Why the National Press Club is so special

I would like to share with you the full text of my remarks today to the General Membership Meeting.

Welcome to the National Press Club. I am Myron Belkind, and I would like to begin my president’s report with a statement to you, the members of the Club, about a column published in yesterday’s Washington Post by Dana Milbank, one of our former members and a well known journalist who has written often about events that happen in rooms at the NPC just like this one.

We respect Dana Milbank’s position as a columnist and we are pleased to see him when he is here visiting the Club and sometimes writing about it.

Firstly, the National Press Club in 2014 is strong professionally and financially, and our membership has been stabilized at a little more than 3,000, despite the cataclysmic upheaval in our industry over the past two decades, as you will hear from our membership secretary and treasurer shortly.

Secondly, please judge us by our programs such as our luncheons and newsmakers and book events and press freedom events, as I will outline in the second part of this report.

We do so many of these and they are so special. Our members and staff put them on. And we are constantly working to improve them and do more of them. They are our gift not just to members but to the Washington Press Corps who cover them, to C-Span which broadcasts them and to the millions of people across the country and around the globe who view them and appreciate them.

All of these…every single one, is on the record. On the record. One of the most important things we do is establish the record for our fellow journalists by inviting government officials and others to come visit and take questions. We have been doing this for years, indeed for decades. People come here from other countries to ask us to teach them how to do this. It is our honor.

As you know, to run a facility like this, with broadcast and food and upkeep and staff requires more resources than our membership dues produce. Like many other organizations, the Press Club relies on revenue from events and room rental to cover our costs and keep us going.

This is something the Club has done since 1927. It is not new. Many of the people who pay for rooms are our own members. Just out of curiosity, please raise your hand if you have rented a room here or if you have attended an event where a member has rented a room. Wow! Lots of you. More than 90 percent of those here today.

When an organization rents a room for a news conference or a meeting or a dinner, the Press Club does not tell them what to say or how to organize their event or what the ground rules should be that they send out to their invitees. That was the case this week with the event Dana Milbank attended.

When the event is ours, the ground rules are ours. When the event is organized by the RNC or the DNC, they establish the ground rules. It is rare for events here to be off the record. Rare, but it does happen. Every journalist has been invited to an event that is off the record. It is not unheard of.

In the case of this event we believe they mistakenly sent out a news release without saying the event was off the record. We did not know that. It was not our mistake to have made. We are sorry that Mr. Milbank was invited to an event via the Reuters Daybook without knowing it was off the record. We learned of this when he told us.

To repeat, this was not a news conference. It was a meeting where attendees were paying fees to attend these briefings. The Press Release does not say it is off-the record. It does not say anything about coverage. This could have been done better by the organization. We had no role in that.

Against this background, I am asking the Board of Governors to develop a committee to look at our practices and see what can be done in this area. For example, it is possible that we ask clients to seek permission in advance to have an off the record session at the National Press Club. These are things we will explore, and we will report back by our annual meeting in January, during the current presidency.

We believe we have been as fully transparent as we can be over the years about how we do our business. And if there are changes we will report those to you. The National Press Club has developed a robust and sustainable business model for the future while maintaining its integrity, values and mission. And we will continue to do so despite the challenges we face in the media landscape of 2014, along with other media organizations.

I intend to produce a President’s Blog based on these remarks that will make some of these points. Please give it a read and feel free to pass it on to your colleagues including via Twitter and Facebook.

Now I would like to share with you some of the wonderful things that have happened at the Press Club since I last spoke to you in May, and I hope you will agree they demonstrate the best – the very best – of what the National Press Club – and only the National Press Club -- can do.

Firstly, let me take you back to the annual National Press Journalism Awards dinner on July 30, again an awards program that is unique to the National Press Club and its Journalism Institute, which raises funds to provide scholarships, including the Scholarship for Journalism Diversity awarded to Jose Valle. Andrea Snyder, the chair of the Scholarship Committee, and I gave Jose the “breaking news” that he had won the scholarship of up to $10,000 over four years when we phoned in live to his 8 a.m. journalism class in at a high school in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. On July 30, I was pleased to call on Jose to speak to us. Fellow NPC members, I am pleased today to ask you to view what many consider the highlight of that evening:

I would like to acknowledge Andrea Snyder, chair of the Scholarship Committee, and Will Lester, who has chaired the Awards Committee for the past four years and who made a major innovation this year by having award nominations submitted online for the first time.

Secondly, let me take you back to September 13, to the Fourth Estate Awards dinner honoring this year’s recipient, Charlie Rose, the acclaimed international broadcaster known as a master interviewer. The dinner is the biggest fund raiser of the year for the National Journalism Institute and this year it raised more funds than ever before for scholarships. Please view the video clip of the report broadcast nationwide on CBS This Morning about the Fourth Estate Dinner:

I would like to acknowledge members of the Fourth Estate Dinner Committee: Co-Chairs Lori Russo and Jodi Schneider, who could not be with us today because of commitments outside Washington, and National Press Club Journalism Institute Executive Director Julie Schoo, and her colleague, Nicole Hoffman.

Thirdly, two weeks ago today, Abdullah Elshamy, an Al Jazeera journalist released from jail after10 months in prison, half of them on a hunger strike, came to the National Press Club to express his thanks for the efforts generated by our Freedom of the Press Committee to seek the release of the Al Jazeeera journalists, some of whom are still imprisoned. Please view the video clip of Abudllah describing the impact our statements make:

I would like to acknowledge John Donnelly, the chair of the Freedom of the Press Committee, and his colleagues, for all the hard work they do literally around the clock monitoring press freedom issues and preparing the statements that Abdullah Elshamy said do make a difference.

Thanks to them, the National Press Club is a respected beacon for press freedom worldwide. Thanks to them, I was invited by the prestigious Foreign Editors Circle of the International Press Institute to make a statement about our efforts to foster and promote press freedom last month, as you may have noted in a recent blog I wrote.

Additionally, please view the still photos of some of the many speakers we have had at the National Press Club in recent months, including Donald Trump and three African leaders: the presidents of the Republic of Congo and South Africa, who spoke at lunches, and the president of Burkina Faso, who spoke at a Newsmaker.

I would like to acknowledge Jerry Zremski, the chair of the Speakers Committee, and Donna Leinwand, the vice chair, for their outstanding successes this year.

Thanks to them and their colleagues, we have a Speakers series second to none!

And, finally, and sadly, I would like to pay tribute to Marilou Donahue, a long-time Club member, friend to so many, and a staunch member of the Speakers Committee, who organized two sell-out lunches in the Ballroom in May featuring guests Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson.

Many of us attended a Mass for Marilou, and it was a beautiful memorial to someone very special, who will always be remembered for her love of the National Press Club.

Please, let us honor Marilou with a moment of silence as we remember this extraordinary and talented person who always said she was honored to belong to the National Press Club, just as I know all of us are.