Live from the Board of Trustees

So that didn’t work out too well. It wasn’t a failure, per se, more of a heap that we should have seen coming but recklessly ignored.

Before we (and by we, I mean me) arrived, media relations people who saw our e-mail edition’s teaser for liveblogging had already been thinking. Granted, they were a little surprised to see the teaser without any knowledge prior to the fact.

The official policy is that Board of Trustees meetings cannot be recorded. Student media are allowed to bring in a pen and paper and note what happens with the intention that they will later report on tidbits from the meeting.

Our purpose in liveblogging would have been essentially the same: to note what happens and share with the readership our notes of things we will look into.

Like I said, we took people by surprise. Rightfully so… no one had ever done this before at a Board of Trustees meeting. The media relations people posed the question to President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg and Board Chairman Charles Manatt.

Manatt opened the meeting by asking the Board if we should be allowed to blog the meeting. He said he was informed of the Daily Colonial’s intentions to liveblog 12 minutes before the meeting started. His initial recommendation was no, since he really did not know what was going on, but he let Michael Freedman, GW’s vice president of communications, give his take.

Freedman told the committee that though he had been thinking about this new media platform and it was an interesting concept, his concern was that liveblogging “doesn’t follow the gather, sort, report process” that traditional media follows. Another concern was that our liveblog violate the “no recording” rule. His recommendation was also no, but he said the Board should decide.

President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg made the final decision.

“You want courageous leadership?” he asked after no one made a decision. “No.”

Trachtenberg said after the meeting that his concern was that instantaneous posts would inhibit the candor of some of the Board members, which is something that he would not like to see.

So, no liveblog. Sorry if we got any hopes up.

We admit that this was a random idea that we had yesterday and that it would have been wise to see if it was even possible to do before we announced it. And we apologize for the surprise we caused some early this morning.

But we’re glad we did it. Everyone seems interested in looking into the idea. From here, we will submit a proposal to GW’s media relations people, who will send it to an appropriate committee within the Board who will decide. Hopefully by the next Board of Trustees meeting in May, we will be able to responsibly liveblog from the meeting.

Technically,we’re not being censored. However, we are being restricted from disseminating the way we want to. But we’re not the only ones.

Blogging is a conversation that everyone in the media world is having. Like Freedman said, blogging is an entirely new media platform that is still being discovered. How do you distinguish a blogger and a journalist? What’s to say Joe Schmoe from Thurston can’t come to a meeting a blog what he wants to blog?

(For the record, our blogs uphold the same journalistic standards that accompany our publication. There will always be a gather, sort, and report process in our blog posts. We will maintain our responsibility in these blogs just as we do in the publication.)

Anyway, now that you’re all bored to death with journalism theory and could probably care less about the future of the news… later this afternoon, expect the highlights from the meeting.