Meeting Watch

The Meeting Watch format replaces the board meeting suitcase story. It has six or seven basic standing elements that reporters use for every board meeting.

It often means that after their Meeting Watch is written, their meeting reporting is done, that there is no story to write.

Once they get to use to doing the Meeting Watch, they come to rely on it for letting the reader know what happened at the meeting without it taking any real writing time. It means that if nothing really big happened, they can go on to work on an enterprise or feature story, something more interesting or fun than having to write a narrative of a board story.

The Meeting Watch has the following, and is only a single sentence on each entry, two sentences at most, and is generally not longer than 10" in the paper. We grouped them and put them in the back of the paper. It has the following bulleted items:

• Meeting: (name of board, date of meeting, length of meeting + length of any executive session)
• Actions: (any resolution adopted that is of reader interest, not government process, and other key action taken)
• Discussion without action: (for all the key items discussed that they did not act on)
• Bids/Purchases over $1,000 (we don't care if they buy a copier for $425)
• Appointments/Resignations: the person's name, what they are appointed to, length of term, salary
• Attendance: (we don't put in all the board members, only those who are absent, plus the number in the audience. We don't count ourselves) -- Signed by the reporter.

We do NOT include government process stuff, only items of reader interest. We still are not the clerk of the board.