Opening night reception raises more than $5,000 for SPJ’s Legal Defense Fund

By Samantha Delgado
Hundreds of journalists networked, ate miniature quiches and bid on vacations and other items at an auction Sunday night as the Society of Professional Journalists formally kicked off its 2010 convention in Las Vegas.

The opening reception at the posh London Club at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino gave members a chance to mingle and spend money at an auction to support the organization’s Legal Defense Fund.
According to SPJ’s twitter feed, the auction raised more than $5,000 for the fund, which defends freedom of speech and of the press.
“I plan to get contacts and information in the next steps to my career,” said Rosa Salamea, a 22-year-old student at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.
Every seat at the reception was occupied and the cocktail tables were crowded with people munching on miniature quiches and crab-stuffed tomatoes.
People introduced themselves and exchanged business cards throughout the event, even while standing in line for a chance to satisfy their sweet tooth with glazed and sprinkled donut holes and chocolate candies.
The top-selling auction item was a folding director’s chair dubbed the “Watergate” chair, signed by reporters and editors Dan Schorr, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and three others who exposed the Watergate scandal that led President Richard Nixon to resign from office.
Steve Geimann, the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation president, bought the Watergate chair for $2,600. He has bought Watergate chairs at past conventions.
Geimann, an editor at Bloomberg News, also spent $400 on a cartoon by Walt Handelsman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist at Newsday.

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