In that category, judges wrote that the Minnesota Independent is “easy to navigate” and offers “lots of supplemental information and good participation from readers.”

Also taking home a first was photographer Kathy Easthagen for her photo essay about President Barack Obama’s 2010 rally at the University of Minnesota with then-candidate and current governor Mark Dayton (who gave the keynote speech at last night’s banquet). As there’s no category for photographers working in online-only news settings, Easthagen competed with newspapers having circulations of 50,000 or more, a category that includes the Star Tribune and major state papers. Judges praised her shots as “good you-are-there photography.” It’s Easthagen’s second first place Page One prize for the Minnesota Independent: Last year she won the top news photo slot (also competing against large newspapers) for photos of Obama’s September 2009 health care rally.

MnIndy also took a third place Page One Award for “Best Website.”

Since its founding, the Minnesota Independent has won 18 Page One Awards, including three last year, eight at the 2009 ceremony, three in 2008 and one in 2007. The prize series “recognizes the best in Minnesota journalism each year.” View all 2011 Page One winners here.

Tom Brokaw. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

New media is replacing old media at a pace that threatens traditional journalistic values Americans rely on, Tom Brokaw told a gathering of Minnesota journalists Thursday night. ”We’re constantly behind the curve,” he said of the news industry’s sluggishness to adjust. “It needs to happen quickly.” Blogging in the current “Thomas Paine environment” is not journalism, he said. “Most of the ‘journalism’ on the Internet is aggregation.”

Brokaw said he sees a “great generational divide [over] why journalism is important and how journalism can affect lives.” He didn’t have to go back as far as his vaunted “Greatest Generation” to find examples. Citing 1960s civil-rights struggles, he said, “Mississippi has been transformed by journalism. … The war in Vietnam became an issue in America because of brave, young journalists.”

With Watergate, “journalism unraveled one of the greatest scandals,” he said: “A sitting president engaged in felonious behavior.” In the midst of that scandal, Brokaw said he remembers often saying, “It doesn’t make sense,” to which a colleague would reply, speaking of President Nixon: “Not until you remember he’s guilty.” (“But we didn’t say that on the air,” Brokaw recalled — not until the smoking gun of incriminating audio tapes.)

Brokaw made his remarks at an awards banquet held by the state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Brokaw’s speech moved from nostalgia for the newsgathering of old to an indictment of new media today. Would civil rights advances, Vietnam protests, or Nixon’s downfall have happened, wondered Brokaw, “were any of these events left to the bloggers or people who Twitter?”

“I don’t know how many of the traditional forms of journalism will survive,” he warned, likening the industry’s economics to the “gas mileage on a Hummer.” A key mistake was letting the “young pioneers” of the Internet think that “information is free,” he said. “We were much too slow to respond … too unimaginative. … We stuck too long to our conceits and our conventions.”

Brokaw doesn’t know how to save what he calls “this great enterprise” of journalism, but he mentioned a few ideas he likes.

“New consortiums” could form to cover Congress. A public service ad campaign could remind people why journalism is important. He called Kindle-type electronic-reader machines “a slight light at the end of the tunnel.”

What won’t work, in Brokaw’s opinion: micropayments, or reliance on the old adage, “Just print the news and raise Hell.”

The former NBC Evening News anchorman had good material for localizing his speech. Brokaw said as a girl his mother, now 92, lived at 3517 Portland Ave. S. in Minneapolis. His observation on visiting the street: “Obviously, the neighborhood has changed a little bit since then.”

He sold and delivered the Minneapolis Tribune (and the Sunday Star and Tribune) as a boy in South Dakota, starting in 1953 — “when they were beginning the Franken-Coleman recount,” he quipped.

That job once earned him the prize of a trip to Minneapolis. But two later attempts to get work as a newsman here failed, leaving Brokaw in what he termed “the lonely wilderness of journalists who could not make it in the Twin Cities.”

He said he was inspired by America’s “two planets in the sky” — network news anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley of NBC and Walter Cronkite of CBS. On Election Night 1960, “I made a pact with myself that I would become a network [newscaster],” he said. “I overwished,”

But someone up there liked him and his overwish was granted. Brokaw helmed NBC’s flagship news show for 21 years, topping off a career that included a three-year stint as White House correspondent during the Watergate era.

