SND to live-chat about sudden leadership change
Of all the weeks to be out of town and away from internet access!
I had no idea that Matt Mansfield had suddenly offered his resignation as president of the Society for News Design until I checked my messages remotely on Saturday. I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries from folks, most of whom are thinking I’m on top of it.
Left, Matt Mansfield, who steps down as SND president on Thursday.
Right: SND vice-president Bonita Burton, who’ll finish Matt’s term.
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Well, I’m not — Not this time. Even now, after follow-up communications from other SND officials, I’m an unclear as you are about what’s happened, why and where the society will go from here.
Here’s an example of a message I received tonight:
Do you have any idea what’s going on at SND? Matt’s note was mysterious, Elise’s [sent out Monday via e-mail] was vague, and the new one from Richard Curtis was both mysterious and vague.
Vague and mysterious. Both words are very good descriptions for what we’ve seen from the society the past few years.
So what will come of this? Some of the communications out of SND imply that major changes might be in store. Will these changes cast a little more sunlight on the organization? How quickly will changes be proposed and carried out?
All this will unfold over the next few weeks. It should be quite interesting, in fact, to watch it happen.
Step one begins tomorrow with a live chat. It’ll begin at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (2:30 Central, 1:30 Mountain, 12:30 Pacific) on the SND web site.
The chat will be hosted by Mansfield and vice-president Bonita Burton. The SND site says:
They will also talk about the Society’s ambitious agenda moving forward. We know you have questions. We have answers.
…Please drop questions on this post and we will do our best to answer them on the chat, which will be archived so all members can see the answers even if they were not able to join live.
June 15th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
I was very disappointed about this news when I first heard it for a few reasons:
First of all, I went to a couple of the events that Matt put on this year – in the case of one of them, traveling halfway across the country on my own dime – and got a lot out of both of them, and met some cool people in the process. I thought the nature of the events really made a lot of sense in the context of where the industry is headed as a whole.
Secondly, I felt like I had gotten to know Matt a little better since I moved to D.C. and became addicted to Twitter. He seemed to me like the perfect leader for SND and just sitting with him and a couple of other people at a bar and listening to what he had to say was really interesting. I mean, I’ve been a few places in my career, but really, I’m still a cub. Hearing that wider perspective was great.
Finally, the rest of the industry is in upheaval. Having someone like Matt in the spot he was in was reassuring because it offered stability when not much else seems very stable. Seeing SND get shaken up now - when so many people are out of jobs or forced to change career paths midway through – is just not a good feeling.
But at the same time, he has his reasons, he’s a total class act, I wish him the best, and I’d like to think that both him and SND have something brilliant up their sleeves.
Suffice it to say, I’ll try to make it tomorrow.
June 16th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Pretty sure any organization that would place what’s supposed to be the year’s most important gathering of visual journalists in a destination that the majority of it’s members are unable to attend lacks any sort of coherent decision making. Obviously it was difficult to know a couple years earlier what kind of economic troubles would face newspapers when the decision was made, but even under ideal circumstances, how many people could realistically afford to go to Buenos Aires?
At this point, the only focus for SND should be providing as much new media training as possible for its members because by this point next year, there will probably be about 100 members with full-time print journalism jobs.