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June 2003

Hello and Goodbye

By Jim Morrison

I had hoped with this column to deliver news about the status of our settlement talks with the databases in the class action copyright infringement case. Unfortunately, that's not possible yet.

In the past year, that has been atop my list of projects. But it's not the only new items on ASJA's agenda.

At our board meeting in May, we voted to issue a request for proposals to revamp our Writer Referral Service with the goal of greatly increasing the number of jobs posted there monthly. We don't know what kind of response we will get. But our intention is to remove the commission currently paid by members and finance the service solely through payments from those posting the jobs. Will it work? We won't know until we begin getting responses.

We also decided to take a look at better helping writers facing collection and other problems with publishers. This project is just beginning, but the idea is to have our Legal Affairs Committee, Writer/Editor Relations Committee and Warning List Committee work together to aid writers plagued by late—or no—pay.

We're going to reexamine our annual Friday members' meeting with an eye towards shaking up things. The members' meeting was transformed some years ago with panels concentrating on both the craft and the business of freelancing. However, many of those panels now appear during the Saturday sessions. Our charge will be to improve and make the members' day even more valuable.

Finally, we're going to explore partnerships with other organizations and corporations to better help members market and sell their reprints. Again, this is something just in the early stages, but seems promising. Will it work out? I hope we'll have an answer for members —and a little more change in their pockets—by the end of the summer.

I'm shaking my head as I write this because I should be summing up, not outlining new initiatives. This is my last column as ASJA's president. Lisa Collier Cool, who brings her extensive experience as a freelancer and author to the task, takes over next month. I hope we've accomplished a few things that have improved the value of membership and ASJA's standing in the publishing business. Anything we did came through the efforts of members, most of them volunteers. They are people who put aside paying work to improve things for the rest of us. So I'd like to name as many of them as possible.

Thanks, first, to Brett Harvey and Zeleika Raboy, our staff of two who sometimes seem to do the work of 20. Thanks to our officers and board members who continue to come up with idea after idea to improve ASJA. They are Lisa Collier Cool, Shari Steiner, Minda Zetlin, Sam Greengard, Margaret Littman, Andie Warren, Jennifer Pirtle, Russ Wild, Bob Bittner, Jack El-Hai, Sandra Lamb, Ann Monroe and Claire Walter.

Thanks to Melba Newsome, the Publications czar, and her crew including newsletter editor Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Web editor Christine Larson and Webmaster par excellence Bruce Miller. In the past year, they've overhauled and vastly upgraded the newsletter and Web site (and Bruce has done amazing work creating the hybrid listserve/forum for members). Thanks to Erik Sherman, our contracts guru; Russ Wild, our conference chair; Jennifer Pirtle, our market reports head; Janine Latus, our recruiting chief; Andie Warren, our new member hostess; Claire Safran, the First Amendment committee chair of many years; Mark Fuerst, who ran the membership applications committee; Diane O'Connell, who put together superb New York meetings; Sarah Francis, who assumed the unenviable task of dealing with annual awards; and Paula Dranov, who heads our PR Committee. Ann Monroe and her committee have taken on the difficult job of reworking the Writer Referral Service and come up with an excellent plan.

Finally, I'd like to thank a number of members who have provided much-appreciated counsel over the past two years, including Florence Isaacs, Sue Russell, Sarah Wernick, Tim Harper, Rogier van Bakel, Donna Albrecht, Sophie Dembling, Rich Marini and Pat McNees. Sallie Randolph has donated a ridiculous amount of her valued legal insight to ASJA and deserves our appreciation.

When I became president two years ago, I mentioned it to my father, who has since died. He grew up and then still lived in a tiny Pennsylvania town and retained that small town view that such things are big news. A few weeks later, I was talking to him and he said, "I've been looking for your news in the paper." I was puzzled until he explained that he was referring to my becoming president of ASJA. "I thought maybe AP would pick it up," he added.

"No, " I said laughing, "it's not that big a deal."

Two years later, I think I was wrong. It was a big deal. I learned that during the annual conference when so many of you were so complimentary. And, yes, Tim Harper was right. I was shocked and a little embarrassed by the fuss. But thank you. I'll long remember it.

Being ASJA's president has been more work than I anticipated. I can honestly say I didn't know all I was getting into, especially when it came to the class action lawsuit against the databases.

However, it has also been more rewarding than I could ever have imagined.

I remain on the board as the past president and will be working on projects related to rights and copyright issues. Thanks for tuning in the past couple of years. It's been some ride.