By MATT PEPIN
Sports Editor
Times Herald-Record/Varsity845.com (Middletown, N.Y.)

Story posted on Aug. 18, 2009

Matt Pepin

The Northeast Region has begun planning a national webcast of one of its professional development seminars for its May 2010 meeting.

One of the great things about APSE regional meetings has always been the workshops, discussions and seminars that send sports editors home encouraged about their work and full of ideas.

But the attendance numbers for the Northeast region's meetings have dwindled every year for the past several.

We had about 10 sports editors at Cooperstown, N.Y., in May, maybe 20 at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in November of 2008.

Tight travel budgets and more workload are the reasons for the decline, so we began looking for a way to continue to provide professional development to our colleagues who can't get away for a day or two.

A partnership with Marist provided the perfect solution. After our first visit to Marist, Keith Strudler, the chairman of the communications department, immediately invited us back. The school is committed to its sports communications concentration, and one of our November 2008 seminars attracted a conference room full of professionals and students (and some professional students) to hear Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post, Ian O'Connor of the Bergen (N.J.) Record and Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe discuss their craft in a panel titled "Great Writing."

This time around, we decided to build on that success. We're looking to identify a blockbuster seminar topic that would have a national appeal and the opportunity to bring in a star-studded panel like the one we brought to Marist the first time.

Marist broadcast journalism students will work the cameras. Marist's techies and the folks at Indiana in charge of the new web site will get it online, both as streaming video and on-demand video that editors and their staff can view anytime.

We'll have a question-and-answer session with both the live audience and those around the nation participating, as well as a comments board and a transcript of the event.

We're all going gung-ho forward into the multimedia age, so we figured this is a logical next step for our organization.

Now all we need is that great topic, and that's where I ask your help. Send me your suggestions. What sort of panel, presentation or discussion would you like to see? Which experts in our profession would you like to hear from? Will you even watch something like this, or have your staff tune in?

Let me know.

I'm at mpepin@th-record.com.

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