Enterprise editor recognized for editorial writing

ALTAMONT — For the eighth time, Enterprise editor Melissa Hale-Spencer was recognized among the best opinion writers in the weekly press.

The Golden Dozen awards were officially announced last week in College Park Maryland, during the 2017 conference of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. In the society’s annual contest, opinion writers are judged for their editorial skills and courage, with the best of the top dozen winning the Golden Quill award.

Andrew Schotz accepted the award for Hale-Spencer. Schotz had started his career at The Altamont Enterprise and recently filled in at the paper along with Hale-Spencer’s daughter, Saranac, as Hale-Spencer was treated for cancer.

Hale-Spencer was awarded for the editorial “The case of siting towers should be heard on its merits.” The contest was judged by Mary Kimm who has, since 1989, been involved in the publication of the Connection Newspapers, a group of 15 weeklies in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

The dozen winners came from an Indian reservation, Kahnawake in Quebec, from Aylmer in Ontario, from Eyre Square in Ireland, and from across the United States — Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Iowa, and Colorado.

“These editorials and opinion pieces conveyed historical and institutional knowledge critical to an ongoing sense of community and community well-being,” wrote the judge.

The Golden Quill winner was Peter Weinschenk, editor of The Record-Review in Abbotsford, Wisconsin, who wrote “We can’t look away” about an incident mishandled by police; his editorial made the point that everyone is responsible for maintaining the rule of law.

The judge had this to say about Hale-Spencer’s editorial, “Abuse of power comes in many forms. Melissa Hale-Spencer correctly identifies the unjustified slinging of life-or-death rhetoric by the first responder industrial complex as one.

“‘If it were merely a choice between saving lives and saving views, this would be a different editorial,’ she writes.

“Another is the circumventing of due process and transparency in the name of public safety.

“Hale-Spencer cheers on the residents who must enforce the environmental requirements and fight for their mandated input by filing a lawsuit, while identifying one more abuse by public officials, filing court motions to drag out the procedure to try to run the petitioners out of money.

“Calling out public officials for failing to respect due process and resident input is a primary function of the local editorial, eloquently done here.”

Hale-Spencer, 64, has edited The Altamont Enterprise & Albany County Post for over 20 years and two years ago bought the newspaper with her husband, Gary Spencer, and co-publisher Marcello Iaia. Hale-Spencer and Iaia run the paper together.

Hale-Spencer was first named to the Golden Dozen in 1999. In 2008, she won the Golden Quill, for the editorial “We, the people, are responsible for what our government does.”

Editorials written by Hale-Spencer are accompanied every week by illustrations from artist Carol Coogan.

Hale-Spencer graduated from Guilderland High School, where she was an editor at The Journal, and from Wellesley College, where she wrote for The Wellesley News.

She learned to write from her father, a lifelong newspaperman. She took her first reporting job at her parents’ Adirondack weekly, The Lake Placid News, where her future husband also began a career in journalism.

Hale-Spencer started writing for The Enterprise as a young mother of two daughters in the 1980s. She introduced the first regular, strongly-worded editorials to The Enterprise, writing them as a part-time reporter covering the Helderberg Hilltowns and assumed the masthead in 1996 as co-editor with fellow staff writer Schotz.

 

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