Choose Burkett or Casey for secretary.

Lynnell Burkett and Maura Casey, both of whom have long been active in NCEW, are the candidates for secretary this fall.

Burkett is editorial page editor and Sunday columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and currently chairs the Futures Committee. Casey is associate editor of The Day in New London, Conn., and recently ended a two-year board term.

The elected candidate will assume the secretary post in January and then move up through the ranks to treasurer, vice president, and president in 2004.

Burkett says it would be an "honor and challenge" to be part of the NCEW leadership team. "The editorial page is the major, if not only, secular conveyor of opinion within a community, based on solid research and without any kind of ulterior agenda. As NCEW moves forward, it needs a clear vision. It must preserve what's best about the past and take advantage of what's new. The organization also must look for new educational opportunities for its members. It must learn what services members desire and provide creative and innovative opportunities for them. NCEW is built on a solid foundation. Its greatest strength is the loyalty and collegiality of its members," she said.

Burkett has been an NCEW member since 1988 and has attended every convention since. She was convention chair for the 1995 San Antonio convention. She has been a board member and an occasional contributor to The Masthead.

She spent the summer and fall of 1998 as editor-in-residence with the Media Management Center at Northwestern University. During that time, she visited 18 newspapers nationwide, interviewing CEOs, publishers and editorial page editors about the future of newspapers. This resulted in the book Future Voice -- Editorial Pages: Newspapers' Overlooked Strategic Tool.

Burkett is particularly interested in newspapers' connections with their communities, having worked with Community Advisory Boards at the two San Antonio newspapers. Before becoming editorial page editor in 1995, she was associate editorial page editor and Sunday columnist for the Express-News. She joined the paper after the 1992 closing of the San Antonio Light, where she also was editorial page editor.

Burkett entered newspaper work after a 16-year career teaching journalism at San Antonio College, a 22,000-student community college, where she helped advise the student newspaper and magazine. For seven years, she was chairman of the journalism/photography department. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and master's degree in communications from the University of Texas at Austin.

Burkett has been active in efforts to engage more minorities in journalism. She was founding director of a high school journalism workshop for minorities at San Antonio College, worked with ASNE job fairs for minority students, and taught in numerous workshops for high school journalism students at Texas colleges. She also has worked with professional training programs for Arab journalists in Tunisia.

She has been national president of the Community College Journalism Association and local president of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Maura Casey

Maura Casey says that "NCEW is special because it is a community as much as it is a journalism organization. As editorial jobs become more complex, the organization can play a leadership role in helping members anticipate future trends in editorial pages. But it can also assist in old-fashioned ways, such as helping members sharpen writing skills by sponsoring panels on writing. We need to make our pages invaluable to our readers. The best way to do that is by helping each other."

Casey has been a member of NCEW since October 1983, when she became editorial page editor of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune in Massachusetts. She's won more than 25 state, regional, and national awards for journalism, including the Scripps Howard Foundation's Walker Stone Award for editorial writing and the Horace Greeley Award, New England's highest award for public service journalism.

In 1996, Casey raised $30,000 so that the New England Society of Newspaper Editors could revive an exchange between journalists in New England and Russia. Because she believes that journalists should talk to each other even if their governments aren't speaking, she traveled to Iran in 1998 to initiate an exchange program between journalists from Iran and America. The contacts she made in Iran helped her arrange, in November 1998, a joint conference for journalists of our two nations -- the first such exchange since the 1979 hostage crisis.

Casey has had numerous roles in NCEW. She served on the board of directors from 1997 to 1999. Last year she obtained a $50,000 grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation to enable NCEW to publish a book on best editorial page practices, a book she is co-editing with Michael Zuzel. She wrote her first cover story for The Masthead in 1984. She served for years as associate editor, deputy editor, and as editor of The Masthead for several issues.

In 1988, she coordinated and edited Editorial Excellence, Volume 2, a compilation of excellent editorials. In the past she has chaired the Regional Conferences Committee and the Convention Site Selection Committee. She has been a member of the Membership Committee and the Futures Committee.

A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Casey graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in political science from Buffalo State College and obtained a master's degree in journalism and public affairs from The American University in Washington, D.C. She lives in a 250-year-old colonial home in Franklin, Conn., with her husband, Peter J. Panzarella, and their two children, Anna, 12, and Tim, 6.