Today Brokaw works on occasional news documentaries and gives a lot of speeches. His talk Thursday night quoted from a past speech he gave at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. He had just come from a talk in Tulsa by way of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where he serves on the board of trustees directors. He’ll give commencement addresses Saturday at Fordham University and Sunday at the College of William and Mary. (Last year it was Stanford University.)

At one point, Brokaw recalled covering a meeting of the East German Communist Party shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall — “in a room quite this.”

Whether he intended to draw a parallel between the representatives of the doomed government of East Germany he saw then and those from the collapsing news industry he was addressing wasn’t clear.

Via The UpTake (which was honored at the SPJ awards event for its use of video), here’s a video clip of the last part of Brokaw’s speech and a question-and-answer period that followed.

Photo by Tom Olmscheid, Session Weekly

Someone at the state Capitol is trying to “stifle public access” to legislative proceedings there, says the Minnesota chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in a new statement this afternoon. Exactly who, an SPJ board member tells the Minnesota Independent, isn’t known. At issue are rules — old, new and not-yet-made — on which media can get floor access in the House of Representatives and who can record what in House committee rooms.

New restrictions on audio and video recording released Friday were apparently retracted Monday after the mainstream media complained, although it’s not clear in what direction the House leadership will take the issues.

“The House should throw this out and start over. This is not workable. I don’t know where this is coming from,” SPJ board member Art Hughes tells MnIndy. “This is effort to orchestrate coverage at the Capitol.”

Hughes says that as a radio reporter he has frequently found himself educating local officials on the finer points of the state’s open meeting law. “I’ve run into cases many times where people don’t want an otherwise public meeting recorded. Especially people in small towns who don’t understand what they were getting into when they were elected.”

Things ought to be different at the Capitol, Hughes says. “In the case of the state Legislature, these guys are pros. They’re big boys and girls. It’s time for them to understand that people don’t just walk in with pens and pads of paper anymore.”

Media access to the House floor and allowing taping in committee rooms should be of concern to the general public, Hughes said. “It’s about public access, especially with nearly $5 billion in cuts to the state government” coming, he said.

Last week, the journalists’ organization came out in favor of online media access to the House floor. On Monday, the SPJ sent a statement about the proposed new rules in response to an inquiry from WCCO-TV. Here is the group’s latest statement, issued this afternoon:

MINNESOTA SPJ OPPOSES HOUSE ATTEMPT TO STIFLE PUBLIC ACCESS

The Minnesota Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists strongly opposes efforts by the Minnesota House of Representatives to limit how the public is allowed into public policy meetings and discussions. The safety of legislators is a valid concern. But curtailing videotaping and other recording methods of those legislators is clearly not a safety threat as Representative Tony Sertich contends.

Make no mistake: these proposed rules are an attempt to shut down oversight of the public process. SPJ recommends the House discard this very flawed attempt to orchestrate press coverage and start over seeking public input to create a fair, open and equitable means of access.

Should journalists who do their reporting online have the same access at the state Capitol that broadcast and print media enjoy? The issue is especially intriguing people interested in media and government. “It is a beaut,” said Minneapolis media attorney Mark Anfinson.

New media journalists have forced the issue by proposing a rule change that would add “online media” to the types of news outlets that can get credentials to work on the floor of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

Who is a journalist? Where does government allow journalists to go to report the news? Those are questions that came up during the Republican National Convention (RNC) in St. Paul, Anfinson notes, but the online-media question at the Capitol “focuses it more perfectly [with] a single geographical locus:” the House floor.

“Some legislators are really freaked out about liveblogging and live uplinks,” said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “It’s nothing personal. … [They] want to continue to deal with the media [they] know. I can understand that.”

But those fears shouldn’t guide policy, Kirtley said. “There needs to be some rational basis by which a government entity can decide who’s going to be there.

“If the issue is decorum in the space, then the body should have rules of conduct,” Kirtley says, adding that doesn’t mean rules regarding the content of reporting. What might they be? Hughes says he can envision restrictions on tripods that take up space and could cause disruption as they’re taken down or set up. Kirtley offers the example of a ban on noisily changing video cassettes during proceedings. If it’s not followed, she said, “We can kick you out.”

