October Newsletter and Fall Welcome from President Alec Harvey

This month's October newsletter contains ideas for Halloween, the fall months, and the following note for our incoming president, Alec Harvey. You can read the full newsletter here: http://featuresjournalism.org/newsletters/octobe-2012-newsletter/

Just a quick note of welcome to those who have joined us since our invigorating conference at the University of Maryland in August.Our speakers were inspiring and informative, and the location — the spiffy new journalism building at the University of Maryland — was beautiful.For those who weren’t able to attend, please take a look at some of the highlights at featuresjournalism.org. To those who did join us, please let us know if you’ve been able to put anything that you learned into practice. We received some great tips in those three days!Thank you to Merrilee Cox, our tireless executive director, and Alice Short, our wonderful former president, for all they did to make the UMD conference the success it turned out to be.Next year, in October, we’ll return to the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. Those of us who attended our 2010 conference there are eager to return, and we hope a lot of new faces will join us.Keep up with SFJ via the website, our listserv, Facebook (join our page, if you haven’t already) and Twitter (#wearesfj is our hashtag).Most of all, though, please let your board know how SFJ can serve you. We know this continues to be a challenging time for nearly everyone in journalism — particularly in features journalism. Resources are dwindling and futures are uncertain, and SFJ is going to be here to help as much as we can — with great ideas, rejuvenating conferences and just some much-needed camaraderie for everyone.And if you’d like to get involved, we’ve got plenty of room for energetic volunteers! Just contact us, and let us know you’re interested.Alec HarveyFeatures editor, The Birmingham NewsPresident, SFJ