Board Minutes

CALL TO ORDER
The meeting was called to order at 5:04 p.m.
MEMBERS PRESENT: Adam Downing, Christine Dipietro, Joe Humphhries, Jacqueline Indula, Cynthia Rouf, Keitris Weathersbe, Tyler Dukes, Lauren Gould, Brian Ware and Adam Compton.
OTHERS PRESENT: Emmanuel Lipscomb, 2005-2006 Americana editor; Jamie Gilbert, Student Media assistant coordinator; William Alligood, Student Media photographer; and Bradley Wilson, Student Media coordinator.
ABSENT: Brittany Farrell, Darryl (DJ) Hardy, Jonathan Melton, Will Quick.

REPORTS
All board-appointed student leaders are required to submit reports before each Board meeting.

EXECUTIVE SESSION
The Student Media Advisory Board may adjourn into executive session to discuss matters of litigation, potential litigation or personnel.

ADJOURN
The meeting was adjourned at 5:17 p.m. so some members could attend other meetings.

At our first staff meeting last Monday, each staff leader, 10 new writers and designers, and the editor of the 2006 Agromeck, were all present. Other students who cannot attend our weekly meetings have made personal weekly appointment times with me or my staff leaders. I am encouraging the staff leaders to take a more personal approach to staff recruitment. Each new staff member sets up an individual meeting with a staff leader at least once a month rather than simply attending all-staff meetings. It seems to be working well and the staff leaders seem to enjoy this method of recruitment also. The staff leaders and I continue to receive e-mails regularly from additional prospective staff members. As of today, we have nine pieces of copy assigned to new writers and new designers working on sample projects or actual spreads with Brandon Wright.

Will and Austin, director of Student Media photography, are training photographers on a regular basis. Brandon is training designers individually depending on their experience and skill levels. For writers, we are taking a similar approach. The same individual attention we used for recruitment is something I am encouraging the staff leaders to continue into the training to ensure that new staff finds their assignments as easy, enjoyable and simple as possible. Writers are turning in work piece by piece rather than turning in a final product near deadline. This allows us to give them small bits of crucial information at a time and make sure they have mastered one step before moving to the next one. It also ensures that the work is completed correctly the first time rather than frustrating students with having to repeat or discard their work. The new writers all have assignments on spreads due on the second deadline, with drafts due earlier. We are giving each writer a packet that includes example articles and basic interviewing and article writing tips. After we receive the drafts, the section editors and I plan to analyze the work our writers submit with the help of the Lee, the Student Media writing coach, to set up a series of workshops to address those problems that are widespread among our writers in addition to the individual training sessions we are giving to writers currently. Each staff member also has a folder in one of our file cabinets, where the staff member will place their submitted assignments throughout the year. This file allows the editors to keep track of each staff member's development while providing staff with a portfolio for their own use.

During our summer staff retreat to Manteo, where the staff leaders worked on team-building and planning for the year ahead, we decided to change our approach to coverage to better fit our primary goals of staff retention, increased coverage and book sales. By including more modular spreads in our yearbook, Agromeck will include more students, allow staff members a wider variety of assignments to chose from, and give the staff more frequent, but smaller and much simpler assignments. For a novice, but dedicated staff that works well together, this approach should work well if they continue to show the dedication and initiative that I have seen out of them the past several weeks.

The decision for this modular coverage came unexpectedly, but I am proud of the way the staff has embraced it and has been developing it as a team. We have 20 pages planned for completion by Sept. 22, our first deadline, and 16 pages of those 20 will be shipped to Taylor publishing that day. Because it will require more commitment and organization that the traditional Agromeck coverage, we've set up frequent workdays (once a month) and worknights (twice a month), mandatory office hours for staff leaders, things-to-do and memo lists for each staff leader posted on the bulletin board to improve communication among the staff, and a progress sheet for each spread so everyone knows what needs to be done at all times. Each staff leader also has an Agromeck e-mail account and access to the Agromeck Google calendar.

After the cancellation of the New Student Directory resulting from an administrative decision to withhold student ID photos from use, we lost nearly $7,000 used on promotional materials for the NSD and lost prospective income from the New Student Directories that we had planned on selling for $10 each.

Despite this early setback, the team has remained optimistic. We have continued to carry out our marketing plan, which is attached to this report. As of today, we have sold 49 yearbooks. Our goal is to sell as average of 40 books a week, totaling a minimum of 500 books by Dec. 15, 2006. The marketing managers will receive bonuses for any weeks during which they sell more than 40 books. They are working with various campus to set up a fundraising project for campus organizations that gives groups money back for each book that their group sells. It is a way to promote Agromeck and to sell yearbooks while supporting our University's student groups.

