Clarendon will welcome more than 70 registered attendees during the Panhandle Press Association’s 106th annual convention this week, Thursday-Saturday, April 14-16.
PPA President Ashlee Estlack and the staff of The Clarendon Enterprise are hosting the event, which has been designed to showcase Donley County and leave a positive lasting impression on the members of the regional group of community newspapers.
“We’ve worked to put together a program that is informative to our members while giving Clarendon a chance to shine,” Estlack said. “Local support for this convention has been terrific, and we believe it will have a positive impact on our community.”
The convention will bring in newspapers from an area encompassing the Texas Panhandle and South Plains as well as bordering counties in New Mexico and Oklahoma. Twenty-one individual newspapers and associate members are sending representatives.
The convention begins Thursday afternoon with registration and a PPA directors’ meeting at the Best Western Red River Inn. Thursday evening the convention will gather at the Saints’ Roost Museum, which is the home of the Panhandle Press Hall of Fame. There the crowd will enjoy the Chuckwagon cooking of Kevin Romines and the Honey-Do Spoiler wagon while listening to the music of local singer-songwriter Phil Flowers and the cowboy poetry of Jo Shaller.
Friday morning the convention gets underway at the Bairfield Activity Center where morning and afternoon work sessions will be led by Kevin Slimp, a favorite speaker and trainer in the publishing world who has worked with newspapers and press associations all across North America. Slimp’s courses will cover everything from customer service to ad and page design tips to Photoshop techniques.
Most of the afternoon Friday will be free for convention attendees to explore Clarendon on their own.
The convention resumes Friday evening at the Bairfield Activity Center with a banquet catered by the Bar H Dude Ranch focusing on the 2016 inductees to the PPA Hall of Fame, which includes longtime Groom publisher Phillip Miller and a former publisher of The Clarendon News, the late E.E. Carhart, who brought the first printing press to the Texas Panhandle in 1881.
Activities on Saturday morning will include a roundtable discussion on social media and web trends featuring Texas Tech University professor Randy Reddick and former Enterprise and Texas Tech Toreador reporter Ashlyn Tubbs, who is now a reporter for KCBD in Lubbock.
Saturday will also include a general membership meeting and the annual awards lunch catered by Great Western Dining, which will reveal the winners of the 2015 PPA Better Newspaper Contest.
“We are very pleased to have the PPA in our hometown, and, by the same token, the PPA is very pleased with the support Clarendon has shown for the association,” Estlack said.
Local sponsors for the convention include the Clarendon Economic Development Corporation, Clarendon College, Herring Bank, the Donley County State Bank, Knorpp Insurance, and the Clarendon Chamber of Commerce.
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