I was sitting in a meeting this week and I started thinking about how we use meetings to shape stories and put together our print and digital products. We’ve changed these meetings quite a bit this year as we moved to more of a digital-first strategy. So I thought I would list the key meetings, when they occur and talk a bit about them:
- Print final: 10 a.m. Mondays-Fridays. This meeting lasts between 15 and 30 minutes and usually starts with a presentation by Local News Editor Jessica Prokop proposing a slate of local stories for the next day’s print edition. That’s followed by the day’s wire news editor, usually Colleen Keller, who pitches the top stories from our news services, including the Associated Press and Washington State Standard. Next, Photo Editor Amanda Cowan shows potential photos for the front page, and then we decide the final lineup for print. The meeting concludes with a look at what stories will be filed after the print deadline, but ready to post on www.columbian.com before the end of the day.
- Saturday A1 centerpiece: 10:30 a.m. Wednesdays. Our front-page Saturday features can be in the works for several weeks or even months, so we need to review them as they progress. We generally look at the next three Saturdays at these meetings, which are attended by the reporters on the stories plus representatives from the photo department and the copy desk. The meeting can last anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes.
- Reporter meetings: 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Thursdays. I don’t generally attend these meetings, but the reporters and the content editors do. The purpose is to review work plans and story ideas in small groups so that we can be ready for the week’s final meeting, which is the …
- Story planning meeting: 3 p.m. Fridays. Jessica takes the lead at this meeting, too. By this time she’s received work plans from the reporters, attended the reporter meetings and compiled an early look at how the news will flow for the next week. This gives the other editors time to ask questions, make sure photos and graphics are assigned, and make sure we’ll have space for everything and no gaps. This meeting takes about 30 minutes.
These few short meetings help us stay organized.
This plan didn’t work
Faithful ePaper readers noticed on Tuesday that our effort to do something nice resulted in a weird failure. When we write our stories, we can embed dynamic web links in them. If you click on a link when reading online, it will lead you to selected web pages. For example, I’ll embed a link to last week’s column right here.
If the last 10 words of that sentence look different — such as blue and underlined — you are probably reading this column at www.columbian.com. Recently we were talking to the vendor that produces our ePaper and were told it could do the same thing. So we told them to turn on the dynamic links beginning on Tuesday.