“We’re looking at it. We don’t have an opinion,” said Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota (ACLU-MN). He said the organization might decide on a response to the issue today. Samuelson said he’d received about 20 e-mails on the issue.

“Because the discriminated class are wordsmiths, you get a tremendous amount of smoke,” he said, as with issues involving celebrities, like former Minnesota Viking Carl Eller’s recent run-ins with the law.

The ACLU may step in if the current rule violates the state or federal constitutions. But those don’t contain specific protections or guarantees for journalists. “The First Amendment is there to protect publishers,” Samuelson says. “As a journalist you have no more rights than John Q. Public. …

“If I were to say I’m going to put a rule in [that] I can only allow 20 people on the floor as observers, we’re going to assign these observers according to circulation [or Web hits] … then next year assign credentials depending on circulation range,” Samuelson said. “That ‘s how I would do it: John Q. Public is represented by these [media outlets]. And at the beginning that’s basically what they did,” Samuelson said. “But the media’s blown up.”

Might the fuss put all media access to the House floor at risk? Anfinson, who represents news organizations across the state, thinks so, and Kirtley agrees it’s a risk.

Art Hughes, a radio reporter who like Kirtley serves on the state board of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), disagrees. “That’s not going to happen,” Hughes said. “There’d be a revolution.”

Related:

New Minnesota House form limits what would-be tapers can capture

Who Owns the J-Word? Videoblogger’s Jailing Raises Questions for Journalists

Secret Service briefed MSM on RNC threats? MinnPost’s David Brauer points out shocking video of a WCCO cameraman freaking out on RNC protesters — captured on film by competitor KARE — while not realizing that the crowd was barring him because a man was having a seizure nearby. While many of us covering the RNC were on edge, Brauer shares a surprising reason that’s new to me: According to WCCO union steward Dave Chaney, the station was “getting emails from the Secret Service all day long that there were people in that crowd that were going to try to attack,” Chaney said. One threat involved a “gentleman who was supposed to be a black belt in karate who was going to try to assault one of us.” Funny: We in the independent media never got such Secret Service notifications.

Local heads top reporters’ org: St. Cloud Times reporter Dave Aeikens has takent the reins as president of the national Society for Professional Journalists. MN-SPJ has the video.

“Ameirca!” My favorite on-screen RNC typo.

The entire statement:

Police confiscating reporting equipment, prohibiting journalists from covering news events, and hassling photographers are definite warning signs as we head into the Republican National Convention. The Society of Professional Journalists is discouraged to learn of such tactics

recently in the name of public safety. We hope these are isolated missteps by local law enforcement officials before the big event arrives and police have more important matters to attend to.

Three out-of-town citizen journalists, here to document events happening outside the Xcel Energy Center, had their belongings–including cameras and notebooks–confiscated by Minneapolis police while in Northeast Minneapolis.  Police claim the three were trespassing, but no charges have yet been filed. The three who where detained maintain there was no such trespassing and their interaction with police was an attempt to intimidate them because the group they represent has documented police abuse in the past.

A KSTP-TV photographer entered a Minneapolis city office where a group of protesters staged a sit-in. Police informed the photographer he could not shoot pictures and pushed him out of the room.

Let’s hope our local police are not as reckless as those in Denver, who arrested an ABC TV producer this week. The producer was investigating the influence of wealthy donors at the Democratic National Convention. Police grabbed him by the neck, handcuffed him and hauled him downtown for ‘trespassing’ on a public sidewalk. Is this the type of threat the public should be worried about during a high profile political event?

Attempts to intimidate journalists, whether professional or volunteer, never work. Such misplaced heavy-handedness only escalates tensions–something we don’t need as thousands of respected delegates fill the convention hall next week and thousand more citizens take to the streets to express themselves. Certainly, police face an honorable and difficult task protecting the public from those who intend harm. But those same protectors lose credibility when they invoke “Homeland Security” as a pretext for stifling attempts at legitimate expression.

How well the Twin Cities are portrayed on the worldwide political stage relies on cool heads prevailing, even when rhetoric runs hot. It is something Minnesotans are and should be known for.

Related:

MnIndy Video: Journos, protesters sound alarm over pre-RNC police behaviors

MnIndy Video: Detained Glass Bead videographer on policing in the age of YouTube