Should We Invite "The Press" to our Meetings?

[Brent]

To his credit, Adam Arnold (Cary News reporter) himself broached this question last night: Should we invite "the press" to our meetings? Mike Joyce noted during the meeting that if we invite Adam (or other reporters), then all of our remarks, technically, are fair game for news articles.

Here are my thoughts:

Having press coverage could be a good thing. One of the concerns expressed last night, by several people, was how much weight would be given to our recommendations by council and staff. It seems to me that having press coverage would only increase the significance of our work and our recommendations.

But having the press at every meeting could put a damper on "uncensored" discussion.

I think there might be a "happy medium" where we invite the press (we could invite the N&O as well as Adam from Cary News, if we choose to) to selected meetings, presumably those at which we have a more structured discussion (perhaps meetings later in the cycle where we are in a position to form some group recommendations, as opposed to other meetings where we have unstructured discussion, brainstorming and so on).

(In a related matter, we need to decide whether or not to invite the press to participate in this forum...to keep the poll question simpler, I will address that in a separate post)


Anyway, please post your thoughts and vote in the poll.

[Brent]

Attention all,

I messed up on the poll question for this poll. I was trying to combine the poll for the meetings and the forum, and realized that the poll would become too complex, but I neglected to correct the third poll response here.

I have modified the third option of the poll. So, whomever voted for option #3, which was something different before I fixed the poll question, should contact Administrator Don Hyatt if you wish to change your vote.

Apologies.

[DarylB]

I'm not really strongly pushing this item one way or the other personally, but I voted to open all our meetings to the press. Here's my thinking: if it's just organizational, they'll have likely only passing interest, since that's not particularly newsworthy, obviously the meatier stuff they'll want to be there for anyway. As far as what I say, if I've said it in a meeting, I feel I should be ready to say it in public, and stand behind it. Yep, I'm one of those "personal responsibilty" types, and just feel there should be a feeling that this is as open as we can make it, while working to get not only comments, but committment (see my other post on opening the membership, same philosophy). I don't want the presence of the press to be a damper, or to throw cold water on anyones participation. Some of this feeling I'm sure is due to my being "just a little extroverted", and while I'm quite comfortable with that, not everybody is. As I said, I don't feel this is a huge issue, but one I'm glad we're taking the time for, and are considering the implications.