Hey webheds:
Our last meeting before September takes place tomorrow at 2 pm in the editorial boardroom. I'll send out a note on that shortly, but here's our agenda and the minutes from our last meeting. We'll be spending most of our time brainstorming ideas for things we want to see on the web.
Marissa is in the chair this time, so if you can't make it, please send her a note with your regrets and more importantly, your ideas!
AGENDA
1) Choose notetaker - they become chair for next meeting
2) Minutes from last meeting - (just in case there are issues)
3) Producers Boot Camp - a proposal (Bill and Rebecca)
4) Cool Ideas - what we want (All)
5) New Business
Minutes from July 18th Meeting
Present were: Rebecca Jager, Marissa Nelson, Bill Dunphy, Tom Hogue,
Joseph Madziba and Lesley Simpson
1) How to Meet
Bill talked about about his concerns for accountability (to the Learning Newsroom steering committee) and transparency, the chief reasons he had kept control of the committee's chairmanship. After discussions it was agreed the Tech Gang would adopt the rotating chair model used by the steering committee. It works like this: Person A chairs and person B takes notes. Person B produces minutes and creates the agenda for the next meeting and then chairs that meeting, with person C taking notes. Then person C produces minutes, creates an agenda and chairs the next meeting and so on.... It was also suggested by Lesley that we try to move our meetings outside, over lunch or some such thing to inject a little fun into them. Marissa agreed to chair the next meeting.
2) Our Daily Video Dilemma
Rebecca, in her new, ill-defined role as web helper and marketing guru (? - I said it was ill-defined) brought to the table a description of the difficulties we've been having getting a new, professional quality video or sound slide show up onto NewsNow's little video window six times a week.
Key issues include lack of training, lack of training and lack of training. Also, the lack of training has led to results that deter others from jumping in and trying their hand at things. As a step in tackling the problem, the group broke down the weekly demands thusly:
Six 'slots' to be filled a week (on the seventh day we can run a "best of" or repeat Saturday's offerings) break down like this:
- Photo dept should be responsible for producing 1 photographer-produced slide show with audio each week. (Can be wire photos or local)
- City desk should be responsible for producing 3 news video's/slide shows per week, coming off the daily news
- Columnists (Dana, Lesley, Denise and whomever) will fill 2 slots a week.
This leaves the issue of training but there are proposals coming forward to deal with that.
3) Ideas
A prime focus for the new Tech Gang will be generating ideas for web features and products and then working on making those ideas real.
We spent the last half hour going around the table and throwing up ideas for things we'd like to work on. Here's what we came up with:
Podcasts - Tom announced that we finally have the technology and explained that there are plans to do a daily news podcast (i.e. a 5 minute news report) in Sept. We felt the Spec.com should be doing a lot more podcasting than currently planned including both "radio" style shows (newscasts, favourite columnists, sound/slide shows) and sound files (capturing the sound of an event and posting it with little or minimal editing, eg a speech from the mayor, an interview with a celebrity, breaking news audio etc).
OpEds/Community Voices - examples were given of the way some sites encourage and nourish contributions from the community and we need to get behind this in a big way. It involves everything from allowing comments on a story to inviting written/audio/video commentary from readers and building a recognizable home for it.
Invent an Icon - We should begin to nurture web stars, people who produce web-first content which may or may not have any kind of print component in the paper. This could be a blog, a vlog (video blog) or podcast — the idea would be to announce the need and then run an open competition for the spot, getting people to pitch for the spot.
It was agreed that we would continue this discussion at our next meeting in two weeks time. (After that we will go on hiatus for the remainder of August)
minutes by Bill Dunphy
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