Jessica Birthisel | July 12, 2010
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| Photo by Jay Seawell |
| Award-winning columnist and author Carl Hiaasen received the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists Saturday night. The group staged its conference at IU this year. |
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“I don’t know how you sustain a life as a columnist if you don’t wake up every morning with a sense of injustice,” said Hiaasen during a speech at the 34th-annual National Society of Newspaper Columnists conference last week at IU.
Hiaasen received the society’s 2010 Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award during the Saturday banquet in the Tudor Room at the Indiana Memorial Union.
From an early age, Hiaasen says he was attracted to an edgier writing style. Dissatisfied by his high school newspaper’s trite coverage of football games and cheerleader tryouts, he started his own underground newsletter, which took on teachers, the principal and administration.
“The kids loved it,” he said, describing his writing as snarky and irreverent. He says this is when he first considered a career in opinion writing. He went on to write columns at his college newspapers during the era of Nixon, Kissinger and Cambodia.
“It was a joyful time for columnists,” he joked. “Talk about low-hanging fruit.”
He says he expected a columnist job would be waiting for him after college, but it wasn’t.
“Who better to write about all of this than a 20-year-old kid?” he joked about his own over-confidence.
Eventually he would make a name for himself at the The Miami Herald, where, since 1985, he has written a column covering politics, culture and the environment. He also has made his name as an author of crime novels with a comical bent, ideas for which often come from reality, especially what he called “this-could-only-happen-in-Florida” content.
For example, consider the mentally unstable Floridian murderer who tried to earn favorable coverage by presenting Hiaasen with two prostitutes over an expensive dinner.
Or the current gubernatorial candidate whose (slightly paraphrased) mantra about his involvement in record-breaking Medicare fraud is, “Hey, lighten up. I never got indicted.”
Or the Florida roof inspectors who don’t carry ladders and conduct drive-by inspections of houses that “were made out of Triskets and glue.”
“The best thing to do is stay pissed off,” Hiaasen told his fellow writers. “It’s not hard. Just look around. I have no excuse not to write a interesting column.”
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| Photo by Jay Seawell |
| Hiaasen received his award from NSNC president Samantha Bennett. |
“The Miami Herald is such a part of me. It’s in my DNA. I have to have a voice,” said Hiaasen.
Beyond expressing his own voice, Hiaasen said the columnist serves a special purpose for his or her community.
“You have readers who rely on you,” he explained, describing writing a column as virtuoso work. “You make sense out of what’s going on in their world. It’s something you can’t put a price on. I still think there’s a great hunger in this country for a literate voice.”
He described his NSNC lifetime achievement award as a tremendous honor and said he would try to keep writing “up to Ernie Pyle’s virtues.” Other than a trip to Grenada to cover a “coup that lasted 10.5 minutes,” he said that unlike Pyle, he has seen next-to-no war correspondence.
“Other than working in Miami every day,” he quipped.
Samantha Bennett, president of NSNC and Pittsburg Post-Gazette columnist, said in all of Hiaasen’s writing, there’s a common theme of decency, and that’s what led to his nomination for the award.
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| Photo by Jay Seawell |
| Herald-Times columnist and local NSNC organizer Mike Leonard, left, chatted with Hiaasen during the dinner. Leonard is past president and current board member of the organization. |
NSNC board member and Herald-Times columnist Mike Leonard was a local organizer of this year’s event in Bloomington and has missed only one conference in
his 25 years as a newspaper columnist.
“This is the only group in journalism I’ve grabbed onto and held onto,” said Leonard.“It’s really fun to trade war stories with each other and remember that someone else has it worse where they are. It gives you an idea of the lay of the land in the world of journalism.”
While in the area, columnists attended workshops and toured local cultural and entertainment sites. The School of Journalism helped sponsor the conference, along with Indiana University, The Herald-Times, Schurz Communications, VisitBloomington.com, Nick’s English Hut and Duke Energy.
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