Welcome to our January Special Edition Series on rethinking the meetings you often participate in or lead in your news organization: one-on-ones, brainstorming meetings, brown bag trainings and strategic leadership meeting. We’ll give you frameworks that aim to help make meetings more efficient, equitable and useful for everyone involved.
New year, same old meetings. Meetings without a purpose. Meetings that don’t include the right people or that include too many people. Meetings that could have been an email. But what if it didn’t have to be that way?
As we kick off 2026, members of our American Press Institute team want to help you reset and rethink key meetings in your news organization.
Though research shows only about 50% of meeting time is effective and engaging, when meetings are done well, they have many positive benefits. Meetings are great settings for collaboration and can lead to better decision-making, more innovation and improved engagement, and they can even boost employee empowerment.
Throughout this month, we’ll offer tips to improve various types of newsroom meetings. We hope this series also gives you permission to say goodbye to some of them. To help you assess your meetings and decide what’s worth keeping and improving, consider:
- Who is involved in the meeting, and why those people?
- What’s the goal of the meeting?
- Is the meeting accomplishing its goal?
These questions should be answered by everyone involved in the meeting, not just the person who called it (research shows those facilitating a meeting tend to have a more positive perception of its quality). You might find that you can achieve a meeting’s goals through other means, the guest list doesn’t line up with the goals or the meeting lacks a clear goal altogether.
Or you might find that continuing the meeting — with tweaks to improve facilitation and communication practices — is your best option.
We’re kicking off this series with a type of meeting that experts recommend for all workplaces, but one we often see gets short shrift in newsrooms: the manager-direct report one-on-one.
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Meeting reset series
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