We have also mailed out two postcards advertising senior portraits to take place Sept. 11-15 and a postcard advertising undergrad portraits Sept. 18-22. The seniors and undergraduates have all received e-mails, which we will follow up with a second and third round of e-mails as portrait dates near. The marketing managers and the student organizations editor are working together to create a list of organization liaisons. These liaisons will be our connection to these groups for both coverage and book sales. The section editors and marketing managers are also attending organization fairs and making brickyard trips to meet student leaders and to reach out to individual students. On such a large campus, actively contacting groups individually is more effective than trying to tackle the entire campus at once. We are also scheduling brickyard trips and chalking trips for the staff. The first one will take place this Thursday night.

In September, I plan to attend LDS 019, Teambuilding as my leadership class for the month, and am also passing to our other staff leaders the information about this class, and several other leadership classes that may be relevant to them. Our new team structure requires leadership input from each member of the editorial staff rather than only from the editor, so it is important that we encourage them to continue building leadership skills and taking initiative as staff leaders.

Since July 2006, seven students have been hired as writers and copy editors. We are hiring for the positions circulation manager and webmaster. The staff is assisting with distribution and circulation until someone is hired. We have scheduled an open house for mid-to-late October.

Our photographers are still learning photo editing and server use. It is just a matter of everyone being trained and understanding exactly which photos we can use, how to edit and how to upload photos to the server.

We are continuing the weekly schedule: every Wednesday, excluding those following holidays or student breaks. Our first issue of the year was available on Aug. 30, on schedule. The next issue is scheduled for Sept. 13.

Over the summer, we created a Nubian Message staff manual. This document includes the mission of the publication, job descriptions, advertising information, code of ethics, production schedule and "house rules." Staff training will take place every other month, focusing on the areas of copy editing and article coverage.

We've gotten quite a bit done since our last board meeting, and I'm very excited with the performance of my staff thus far. Most of them are new editors, and I'm seeing quite a bit of growth from all of them. We are, without a doubt, a completely different staff now than we were at the beginning of April.

The staff of Student Media worked extremely hard over the summer to recruit prospective employees at every single information fair during New Student Orientation. The staff also produced an outstanding New Student Orientation edition, which they distributed throughout the course of the information fairs and during convocation before the start of classes.

Our work over the summer paid off. Tuesday, Aug. 22, Student Media held what in my experience was the biggest Open House we have ever seen. Prospective employees spent time with section editors of the Technician and got the opportunity to see the staff in the act of producing the first edition of the fall semester.

But what I find most exciting about our efforts to recruit and retain new employees is the new "Introduction to the Technician" class we began last Wednesday. This two-hour course, taught over four weeks, is based on the very successful model WKNC implemented last year. Wednesday, about 60 people had signed up to take the course and about 40 showed up. It was a great experience for Bradley Wilson, Lee Williams and myself to meet these new staffers and begin to train them in the basics of journalism. While I don't necessarily think we will see the effects of this comprehensive training this semester, I'm confident it will be a step in the right direction in the betterment of this publication in the near future.

Aside from the aforementioned introductory class, now required of all new Technician employees, the entire editorial board attended a retreat in Manteo, N.C., Aug. 18 - 20. Although this retreat addressed a variety of topics, ranging from writing skills to photography basics, the main theme for the trip was legal concepts and ethical issues.

We covered these two closely related topics in a few different ways. While we did do some lecturing on legal basics, one of the most interesting of our work segments was our ethical discussions. In a few scenarios provided by Bradley Wilson, the staff broke up into small groups to discuss the various aspects of these issues and make decisions on what to do. This was one of the most valuable parts of the retreat because many of the ethical case studies have happened or are likely to happen to our publication.

I also feel that the bonding that took place on this retreat was an invaluable contribution to the staff morale. Although we have worked together now since April, we were able to bond as a staff and really become the family that we need to become to gain the ability to trust each other and produce a high quality and demanding product each and every school day of the year.

In late July, I attended the Management Seminar for College Newspaper Editors at the University of Georgia in Athens. I was able to spend a week in workshops with 50 editors from some of the top newspapers in the country. Over the course of this time, I attended close to 30 programs and seminars from individuals ranging from the publisher of the Centre Daily Times in State College, Penn. to an assignment editor at the Dallas Morning News. They even gave us the chance to tour the offices of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Although the programming here was amazing, I think the best part about the whole experience was the bond I formed with some of my fellow editors. The newspapers they represented ranged from weekly to daily, from private institutions to public, and during multiple discussions both in and outside the classroom, I was able to learn quite a bit about the problems and solutions these organizations have implemented for their own processes.

