New York Times Meetings

Mike Allen's "Playbook" feature in Politico is a great way to stay ahead of DC news. [You can get an email update.] Today's Playbook was some background on media decisionmaking:

N.Y. Times internal memo, “The New News Cycle”: “As an essential step in our reorganization, we will begin holding the morning meeting at 10 a.m. … and to conduct both it and the 4 p.m. meeting differently. … The 10 a.m. meeting will combine the current 9:45 Continuous News meeting and the broader 10:30 meeting, aiming both at Web coverage for the day and planning for the front page … The organizing thought is simple, focusing on a single news report that unfolds around the clock on the Web and is crystallized into a printed product at night. Our main goal is to create a conversational venue to discuss and plot coverage for the big news of the day. Until now, the discussion has been driven largely by what each desk hopes will front in the next day's paper. Now, we want the conversation to focus more intently on the big stories that have arisen overnight or in the morning — or are likely to develop as the day proceeds — and how we plan to pursue them for all of our publishing platforms. This should also be an opportunity to talk about how these stories will be handled on various blogs and in social media; representatives of photo, graphics, multimedia and video should be prepared to offer their contributions. …

“[W]e would like the morning to be vigorous news meeting, with the best minds there thinking collectively about how to go forward, rather than leaving each department in its own silo angling for the best play. Following that, we’ll ask each department what they see as their best offering for A1 for the following morning. These pitches should be brief, with copies of enterprise available. A best bets list for the paper will be distributed after the meeting. We will try our best to signal what pieces should be held for fronting later, what we'd like for the Web during the day what should run immediately in print. That list will serve as a starting point for the 4 p.m. meeting, at which we’ll ask the department representatives if their stories are shaping up as expected and whether other stories have risen to consideration, as well as how photo, video and graphics will fit into that coverage. Also, we want to use the 4 p.m. meeting to begin planning for the next day’s early morning home page. The focus here should be on enterprise stories, blog posts, videos or multimedia projects that are worth featuring in the early morning and on new stories that might be generated either overnight or early in the day. … Ian Fisher/Tom Jolly/Jim Roberts.”