This year, the most widely discussed and anticipated event was a Friday afternoon keynote address by Jay Harris, the former publisher of The San Jose Mercury News.

In the days preceding Harris’ speech, journalism professionals from throughout the country pondered what Harris called the "myopic focus on numbers" that led him to leave Knight Ridder’s Bay Area franchise. They spoke of their own struggles with the increasingly powerful conflict between doing good journalism and improving the bottom line.

During his address, Harris said that meetings between Mercury News and Knight Ridder executives "focused on getting to a number—and essentially blind to all else." Harris was deeply concerned that "there was virtually no discussion of the damage that would be done to the quality and aspirations of the Mercury News as a journalistic endeavor or to its ability to fulfill its responsibilities to the community."

For Harris, leaving the Mercury News was the ethical choice and "the only way to slow things down."

We at the School of Journalism and Communication are equally aware of what Harris called "the tyranny of the current situation." We understand that when our students enter the workplace, they will need the tools to uphold the ethical standards of responsible, high-quality journalism. To that end, we continue to make ethics central to the mission of the School of Journalism and Communication.

Tim Gleason, Dean

First awarded last year, the Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism now join the Ruhl Symposium on Ethics in Journalism and the John L. Hulteng Chair in Media Ethics as an integral part of the School’s growing ethics program.This year the awards honor the staff of the Jackson (Tenn.) Sun; Nellie Moore, D’Anne Hamilton, native American radio journalists in Alaska; and David Offer, the former executive editor of Stars and Stripes. All three refused to allow their news standards to be compromised. We will give you a full report on this year’s Payne Awards and the awards ceremony in the next issue of Flash.

Last year’s Payne Award winners were The (Sonora, Calif.) Union-Democrat for the paper’s refusal to violate its policy forbidding the use of anonymous sources in the face of fierce competitive pressures; the news staff of The Los Angeles Times for its response to the paper’s business deal with the Staples Center; and the student editors of The Western Front at Western Washington University for their resisting of law enforcement’s demands for source material.

One of the great pleasures of the Payne Awards for me is the opportunity to spend time reviewing nominations and talking about ethics with a distinguished group of judges. I know that we come away from the judging with great admiration for all of the nominated journalists and with a better understanding of what it means to be an ethical journalist.

Judges include, Joann Byrd, Editorial Page Editor, Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Dr. Everette Dennis, Felix Larkin Dinstinguished Professor for Communications and Media Management, at Fordham (New York) Uni-versity’s Graduate School of Business; Larry Grossman, author and former president of NBC and PBS; Patsy Smullin, President of California Oregon Broadcasting, Inc. (Medford); Mark Trahant, Chairman and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education (Oakland, Calif.); Jim Upshaw, KEZI-TV (Eugene) Distinguished Professor of Broadcast Journalism at the School of Journalism and Communication; and Mark Zusman, Editor of Willamette Week (Portland).

Nominations for the 2002 Payne Awards will be accepted until February 15, 2002.