By: Charles Bowen Dang, but I hate meetings. Always have. Always will.
So I came to the Web site known as "Al's Morning Meeting" with more than a little prejudice. Go ahead, Al. Show me something. And Al did.
Al Tompkins, the online and broadcast leader at the famed Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., operates his Monday-through-Friday updated service to help the working press identify stories that need to be done.
"What?" you say. "Who is this guy who's trying to tell me how to do my job?" Actually, Al Tompkins has been telling us just that for a long time. He has taught literally hundreds of Poynter seminars for news professionals around the country, focusing on writing, storytelling, ethics, and leadership in newsrooms. With a background as a news director at major southern and midwestern broadcast operations and awards for investigative reporting, Tompkins has earned the right to call a meeting. And best of all, Al's meetings, being online, work around your schedule.
Obviously named for the midmorning gathering of editors at the nation's newspapers and TV stations, Al's Morning Meeting points out several fresh stories each day that someone in your newsroom could jump on. The ideas come from everywhere. A growing group of Web-wise tipsters gives Tompkins advance notice of reports and trends as well as some interesting local stories that affect every community. Al even offers ideas on how to flesh out and localize the story, along with helpful Web links for gathering documentation and finding quotable sources.
To get a seat at the table, visit the site at
http://www.poynter.org/morningmeeting/index.htm, where the opening page gets right to the meat of the matter, with a summary of the day's most interesting tip. One day it might be the call for softer baseballs for use in kids sports, complete with stats on sudden death and injury from chest wall blows (known as "commotio cordis"), quotable experts, and Web links for background. Visit tomorrow and the opening discussion could be on the politics involved in replenishing the sands on the nation's beaches or about scams involving faulty automobile air bags. There could be a comparison of taxes in various states or the names of the fastest-growing counties in the country or the latest national and local numbers on car thefts.
Note that the site's not only for the city desk. Feature editors, sports writers, and editorial page editors can find rich resources here. Also you can browse the minutes of Al's earlier meetings. Scroll the opening page and look in the left column for the section called "Past Morning Mornings." Here are links to more than a year's worth of story ideas, all saved in the month in which they were originally discussed.
Other considerations for using Al's Morning Meeting in your editorial planning:
1. If you don't have time to surf the Web each day before your
own morning meeting, let Al bring his meeting to you. You can get a full-text version of Morning Meeting delivered to your e-mail inbox by 7 a.m. Eastern Time Monday through Friday. A link on the site's opening screen gets you set up.
2. Want to share an idea with Tompkins? A "Contact" link on the introductory screen invites you to send him a few sentences and hot links about your idea.
3. To check out other features of The Poynter Institute, visit the organization's main page at http://www.poynter.org.
To see Bowen's last 10 columns,
click here. Previous columns may be purchased in our
paid archives. Search for "Bowen" in the "Author" field.
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