Newspaper agency meeting

Today at lunchtime me and Cveta held the very first meeting of all those pupils who were willing to get involved in our project; many of them have approached us in the hallways asking if they could participate whilst the others were recommended to us by the English department as excellent students. We had a total of 9 volunteers, which for me is a significant improvement from the one lonely person that I have in French club. 

The purpose of this meeting was to become acquainted with our participants and to introduce them into the concept which we have developed, for running a school newspaper is rather challenging because deadlines have to be met and the content has to be moderated, just like it would be with a global newspaper agency. We drew up a set of ideas on the whiteboard so that everyone could form a better understanding of what it is that we will demand of them; afterwards, in order to show greater care towards our fellow 'staff members', we gave them the freedom to chose one of the topics on which they would like to compose an article. That triggered great enthusiasm amongst everyone, and it had been very pleasing to observe for we weren't expecting such a rush of excitement on what was the very first day. 

Our assemblage

On the whole, I think that our meeting had gone relatively well for a first experience because we weren't exactly familiar with how to manipulate a gathering of people, all of whom are willing to contribute at the same time and find it difficult to concentrate for too long. We managed to engage them, as it seemed, which was probably the main target for us; furthermore, we were able to allocate tasks for the upcoming issue, the deadline for which had been postponed to the 11th of November. We have gathered enough material to work with, and hopefully what we have collected will make a decent first publishing that will appeal to our rather fastidious audience. 

We asked a fellow IBDP student who had attended our assembly if they had any suggestions or evaluations to offer upon the organisation of the matter, and they have told us that next time we should invest greater effort into systematising our narrations since some people tended to talk over us and pay limited attention overall. Also, we had forgotten to ask for people's emails, which was very inconvenient for we will require them to monitor their progression with the articles; this is why next time we have a meeting, we should plan it more thoroughly in order to avoid fatuous mistakes occurring and to make the outcome of the discussion much more effective. 

Ultimate decisions for first issue