Mel Opotowsky was given the Philip N. McCombs Achievement Award by the California Press Association at its winter meeting. The award recognizes the contributions of a journalist who is no longer working full time in the business. The association also honored the founder and late publisher of the Fontana Herald.

Opotowsky joined The Press-Enterprise as day editor in 1973 and retired as managing editor in 1999. He currently runs a newsroom training program for the paper and consults about public access and First Amendment matters. Opotowsky also teaches at California State University, Fullerton.

In accepting the award, Opotowsky urged the association to help improve the quality of journalists entering the business and more aggressively defend the public's rights to access government records and meetings.

"We are no longer getting the best and the brightest, indeed, even just the good ones, to enter our business," Opotowsky told the group. Wages have lagged, and journalism has lost the prestige it once had in the 1950s and 1960s. That has hampered the ability of newspapers to attract bright young people to the profession, he said.

He lamented the focus of many publishing companies on bottom-line profits at the expense of news staff. He also lamented the unwillingness of more publishers to mount aggressive challenges against governmental efforts to close meetings and block access to records.

"We must recapture our purpose or acknowledge we deserve the loss of our prestige and quality," Opotowsky told the group.

Opotowsky is a co-founder of the California Society of Newspaper Editors and founding member and first president of the California First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting public access to government documents and information. He received the coalition's Beacon Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996 and the Freedom of Information Award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association this year.

The Philip N. McCombs award includes a $1,500 scholarship in Opotowsky's name to help defray the cost of a newspaper internship for a college student.

The California Press Association also inducted Cornelius De Bakcsy into the California Newspaper Hall of Fame. De Bakcsy founded the Fontana Herald in 1923 and was a founder and later president of the Fontana Chamber of Commerce. DeBakcsy, who was born in Hungary in 1880, became an American citizen in 1918 and promoted citizenship through a page of news published in English, Hungarian, Spanish and Italian. DeBakcsy died in 1947.

The association was founded in 1878 to inform newspaper professionals and recognize outstanding newspaper people in California.