Lori Potter, Kearney Hub agriculture/natural resources reporter, was elected president of the National Federation of Press Women on Thursday, Sept. 8, at the organization’s conference at Harrah’s in Council Bluffs. She will serve a two-year term leading NFPW.
Potter joined NPW and NFPW in 1979. She has served as NPW president and has been on the organization’s board of directors since 1981. At the national level, Potter has served as second and then first vice president before being elected to lead the group.
Also at the conference, Grand Island Independent features editor Terri Hahn was honored Friday, Sept. 9, as the runner-up for 2011 Communicator of Achievement at the National Federation of Press Women (NFPW) Communications Conference in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Hahn was one of 12 nominees from across the country for the highest honor bestowed by NFPW. The 2011 Communicator of Achievement is Beth Miller, a reporter for The Delaware News Journal in Wilmington, Del.
Hahn has worked for The Independent since 1993. She is a 17-year member of Nebraska Press Women (NPW), which nominated her for the national award, and a 21-year member of NFPW.
She has served as NPW president, vice president, historian, newsletter editor and on the President’s Advisory Board. She is currently NPW publicity director.
The conference was jointly hosted by Iowa Press Women and Nebraska Press Women Thursday through Saturday in Council Bluffs and Omaha.
Preceding the NFPW conference, NPW inducted the first six women into the Marian Andersen Nebraska Women Journalists Hall of Fame. Honored in the inaugural class of the hall of fame were Bess Furman Armstrong, a graduate of Nebraska State Teachers College in Kearney who went on to be a political reporter in Washington, D.C., for The Associated Press from 1929 to 1937 and for The New York Times from 1943 to 1961; Dr. Wilma Crumley, an advertising and journalism professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who became associate dean of the College of Journalism and chairwoman of the Journalism Graduate Program, retiring in 1991; Lynne Grasz, a UNL graduate who was director of promotion and public relations from 1966 to 1976 at KOLN-TV/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, went on to be director of communications and executive director for the CBS Broadcast Group in New York City and now is president/CEO of her own international PR and marketing company, Grasz Communication; Marjorie Marlette, a reporter for the Lincoln Journal from the 1940s to 1982, specializing in covering courts, prisons and legislative issues; Beverly Pollock, co-publisher of the Keith County News in Ogallala from 1966 until she retired in 2000; and Deanna Sands, an editor for the Omaha World-Herald from 1972 until she retired in 2006, spending the last 15 years as managing editor.
