San Francisco Blog

In order to re-inforce our point that this year's SPJ honorees heark from a different era, here's a Spencer Tracy reference

Last week, the Society of Professional Journalists -- whose membership is growing ever more, shall we say, selective every day now -- honored three men as "fellows," the highest award it can bestow.

It's a high honor, and one earned not in years or decades but a lifetime. That being said, in a time when the robustness of the field of journalism is getting to be on par with that of whalebone corset-makers or lamplighters, it says a bit that this year's honorees are a very, very old man and two very, very old dead men.

Let's name the living man first -- there's no harm in making the dead wait. It's Austin Kiplinger, the 90-year-old who still serves as chairman of Kiplinger Washington Editors, founded by his father, W.M. Kiplinger. The "younger" Kiplinger is a former ink-stained wretch for our very own San Francisco Chronicle, a World War II pilot in the South Pacific, and a lifelong journalist.

The two dead men are Stanley E. Hubbard -- who began his broadcasting career in the 1920s and ran the first color TV station in the nation -- and Nelson Poynter. Even many knowledgeable journalists may not give much thought to the namesake for the Poynter Institute -- where much of the good gossip about our field emanates from -- but he also founded the Congressional Quarterly and began writing for newspapers in 1912.

Again -- congrats to the honorees and their surviving relatives. But it sure would be nice to see the honoring of some exemplars of the field who don't remember where they were when the Titanic sank. It'd make us feel, you know, relevant.