There was no time to waste this Monday. We only briefly touched on the conference in Groningen that four of us attended last week. Yes, it was interesting, especially Nikki Sterkenburg’s lecture on dealing with the far right as a journalist – ask critical questions, keep a professional distance, and be careful that you don’t provide them with a platform to spread their unfiltered views. The discussion on “activism, woke, and news media in higher education” was also far from boring. The main question was: should we be willing to discuss anything with anyone, or should radicalised people be excluded from panel discussions? We didn’t reach consensus, but that wasn’t the point.
Endless meeting agenda
Anyway, we had no time to reflect on our trip to Groningen in much detail. The meeting agenda was endless. We’d scheduled a good four hours for it. Yes, it was long; too long, in hindsight. But once a year, we try to go through all kinds of plans for the coming academic year in record time.
Central question
We talked about the shelf life of the print version of our newspaper – we will continue to publish it, for the time being, as there is still enough interest in it. About our social media presence – we’ve decided to become more active on LinkedIn. About the team-building day that has been planned for fall. And, of course, about the best combination of articles to appear weekly in our newspaper and on our website. One person called for more articles on academic research; another pointed out that we don’t publish enough investigative journalism pieces. A third person said we shouldn’t forget about stories from the student community. How will we manage all this, with our small team? Afterwards, editor CF rightly concluded that we hadn’t addressed one question, the central question we kept circling around: what kind of newspaper do we want to be? Once we have a clear answer to that question, all other decisions will be a lot easier to make.
Moral of the story
The moral of the story is that sometimes haste makes waste (even if haste is in our DNA, with the ever-looming deadlines in journalism). We’ve already set the date for our next meeting. And we already know what the first item on the agenda will be.