDRA  

For the third consecutive year, the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA) has named Clarion the best union newspaper of its size in North America.  

In awarding the paper a first-place prize for general excellence, ILCA judges described Clarion as “outstanding” and said its articles featured “good analysis and no fluff.” The award was presented at the ILCA’s 2007 convention, held October 18-20 in New Orleans.  

NO FLUFF  

The ILCA, a labor media organization for unions in the US and Canada, also honored Clarion with awards for photography, illustration, a feature story and collective bargaining coverage. Awards were based on issues published in 2006.  

New Orleans was not just the location of the labor press convention: it was the main focus of the meeting itself. Labor journalists fanned out across the city to examine the rebuilding of New Orleans – or the lack thereof – and how Bush administration policies and local corruption have affected the city’s working people. The ILCA organized bus tours of devastated neighborhoods and coordinated teams of labor reporters to follow particular stories over the course of the four-day meeting. Local labor leaders, workers and organizers were invited to address the convention, and delegates discussed what the human catastrophe in New Orleans means for the union movement and the nation as a whole .

“Every challenge that this nation’s workers and their unions face is here, but in a concentrated and exaggerated form,” said ILCA President Steve Stallone. “Reporting on and broadcasting these challenges and these stories not only furthers their cause but informs our reporting wherever we live and work.” The work that ILCA members produced is available at www.neworleanslabormedia.org.  

MORE AWARDS
 
In addition to the recognition from the ILCA, Clarion also received awards in 2007 from the American Federation of Teachers, New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and the New York Metro Labor Communications Council.

NYSUT judges also gave Clarion first place for general excellence, in this case among teacher union locals of the same size in New York State. “There’s no competition when the Clarion is in the running,” commented the judges, who praised the paper’s stories, photos and the “topnotch layout” by Clarion designer Margarita Aguilar.  

NYSUT also gave Clarion a first place award for best news article, citing Associate Editor Dania Rajendra’s article on a union arbitration victory at LaGuardia Community College. The story was “told with verve, and the prose shines,” judges wrote.  
Steve Leberstein, chair of the PSC’s Academic Freedom Committee, won NYSUT’s Solidarity Award for his op-ed about the threat to academic freedom posed by the so-called “Academic Bill of Rights,” which would invite government monitoring of academics’ political views. (The award was given jointly to Clarion and to The Answer, the publication of the Bay Shore Classroom Teachers’ Association.) NYSUT judges also cited Clarion for best front page and best original cartoon.  

BEST NEWS  

The American Federation of Teachers Communicators Network (AFTCN) honored Clarion with a first-place award for best news story, for Editor Peter Hogness’s March 2007 article about the severe problems experienced by many retirees when TIAA-CREF introduced a new computer system. Judges praised the article’s thorough reporting and said the result was a “complicated issue well explained.”  

Clarion was invited to make a presentation at the AFTCN meeting to describe how the paper’s Letters to the Editor section had developed into an active, open forum for members’ views. It was one of several presentations in a discussion of “success stories” in labor communications, with other locals encouraged to learn from these examples. At the 2007 meeting of the New York Metro Labor Communications Council, Clarion won a first place award for best reporting in 2006, for Peter Hogness and Esther Kaplan’s joint article on the formation of a municipal bargaining coalition. (Kaplan was then newspaper editor for Communications Workers Local 1180, and the article was published simultaneously in both union’s papers. She is currently investigative editor at The Nation Institute.)  

COLLABORATION  

Judges praised the article for “indepth, candid reporting of an event with broad significance to the New York labor movement,” noting that the “well-researched” piece “presented a forthright examination of internal debates among municipal unions.”  

The PSC website, administered and maintained by Bill Friedheim of the Retirees Chapter and PSC Communications Coordinator Dorothee Benz, also won awards in 2007. ILCA judges gave the website a first-place award for best content, remarking that “while the design is a bit rough, the content covers a wide range of useful information.”  

Clarion also came in for some constructive criticism: NYSUT judges, for example, noted that certain articles “could use some trimming.” In one case, they wrote, “the length and density make this read more like an academic paper” than a newspaper article.
 

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