Al’s Morning Meeting returns this week, influenced by your feedback. More than 500 readers responded to our survey, telling us what you find most useful and what you’d change.
One reader — who represents many similar responses — said: “Love, love, love Al’s Morning Meeting. The ideas jump start my day”; we also heard “Great site – please don’t change much!” and “Please keep up the good work! I find most helpful your tips on how to localize a recent story or trend, Thanks!”
We also received feedback that some story ideas were hard to localize for smaller operations or less frequent publications.
But the overwhelming suggestion was to return to more, shorter story ideas: “I miss having the three-plus story ideas per morning; please bring that back!”
We heard you, and that’s what we’ll be doing starting soon. We’ll publish several short story ideas each morning a few days a week. On the other days, we’ll continue to provide you with an in-depth look at an idea or issue or tool that will help you improve your journalism. We hope to introduce video a few times a week that walks you through an issue or story idea in depth, shows you how Al finds and develops story ideas and inspires a few questions for you to pursue.
You also asked: “Would it be possible to have a place for other journalists to submit story ideas, too?”
And some wondered whether readers could submit examples of story ideas they used: “For instance, if Al pitches an idea on the BP oil spill on Monday, and a few stations across the country use that idea, maybe on Wednesday you could post those on Poynter (or at least their links) so that people can see how they tuned the pitch INTO a story.”
We love these ideas and will work on developing them, with your help.
Most of you who responded read Al’s Morning Meeting daily and most of you work in newsrooms. All of you are important to us and to the future of journalism, and we thank you for your support.
