By
Steve Buttry
Daily news meetings are an important
place for editors to emphasize priorities.
If a morning meeting focuses on the
next day’s newspaper, that will be the focus of the staff’s energies. A digital
news outlet should place the focus, especially in a morning meeting, on plans
and results for digital content. Don’t critique the morning paper (or, if you
must, critique it briefly at the end of the meeting). Instead, you should
discuss what’s resonating this morning with your digital audience: What’s
getting strong traffic? What’s generating comments on your site or your
Facebook page or on Twitter? Do you have plans (or should you make them) for
advancing those stories through the day?
If you have projection capability in
your conference room, show the site and/or your Facebook page and/or your
analytics page(s) on the screen to aid in the discussions.
Discuss digital coverage plans for the
day: What video are you shooting? What stories might you be able to supplement
with YouTube videos? What stories provide good crowdsourcing opportunities, and
how should you pitch them to the community? What are photo gallery
opportunities, and are you planning to shoot them (and/or to seek community
photos)?
What events will you be covering live
this day (and the next)? Will you be live tweeting them, live blogging, live
streaming or some combination? Are you planning a live chat about an event or
timely issue (or should you)? Discuss what you’re promoting (or will promote
later in the day) on social media.
The meeting also should reflect that
mobile content and audience are growing in importance. Look at your tablet and
phone apps during the meeting to see whether the right stories are featured and
how your content is displaying. If you can project a laptop or phone screen,
that would be great, but holding a device up or passing it around will work.
Discuss opportunities for engaging with your mobile community.
For the morning meeting, the print
product should be an afterthought, perhaps a brief mention of which stories
have page-one potential or of any graphic elements for print that will need
attention early in the day.
If you have a late-afternoon meeting,
that can focus appropriately more on print. Most of your day’s digital news
traffic and coverage is behind you, and the print deadlines are approaching. Go
ahead and make your page-one plans. But even here, you need to mix in some
digital discussion. If you have some evening events, discuss your live coverage
plans. If you have an afternoon or evening iPad edition, discuss which stories
will be ready and how they will be played. Facebook use gets a boost in the
evening, so you should also plan some evening posts.
Maybe you should overhaul your
meeting(s) in other ways. Should you scrap them altogether and communicate
through a shared Google doc or gchat and/or smaller conversations with one or a
few staff members at a time? Should you invite all staffers into a meeting
that’s now just for the editors? Or should you invite staffers from remote
bureaus or sister newsrooms to join by conference call or Google Hangout?
Should you meet in the middle of the newsroom instead of a conference room?
Should you livestream the meeting or invite the public to attend in person? If
you do, you might want to tell staff to tone down foul language or edgy
sarcasm, if your meetings tend to be foul or sarcastic. And you certainly need
to tell staffers to be careful not to mention details that shouldn’t be public,
such as confidential sources, juveniles whose names you won’t be publishing and
speculation about people who might be charged with crimes.
How does your newsroom focus on digital
and mobile platforms in your meetings?
This post is an excerpt from one which
originally appeared on The Buttry Diary. It is republished
on IJNet with permission.
Steve Buttry, a veteran editor
and journalism trainer, is Digital Transformation Editor at Digital First
Media. He was named the inaugural Lamar Visiting Scholar at Louisiana State
University’s Manship School of Journalism and Communication, where he will begin
work July 1.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via Andy Piper
Source: www.IJNet.org
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