| |
| BUILD
A BETTER MEETING |
 |
Want to improve your newscasts? Improve your planning
meetings. Meeting time may be the only time during the day when a
critical mass of news staffers are off the phone and paying attention
to the overall content of upcoming newscasts--not just their own piece
of the puzzle. If you can make your meetings better, your newscasts
will be better, too. Here are some suggestions from the NewsLab conference,
"Reinventing the Desk." |
- Change the agenda. The way you start the meeting
sends a message about what matters in your newsroom. Do you begin
with a review of last night's ratings? A post-mortem of yesterday's
"disaster?" Try starting with what some stations call
"the daily win," and celebrate enterprise to help your
newsroom build on success. When you must review what went wrong,
think about whether it really was a "disaster" or a
case of "we could have done better." That changes the
tone of the discussion from "blame patrol" to "what
can we learn from this?"
- De-emphasize the daybook. The events on the
daybook will still be there at the end of the meeting. If you
start with them, you'll probably assign the bulk of your limited
resources to those "must covers" before you get to any
enterprise ideas. Give other stories a chance by discussing them
first.
- Set a place for viewers. Your viewers should
have a place at the table. Some stations invite "public representatives"
to attend their morning meetings. Others assign someone to monitor
and report on e-mails and phone calls. Consider passing the job
around.
- Encourage participation. If the same few people
attend your meetings, they're likely to come up with the same
ideas, time after time. Encourage photographers, interns, and
people from departments outside the newsroom to come to your planning
meetings. If you have a conference bridge as part of your phone
system, let people who can't attend the meeting in person call
in and participate via speakerphone. The more perspectives you
can bring to the discussion, the more story ideas you'll have
to choose from.
- Talk content, not just logistics. If your
story meeting is devoted to logistics, that's what people will
spend their day worrying about. If it's devoted to content, they'll
focus on that instead. Of course you need to discuss logistics,
but you can do that in a smaller meeting afterwards among the
people directly involved.
- Give everyone a part. Not everybody is great
at coming up with story ideas. Find another important job you
can delegate like monitoring the competition, reading the papers
or scanning the Internet. That makes it possible for everybody
to bring something to the table. And it's one less thing you'll
have to worry about.
- Be more of a coach, and less of a player. The
news director or assignment manager isn't the only person who
can run the meeting. Let somebody else do it. Better yet, rotate
the responsibility among several people. One station has a rule
that no one in management can run the meeting. Ask open-ended
questions to encourage others to contribute ideas. And watch the
body language that can send an unspoken signal that those contributions
won't really be considered. Nothing shuts down enterprise faster.
- Advocate for others. Support suggestions that
have potential, even if they can't be turned into packages that
day. Pitch ideas on behalf of others who simply can't or won't
attend the meeting.
- Have a holding pen. Create a place for unused
but valid story ideas that everybody can see. It may be on a dry
erase board in the newsroom or in a computer file or on the sheet
of assignments you hand out every day. The goal is to find a way
to keep these ideas on everybody's radar screen so they can eventually
find their way into a newscast.
- Recap and review. Do this at the end of every
meeting. It's a good way to ensure that everyone is on the same
page, and that the next steps you've agreed on will actually be
taken. Then share the plan widely. Why not have somebody bring
a laptop into the meeting, take notes and mass mail them to your
news staff when it's over?
- Set an example. Get out of the office and
bring back some story ideas. See how many you can come up with
in a half-hour walk or drive. Tell people how you did it and encourage
them to try it themselves. Then support their ideas to encourage
more enterprise efforts.
|
|
 |
