Our February board meeting focused primarily on how to better serve our members and future journalists. We discussed upcoming programs—Professor Laura Weir’s take on politics at our February luncheon, the Edwin Black “Insider Breakfast,” the March 16 “Honor the Free Press” luncheon, a planning meeting to begin discussion of how to celebrate our 20th anniversary.
Be sure to buy your $35 ticket right away to the “Honor the Free Press” luncheon. Purchase online with credit card or PayPal: HonorTheFreePress.org, then click on “Book for 2016 Event.” This REPLACES our regular NPC monthly luncheon, so we urge you to attend and show your support for a free press. This event is always heart-warming. I hope to see you there.
The board spent some time to review the excellent results of our FGCU-NPC “Mentor Mixer” when six NPC mentors intermingled with a roomful of FGCU journalism students. The overflow crowd spilled into the hallway. Program VP David Silverberg will coordinate with Judd Cribbs at FGCU to set up more.
We decided to start a new policy of offering our luncheon meetings to FGCU students at the price of $10, with our NPC treasury subsidizing the rest.
For prospective “Newsmaker” events that Silverberg would like to initiate, we will need a venue that won’t charge us for the space. No food—just a meeting room that would accommodate 50 or so. Might the neighborhood where you live have a “community center” that would work for this? Or do you know of a restaurant or bank or other business that would lend us a room from time to time? Please let David know.
Gina Edwards acquainted the board with legislation making its way through committees in both of our Florida houses that, if passed as currently structured, could put a crimp in the ability of journalists and ordinary citizens to access public records. The board voted that NPC should go on record in favor of open and accessible public records. The president (yours truly) was directed to write a “letter to the editor” to make public this matter of NPC policy. Look for it elsewhere in Scoop.
OK, now for an important fiscal matter: it is time to pay your dues, if you haven’t already. Although we received a number of renewals at the January luncheon, we felt we should incur the expense of mailing a one-page request for the dues payment AND updated contact information for our Members Directory. We will consider as members for 2016 all whose dues arrive no later than March 15. We will update our “Members” section on our NPC website. From now on, that will be our Members Directory.
Finally, we decided to hold a webinar with our IT guru Birgit Pauli-Haack to teach several board members how to use MailChimp. We’ll start communicating with you via that method instead of ListServ.
Our next board meeting is set for March 8. If you know of anything we should discuss, please let me know.