David A. Zeeck, 2006-07 ASNE president, is executive editor of  The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.

When we asked editors last fall what ASNE’s priorities should be they were clear.

They wanted help navigating toward the digital future, and they wanted ASNE to promote and defend the First Amendment.

While dealing with change — in news-gathering, in delivery, in competition — may drive the agenda for most of our workdays, I’ve found that it’s the role of a free press that really ignites the passions of editors, here and around the world.

I was powerfully reminded of this twice early this year. First was at an ASNE First Amendment Summit in Washington, D.C., in mid-January. The same lesson came home in a different way later that month when a dozen editors representing ASNE traveled to Mexico to investigate border and immigration issues, and to study and support press freedom there.

The First Amendment Summit consisted of two parts. The first day was exploration and explanation. Much of it was videotaped, and parts were aired on C-SPAN. Among the highlights:

• Geoffrey Stone, who teaches Constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school, gave as clear an explanation and defense of the need for a reporters’ shield law as I’ve ever heard. (In part, he stressed the privilege belonged to the source, whose whistle-blowing benefits society.) He’ll be a featured panelist in a conversation about national security and anonymous sources at our convention in Washington, D.C.
• The BALCO reporters, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of The San Francisco Chronicle, were there. It was their reporting that revealed grand jury testimony in which top athletes admitted illegal steroid use. Though their source has since come forward and they are out of danger, at the time they awaited sentencing for refusing to reveal the source’s identity.

They had been to Capitol Hill making the case for a federal shield law. While at the summit, they received the good news that Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had pledged to work for a federal shield law.

Fainaru-Wada and Williams are also expected to speak at the ASNE convention.

The second part of the First Amendment Summit occurred the next day, when editors, friends from various reporters’-rights and open-government groups, met to talk about where we go from here.

I heard consensus that this may be a brighter time than any in recent memory to advance a shield law and to promote openness in government.

And there were many strategies put forward for how we might work together to gain those advances.

Of particular interest to editors may be the formation of a new ASNE committee, a First Amendment Committee chaired by Ken Paulson, editor of USA TODAY. His mission is to build public understanding of and support for The First Amendment and the five freedoms it promises: speech, religion, the right to peaceful assembly, the right to petition the government, and to a free press.

The FOI Committee will continue to fight for press freedoms and government openness. It remains under the direction of co-chairs David Westphal, chief of McClatchy’s Washington bureau, and Pat Yack, editor of The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville.

As January melded into February, I traveled to Mexico with the ASNE delegation. The most moving part of that trip was learning about the press there and offering support to the Mexicans in their battle for press freedom.
While we have problems as journalists in the U.S. — namely keeping reporters out of jail and law enforcement out of newsrooms — Mexico’s problems make ours seem tame.

•  Since 2000, we were told at a discussion with four Mexican reporters and editors, 29 journalists have disappeared or been murdered in Mexico.
  Most were reporting on drug trafficking and made enemies by writing the truth. Some might have died because they exposed police or political corruption. The group Reporters Without Borders last year said Mexico had the worst record for press freedom in the Americas, and was second only to Iraq in the number of reporters killed.
  
• Only this year have three Mexican senators representing the major political parties come out in favor of national revisions of Mexican state laws on defamation, or so-called honor crimes. In most every Mexican state, a reporter can write a truthful story, proving with irrefutable evidence that a government official or business person is corrupt or a criminal, and still be charged and sentenced to prison for damaging the subject’s reputation.
  
• A high-ranking American official in Mexico told us that threats against journalists kept secret the fact that 16 bodies were discovered early this year in Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen, Texas.
  

They apparently were murdered by a rival gang in an ongoing war among drug-traffickers there. The people of Reynosa didn’t get that news because gangsters called the local press and promised to kill any journalist who printed the story.
Some large regional and national papers — El Norte in Monterrey and El Universal in Mexico City, among them — are relatively strong enough to resist such pressures. But smaller papers, particularly in the Mexican border states where the gangsters are strong and corruption goes unpunished, live with the real threat of death when they report the truth, and have no hope of protection from the authorities.

Our visit to Mexico, and the sobering encounters with our Mexican brothers and sisters, was a potent reminder of how blessed we are to have a free press and relatively open government. And how important it is that we keep up the fight — for our nation and for our colleagues around the world. *