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For more than a year, The Repository in Canton, Ohio, has used meeting box scores to document quick-hit info from meetings.
Jeff Gauger, executive editor of the Repository, told us about the idea: We’ve used meeting box scores at The Rep now for 13 months but developed a how-to guide recently (see it below). They’re great space and time-savers.
We call them “meeting box scores” because, as with a game box score, they tell readers all about an event in an at-a-glance format. For staff writers, we require a meeting box score for every meeting they attend. The reporter may write a narrative story and a box score, or only a box score.
Here’s how it works:
• If the reporter writes both, the story focuses on the meeting topic deemed most news worthy, and everything else is put into an accompanying box score. And we want as much of everything else done at the meeting as possible in the box score. We have ended the long-standing news writing convention of tacking “in other business” paragraphs at the end of a longer narrative, where they simply get lost. In these cases, the box score has no “key action” element because, of course, that was addressed in the accompanying narrative news story. Box scores sometimes are squeezed out of the paper for space; they then become online-only elements.
• If the meeting is routine with no single topic rising clearly to news prominence, the reporter writes only a meeting box score. It’s fairly easy to write these while you’re still at a meeting, even if you’re scribbling into a notebook. If a reporter attends a meeting, we want a box score at least. It’s not acceptable anymore for the reporter to say, “Boring meeting, nothing newsworthy happened, no story.” We usually ask freelancers to provide only a meeting box score.
For more than a year, The Repository in Canton, Ohio, has used meeting box scores to document quick-hit info from meetings.
Jeff Gauger, executive editor of the Repository, told us about the idea: We’ve used meeting box scores at The Rep now for 13 months but developed a how-to guide recently (see it below). They’re great space and time-savers.
We call them “meeting box scores” because, as with a game box score, they tell readers all about an event in an at-a-glance format. For staff writers, we require a meeting box score for every meeting they attend. The reporter may write a narrative story and a box score, or only a box score.
Here’s how it works:
• If the reporter writes both, the story focuses on the meeting topic deemed most news worthy, and everything else is put into an accompanying box score. And we want as much of everything else done at the meeting as possible in the box score. We have ended the long-standing news writing convention of tacking “in other business” paragraphs at the end of a longer narrative, where they simply get lost. In these cases, the box score has no “key action” element because, of course, that was addressed in the accompanying narrative news story. Box scores sometimes are squeezed out of the paper for space; they then become online-only elements.
• If the meeting is routine with no single topic rising clearly to news prominence, the reporter writes only a meeting box score. It’s fairly easy to write these while you’re still at a meeting, even if you’re scribbling into a notebook. If a reporter attends a meeting, we want a box score at least. It’s not acceptable anymore for the reporter to say, “Boring meeting, nothing newsworthy happened, no story.” We usually ask freelancers to provide only a meeting box score.
