Arizona Daily Star editor picked to lead APME

The executive editor of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson has been elected president of the Associated Press Managing Editors, the organization of newspaper editors served by The Associated Press.

Bobbie Jo Buel replaces David Ledford, executive editor of The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, and will serve a one-year term.

As president, Buel will supervise meetings of the association and the APME board, which consults with the AP on its news coverage and services to newspaper members. The AP has a separate board that directs the cooperative.

"We have to be the ones that stand up in the face of these hard economic times and keep reminding our publishers and our owners about the importance of the core journalism, and that's what sells the product," Buel said.

Buel said that it's important for the association's editors to continue to fight for the core things journalists stand for: access to public records, first amendment issues, and enterprise and investigative reporting.

Also Thursday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel won the APME's second Innovator of the Year Award for launching an investigative reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.

Other finalists included the Las Vegas Sun for Web site innovations and Florida Today of Melbourne, Florida, for its so-called "mission control" approach to print and online coordination.

At the conference which ended Thursday, APME members voted to reduce its board from 24 directors to 20 by 2011. The reduction will bring the association's board closer to those of other journalism organizations, Buel said.

Other APME officers elected include: Otis Sanford, editor of opinion and editorials of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee, to vice president; Hollis Towns, executive editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, to secretary; and Joseph Garcia, viewpoints and aztalk editor of The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, to chairman of the Journalism Today committees.

Founded in 1846, the AP is the world's oldest and largest newsgathering association, a source of news, photos, graphics, audio and video for thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers around the world. It is owned by its 1,500 U.S. daily newspaper members, which elect the board of directors.

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