The membership at the September meeting set the ticket price for the November banquet at $25. The banquet will be packed with important events.

The winners of the 10th Annual KCABJ Media Awards will be named. This year entries are in a record number of categories, including daily newspapers, weekly newspapers, broadcast television, broadcast radio, advertising, media public service and new media.

These awards are given for outstanding coverage of African Americans and other people of color of Greater Kansas City.

Judges for the entries are finishing the work, and the plaques will be ordered soon.

The 6 p.m. Saturday Nov. 17 banquet at the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center, 3700 Blue Parkway, also will be an event that will celebrate KCABJ's 20th Anniversary. Gerald Jordan will be the keynote speaker.

Gerald renewed his KCABJ membership this year. He was instrumental in gathering people together in 1981 at his Westin Crown Center apartment to ask whether we should form KCABJ. Several meetings took place afterward during which KCABJ was born.

It actually had been around informally since the mid-1970s when Jeanne Fox, a reporter for The Kansas City Times, gathered black journalists at her apartment to discuss issues that concerned us under the banner of KCABJ. When Jeanne left in 1980 the informal organization dissolved until Gerald brought us back together.

Gerald is a former sports writer, editorial board member and television critic for The Kansas City Star. He currently is a professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville and works during the summer as an editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The graduates of the 2001 KCABJ Urban Student Journalism Workshop also will be honored with Greater Kansas City Media professionals during the banquet. Each of the 12 high school and college students will receive a certificate from KCABJ, a videotape copy of their TV newscast and copies of the 2001 KCABJ Journal, which includes the stories they did during the summer. The students' newscast will be shown during the banquet. KCABJ member and Journal Editor Malecia El-Amin said this year's publication will likely be larger than previous years because of the number of stories the students produced.

The banquet also will feature scholarship awards to the students. Kansas City Star Publisher Art Brisbane last year committed the newspaper to funding a $1,000 scholarship in honor of Laura R. Hockaday, the paper's longtime society editor who retired in 2000. Hockaday did a lot to include people of color in the society pages of the newspaper. The KCABJ/Kansas City Star/Laura R. Hockaday Scholarship will continue this year.

KCABJ also will award its KCABJ Roy Wilkins Scholarship -- a $2,000 savings bond -- to the top student in the class. This scholarship has been given annually to KCABJ workshop graduates since 1987. At the request of Kansas City Call Publisher Lucile Bluford, it is named in honor of Wilkins, a longtime editor at The Call and former head of the national office of the NAACP during the Civil Rights Movement.

A 2001 graduate also will receive the KCABJ/Nancy Diuguid Scholarship in the form of a $500 savings bond. It was started in 1994 after the death of KCABJ Treasurer Lewis Diuguid's mother. She had wanted to be a journalist, but that was a profession that was mostly closed to black women in the 1940s and 1950s when she was a young adult. The membership voted at the September meeting to add a fourth scholarship to those that KCABJ annually presents. It will be a $500 savings bond. The recipients of this year's awards will remain a secret until the banquet.

The membership voted to contract with Cuisine by Matthews, a black owned company, to cater the meal. KCABJ member and Media Awards Committee Co-Chair Anita Parran secured the company. KCABJ member Laurie Scott Austin again agreed to print the tickets for the banquet.

About 50 letters were mailed during the last week in September inviting all of KCABJ's past presidents to the banquet. 2001 workshop students received letters, and so did the people whose work was entered in the KCABJ Media Awards contest.

All KCABJ members are encouraged to buy tickets to the event and help make it the best banquet the organization has ever had. It is KCABJ's biggest fund-raiser -- annually providing money for scholarships, special community programs and the student workshop. The workshop helps ensure that more students of color will become journalists. Seating for the banquet will be limited to 200 people. The deadline to purchase tickets is Nov. 2.

Last, but far from least, the KCABJ Executive Board will give out its annual KCABJ Thumbs Down Award to the media or persons in the media that have done the most to set back the image of African Americans or people of color. There were a record number of candidates this year, and they were in print, broadcast and advertising categories.

The number may be just one indication of how inclusivenesss and diversity in the media may be slipping. The executive board with the backing of the membership at the September meeting picked the winner of that infamous distinction. At least one candidate will be held over for next year. The name of the winner for 2001 will be engraved with seven others on a large plaque housed at the Black Archives of Mid-America Inc. During two years -- including last year -- KCABJ gave out no Thumbs Down Award because there were no qualifying candidates. The guidelines for who gets it are extremely strict.

All of the award entries also will be kept at the Black Archives, where KCABJ is building a Media Resource Center for individuals who may want to study the best of press accounts of African Americans and people of color. Books about African Americans, diversity and people of color also will be donated during the banquet to the Bluford Library. It is a 10-year tradition accompanying the KCABJ Media Awards.

Checks or money orders for tickets can be mailed to KCABJ, P.O. Box 32744, Kansas City, Mo. 64111. For more information contact KCABJ Treasurer and Media Awards Co-Chair Lewis Diuguid at (816) 234-4723, (816) 942-0733 or ldiuguid@kcstar.com. Don't wait until the last minute to get your tickets.

NABJ News

KCABJ President Benita Y. Williams informed the membership at the September meeting that the National Association of Black Journalists at its convention in Orlando lifted the ban on beer and liquor companies being sponsors of the NABJ conventions.

The 2002 convention will take place July 31-Aug. 4 in Milwaukee, a big brewery town. Benita said NABJ needs to examine its total corporate sponsorship policy especially in light of its financial losses totaling nearly $1 million in the last two years.

She also told the membership that the 2003 NABJ convention will be in Dallas. The third Unity convention will take place in 2004. The first was in Atlanta in 1994 and the second was in Seattle in 1999. NABJ is following a practice now of having its conventions only at those cities where membership turnout has been good. The conventions generate most of the operating revenue for the organization, and a strong turnout adds to the money NABJ receives.

Benita also told the membership that beginning in 2002, NABJ will require all of its affiliate chapters to obtain a tax exempt designation from the federal government in order for the chapters to remain linked with NABJ. The designation will reduce the financial liability that NABJ might incur and open the door to more fund-raisers for the local chapters. It is in line with NABJ requiring all member chapters a few years ago to become bonded.

Benita said that despite the new requirements, NABJ declined to reinstitute the convention discounts that people used to receive if they were members of both the local and national organizations. That had always been an opportunity for local chapters to increase their paid membership ranks before each convention. The discount ended this year.

(Note: NABJ treasurer Glenn Rice reports that the primary 2002 NABJ Convention hotel will be the Hilton Milwaukee City Center, 509 West Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, Wis., 53203; 414-271-7250. Book online at www.hilton.com and check NABJ's Web site for updates in the months ahead.)

KC People

KCABJ Vice President/Print Tanyanika Samuels joined a battalion of reporters nationwide covering the Sept. 11 attacks that brought down the World Trade Centers in New York and heavily damaged the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Terrorists hijacked four passenger planes and flew three of them into the buildings.

More than 6,000 people are reported killed or missing. KCABJ President Benita Williams also writes: "Please remember our fellow journalists who have been reporting locally and nationally on the tragedy. Most people often forget to pray for the journalists. But we know they are out there, rushing in where sane persons don't dare go, to get interviews and take pictures. They also must remain alert, objective, sensitive and tough at the same time."

KCABJ member Jeanene Dunn in September left Black & Veatch for a new public relations job with H&R Block.

The Kansas City Press Club is sponsoring a writing seminar on Oct. 13. Call Lewis Diuguid at 816-234-4723 for more information.