I was also able to represent the newspaper through a presentation I gave to the group on our case-study process. I took the group through our problems with both the censorship issue over the summer, which at the time was a case study in progress, and the Jeff Gaither column, "Sometimes It's Necessary," about drunken driving. I received good feedback after the presentation, and I feel that by presenting these issues to the group, I was able to expose them to an alternate way to both document and analyze major issues with the newspaper. I still keep in touch with some of these editors, mainly through a Facebook group we created for the event. So far, we have shared several problems and frustrations and have continued to share solutions to these problems. I feel confident that this invaluable experience will help me to become a better leader.

In addition to these training opportunities, Bradley and I are also planning another training workshop for the editorial staff at the end of September that focuses on ledes writing from an editor's perspective. This training opportunity will help the section editors work with their writers to write powerful ledes that will sell our stories to our readers and pull them in to our coverage.

I am signed up for two leadership classes for the month of September and October - Team Building and Assertive Communication. I am not however, requiring any of my staff to attend these courses. In addition to the fact that our goal this year is to offer a required training course for our staff once a month, I don't feel the time table for these classes, which occur during the peak of production, is appropriate for our purposes. However, I have discussed attending these classes with some of my editors, and some have expressed interest in signing up on their own accord.

Thirty-five people expressed an interest in Windhover either by signing up at orientation or by contacting the editor directly. All were immediately contacted. Ten responded to express further interest in being a part of the literary portion of the staff. This is a considerable jump from last year. Minori Sanchiz has been selected as the literary editor. She was on the Windhover 2005/06 staff as a reader. Tony Brock, assistant professor of graphic design, has agreed to be the design advisor for Windhover. Windhover is in the process of hiring a team of readers and a team of graphic designers.

Designers should be hired by the end of September at which time the production schedule will be able to be finalized.

Britt Hayes, 2005/06 editor, made significant improvements in the Web site which are in the process of being updated and amended. The new portion of the Web site will include archives of the past issues, information on the awards Windhover has won, and a brief written history of the magazine.

There have been no significant deviations from the budget. We have used a portion of our engineering budget to purchase upgrades for various aspects of the station including but not limited to: repaired CD modules, KVM extenders, antenna and an RDS encoder.

As of the beginning of the fall semester, WKNC has had all of its staff return from summer vacation. All members of the board of directors are present and accounted for. The following is a list of the WKNC Board of Directors:

Over the summer, WKNC staff members attended every one of the New Student Orientation Sessions for recruitment and publicity purposes in conjunction with Student Media. Out of all of the orientation sessions, WKNC had a total of 84 students express interest in possibly joing the staff of WKNC. There were also an additional eight students that expressed interest in joing the WKNC staff that contacted me through e-mail via the online application page on WKNC's Web site or via e-mail acquired from an ad that was run in the Technician. The total number of interested students came out to 92 for the fall semester. Every single one of those students who expressed interest were contacted personally by me via e-mail with information about the Student Media Open House and other information pertaining to training.

Once this list was generated and everyone was given information pertaining to training, we opened the sign up process for completing our training course. Due to the physical limitations of the classroom, the fall semester training class was capped out at 42 students. We have a waiting list of approximately five students. That training classes will begin on Wednesday, Sept. 13 from 7:30-8:30 p.m. in Winston 001.

The engineering schedule is right on time, and we will soon begin work on the full renovation of our closed production studio designated for use by authorized personnel only. This summer engineers completed all of the maintenance on station equipment that was designated for them.

I have yet to attend any leadership classes and will be looking into the scheduling of my monthly leadership classes within the next week.

WKNC's adviser Jamie Lynn Gilbert, Program Director Chanon Smith, Production Director and former General Manager Dave Nourse, and myself are all working on monthly training initiatives in the form of three-hour workshops to offer to all current staff members to help them perform their duties as station personnel better. These workshops will include but will not be limited to: basics of engineering, broadcast performance, Adobe Audition, and station policies. The WKNC station manual has been updated this year to reflect current information and has been printed for circulation to incoming and newly trained DJs.

WKNC will be turning 40 years old this year on Oct. 9. The staff plans to throw a big party in celebration with the help of local businesses and bands. WKNC board of directors members will be meeting soon to discuss this event more specifically.

WKNC will also be hoping to take part in the Brickyard Shack-a-Thon for the first time in the coming weeks. We have begun the process of raising the funds to raise what we need to take part. At last update from the promotions department, WKNC has raised the minimum amount of money to place a bid on a shack.

With the amount of new recruits that will be taking part in training this fall semester, WKNC is looking at the possibility to have a completely full air schedule for the spring semester of 2007. Having a live body on the air 24 hours a day seven days a week is something that WKNC has not been able to accomplish in several years.