There’s nothing unusual about journalists winning awards for work done at places they’ve since left. But Scott Nychay is a special case.
The idea that the Herald would take away his job as editorial cartoonist, say nothing about it to readers, and continue to use him to promote itself stuck in Nychay’s craw. Earlier this year a cousin had told him about an ad the Herald was running early mornings on Channel Two that touted his work, though he’d been fired months before. Instead of complaining to the Herald, Nychay wrote various journalists who focus on the trade’s ethics and asked them to weigh in. They gave Nychay all the sympathy he could have hoped for. “I personally think it’s a slimy thing to do,” one replied.
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Nychay read that line in my column about him, which ran July 13, and remembered it. A couple of weeks later he saw the Herald’s having entered him in the IPA and AP contests–the IPA in particular–as “an attempt to gain ground through the work of a former employee.” The TV ad had touted his John Fischetti Award, a national award sponsored by Columbia College, but that was a huge personal achievement that just happened to reflect well on the Herald. The IPA nominations, on the other hand, served the Herald in a much more specific way. The Mabel S. Shaw Memorial Trophy, named for one of the founders of the company that owns the Herald, is given each year to the “outstanding daily newspaper” in the Herald’s circulation class. The winner is determined by points the finalists earn in the individual categories, and the points Nychay racks up this year as a triple finalist could easily decide whether the Herald wins the trophy for the fourth year in a row. Kim Filson, who’s director of IPA’s educational programs and who runs its competition, already knows who all the 2007 winners are. She wouldn’t tell me which paper will get the Shaw trophy, but she said it’s “close.”
Krug would have heard about them from IPA’s Kim Filson. George Garties, the AP bureau chief in Chicago, didn’t want to discuss the AP’s conversation with Nychay, but Filson was more open. She said that when Nychay told her he was thinking about dropping out “he was a day late and a dollar short. I told him I couldn’t figure out how or even why it should be done.” It was the Herald’s business if it wanted to enter him for work he’d done as their employee. She called Krug to ask what he made of the situation and they traded voice mail, but they never spoke directly.
Here’s to editing. You work on this story and that story, and sometimes they start cohabiting in your head.
The reference, of course, is to “The Road Not Taken,” possibly the most misread poem in the English language. Readers find in Frost–as they do in Strauss–what they want to find, and if in Strauss’s case we’re talking about dozens of readers, in Frost’s there are millions.
