Sue Porter, vice president, programs at Scripps Howard Foundation, received the Society of Professional Journalists highest honor, the Wells Memorial Key award. She received the award during the Presidents Installation Gala.

The gala also serves as an awards ceremony for distinguished journalists, but the Wells Memorial Key is always given out last. Recipient names are kept secret until it’s time to present the pin, and Porter said she was surprised.

“It’s incredibly humbling to win an award like this, after you’ve sat through an evening like this,” Porter said. “All the people who’ve been on stage before this, all the stories you’ve heard, aren’t they amazing? Don’t they make you proud? This is for everyone who recognizes that.”

The Wells Memorial Key was first awarded in 1913 and is given annually to a member for outstanding service to the Society during the preceding year or over a period of years, according to a news release about the award.

Porter has served in various positions, including the president of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation board of directors and was the editor of Quill, SPJ’s magazine.

During her time as president of SDX, collaborators said Porter was an inspiration to others.

“A lot of women look to someone like her as a role model,” said Robert Leger, current board president of SDX. “She’s just so willing to give of herself.”

Leger also said that Porter helped foundation members learn new skills about raising money for their projects.

“She was invaluable about helping us learn about fundraising and just the relationships that lead up to successful fundraising,” he said. “I can’t just go right up to you and say, ‘Can you give me some money?’ It’s rude for one thing. But she was really good in helping our staff learn the ins and outs of the right ways of going about that.”

Porter joined the E.W. Scripps faculty almost 40 years ago, working as a reporter, editor, and producer.  She recently announced that she’ll be retiring.

Corchado. Photo courtesy of his website.

Many attendees of this year’s Excellence in Journalism conference arrived via relatively short trips to Orlando. However for some like Alfredo Corchado, who works in Mexico City for the Dallas Morning News, the commute involved international time zones and lasted much longer.

Corchado says he uses two angles in his coverage – how what happens in the United States affects Mexico, and how what happens in Mexico affects the United States, particularly, north Texas. At the 2015 Excellence in Journalism conference, he went to some panels related to those topics, such as one on Latino voting patterns.

“In many ways, I think as foreign correspondents, the more we can bring, connect, the world that we cover, to the United States reader, the more these stories will resonate,” Corchado said. “So it’s all about trying to make the foreign story seem less foreign.”

When he attends conferences, Corchado wants to get a broader view to do precisely that. Adding to that, he said the media is influx, with journalists essentially sharing similar roles and responsibilities.

“We’re all one giant platform,” Corchado said.

During conferences and panels, Corchado sees not just how his colleagues are surviving in the business, but how they are “thriving.” Corchado has had to deal with some of the setbacks that have the impacted the journalism industry in recent years. At one point his Mexico City bureau had the largest staff of any U.S. publication abroad.

“We’re now down to one, and that’s me,” Corchado said. “So, I have to go out and do TV interviews, I mean with my iPhone 6. I do blogging. So I’m always trying to learn, especially from the younger colleagues, how they’re doing things.”

Ultimately, however, Corchado said the field is about storytelling and content. And the story of Mexico, he said, is becoming increasingly important because of the integration between the United States and it’s neighbor to the south.

Readers, he said, are not just immigrant families. They include a broader range of people, such as businessmen doing trade with Mexico and the person who wants to vacation in Cancun. In the future, if media companies are unable to cover Mexico with bureau-based staff, he thinks people will continue to cover the country from the United States by dispatching teams on short assignments.

“You can’t get away from the story.”

[View the story “The art of storytelling: by Boyd Huppert ” on Storify]

App scores as of 5 p.m. Sunday – seven hours before the competition’s end.

Holly Duchmann and Kailey Broussard are not only fellow student journalists at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, but even closer this weekend during Excellence in Journalism 2015 while rooming together in Orlando. However this weekend their safriendship took a competitive turn.

An online competition integrated within the popular EIJ15 mobile app has seemingly formed rivalries and friendships among conference participants. The app awards points for things such as posting photos, checking in at events and participating in online surveys. The overall winner scoresfree registration to next year’s EIJ conference in New Orleans.

While battling their way to social media glory, Duchmann and Broussard say admit they’ve found a rewarding experience in what started as lighthearted competition. “It strongly motivates people to communicate,” Broussard said. “I just ran up to people and they recognized me from the app.”

Andrew Worth, a mass communications and journalism senior at California State University, Fresno, has consistently hung around the top of the app leaderboard all weekend. “It’s just another way to network,” he said.

However, not all content being posted is being received with the same enthusiasm, Duchmann suggested users could easily game the app competition with posts irrelevant of the conference.

Tara Puckey, SPJ member strategist, said the app is designed to engage users by helping them network and discuss the conference. “We’re a journalism organization, so we can’t dictate what people post and what they talk about,” she said. “We just hope that it’s used mainly as a tool to enhance their conference experience.”

SPJ Region Three Director Michael Koretzky said certain users are ruining the experience for others while sabotaging their own chance of successfully networking – all for a conference admission.He counted 189 posts over one hour from a single user.

“People just kind of backed away like you back away from a person who’s talking to themselves at the park,” he said.

Instead of awarding points for each post, users should have the option to vote on worthwhile submissions, Koretzky said.

He plans to make recommendations during a board meeting on Monday.

Dave Sirak of the Cox Media Group’s drone committee leads a discussion Sunday on drone usage. Photo by Shelby Reynolds

Journalists are often looking for any advantage for discovering, gathering, and reporting news events reliably and quickly. Especially if that includes eyes in the sky.

However even after ongoing examination and exploration of proposed regulations for operating drones in the U.S., news organizations largely remain in a holding pattern for legally launching drones from station helicopter pads.

Current FAA laws require a sports pilot license or higher for drone operation and prohibit commercial-purpose use, said Dave Sirak, Cox Media Group Drone Committee.

With recent use case examples for just how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) can provide a difference with newsgathering and reporting, many questions still exist about the legalities and restrictions for commercial use by media companies including news organizations.

“The law is always trying to catch up to technology, the problem is technology moves at an exponential rate,” Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel, National Press Photographers Association.

Many news organizations turn to hobbyists for drone footage– but there are guidelines. The organization seeking video cannot have a professional relationship with the hobbyist, and a request of any drone footage is prohibited.

RTDNA’s Kathleen Kirby says that Section 333 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act allows exceptions to the law, allowing for the government to grant some exemptions. So far, more than 1,50o of these exemptions have been granted.

Kirby advised that newsrooms should explore the Section 333 waiver and implement an internal plan for waiver exemptions. “It’s the first step to law proposal,” she said.

Penalties for illegal drone use range from $5,000-$25,000. There are six test sites in the nation that allow drone experimentation. Virginia Polytechnic University is one of them, allowing news organization to operate drones for testing purposes.

We already have innovation, but as journalists we’re going to have to bring broader views to governments so they can see how beneficial drone use can be. Privacy shouldn’t be an issue because digital media is already here,” Janet Zaragoza, California State University, Fresno.

Some drone industry experts believe we may not see any major changes to government regulations until late 2016 or early 2017.  

[View the story “#EIJ15 Day 2 Highlights from the EIJ News Staff” on Storify]