Additions to the agenda:
J. Fowler asked if by-laws would be discussed.
C. Bury is looking after them but said he would mention their status during the meeting.

Moved: R. Frank Seconded: P. Schneidereit. PASSED.

Minutes of June 2005: Discussion about the two-weeks process for turning the minutes around so that they are out much sooner. Resolved to send out draft minutes to all board members asking for input within 1 week of meeting.
Approved with changes: Moved: R. Friesen Seconded: P. Schneidereit. PASSED

Task List: Updated and new task list to be issued to board.

President’s Report

Talked about the trip to Global Investigative journalism Conference in Amsterdam. Interesting experience, great conference and excellent chance to listen to journalists from all over the world. Many similarities in terms of problems faced.

CAJ was successful in getting the 2007 world conference for Canada. Had one conference call with Susanne Reber, P. Schneidereit, J. Dickins and Sandra Bartlett. Have laid out organizational plan. Will feature a 4-day conference with 10 tracks for panels, roundtables, and workshops. Also want simultaneous translation with French and possibly Spanish. The Amsterdam conference had many journalists not able to make it due to the language barrier.

J. Dickins and P. Schneidereit have talked about fundraising. CAJ has put out a call for volunteers and to date Susanne is very pleased with the feedback. All in all, a successful trip. Asked about financing of simultaneous translation. Looking to have this sponsored directly. Need to look at Heritage Canada. Would need to be transparent about the government sponsoring or funding the simultaneous translation.

R. Frank will put out feelers on sources of funding for simultaneous translation. P. Schneidereit said we need to be sure we’re coordinating efforts. Get Susanne to contact R. Frank regarding his ideas.

P. Schneidereit noted the conference was hosted in a conference centre with the hotels scattered all around. Amsterdam was an easy city to get around.

J. Fowler asked if there were Canadian delegates there. Noted that Julian Sher was a delegate and a presenter and his session was well attended.

Website: Discussed with S. Khan last week. Had hoped the revamp process would have started by now. P. Schneidereit suggested we need to get on it right away. Letter went out in the past week looking for volunteers and received 30 indications of interest, which was an excellent response.

Discussion with CNW Group: Clarified some issues in dealing with regional CNWGroup offices. P. Schneidereit met with CNWGroup people at a recent reception in Halifax. CNW Group are very enthusiastic. Didn’t get a chance to meet some of the western CNW Group reps though.

Policy paper idea: P. Schneidereit wants to send a message to members explaining idea and asking for people who have suggestions to contact P. Schneidereit directly. J. Fowler asked if we could do a position paper on shield laws for journalists. Viewed as a good idea. One idea P. Schneidereit heard was about the wall between editorial and advertising.

Moved acceptance of president’s report: Moved: R. Friesen Seconded: H. Rodrigues.
APPROVED.

Executive Director's Report

J. Dickins took a moment to thank the board for allowing him to go to Amsterdam and help to bring the 2007 conference to Canada.

Also let board know that the CAJ’s educational foundation charitable status application is still with Canada Revenue Agency and we are hoping to hear something soon but nothing to date. Will keep board posted on any developments.

Board suggested that a formal motion of thanks be extended to Hal Doran by CAJ board.
Moved: H. Rodrigues Seconded: P. Schneidereit.
APPROVED.

J. Dickins to present certificate to Hal Doran at NWS.

Finance report

J. Dickins presented report in the absence of the treasurer.

The CAJ expected a surplus of around $29,000 but this will probably be lower due to the Amsterdam trip. Expect around $26,000 but this may change depending on how the National Writers’ Symposium goes. At present we do not have as many delegates as hoped for the NWS. J. Dickins queried as to why numbers are low. Unknown. It is possible that the CBC lockout has had some negative impact. However, there has been advertising via CNW faxes, personal contact, the Ontario Community Newspaper Association, e-mails to our own members etc.

J. Dickins let board know that the Ottawa Citizen is paying for some of its journalists to go. J. Dickins confident that financially we’ll meet our NWS surplus even if we have fewer people than expected. This will be as a result of good budgeting and some good financial forecasting. J. Dickins had hoped to have about 50 signed up to date. A lot of walk-ins are hoped for.

Advocacy

According to R. Cribb, the Ken Peters appeal will proceed. John Norris and R. Cribb talked, and he, as the lawyer for Peters, is monitoring the case’s developments. They are going through procedural wrangling right now. Norris will handle CAJ's submission. He will advise R. Cribb when they should meet.

Regarding Juliet O’Neill case, CAJ is seeking intervenor status. Case, which is still ongoing.

R. Cribb went on to talk about the excellence project. R. Cribb sent out an e-mail from Ivor Shapiro at Ryerson who’s heading this project up. Among those committed to this are the journalism schools at UWO, Laval, King's College, Carleton University. CAJ has expressed interest and are on the list. It will be set up as an Internet portal modelled on Poynter.org. It Will be covering journalism news, commentary, media law, journalism education, news or history of journalism. CAJ is listed under the ‘mentor’ category. Not defined yet what it will involve. The others who expressed interest are CJFE, Canadian Media Research Foundation, National Magazine Awards foundation, National Newspaper Awards, and Massey College. Proposed to be in English and French. Ambitious project that seems to be getting some good support.

Main thing is we need to get a sense of what specifically we want to do around mentorship. It is tough to get volunteers to give up their time. Where it has been done it has been extremely successful and has built bridge between older and newer journalists. i.e. you physically set up people in same cities. May be able to look beyond your city, as a virtual connection. May also look at volunteer mentors to whom people can post questions. Don’t need answers tonight but it’s something to think about. Any thoughts, please e-mail R. Cribb.

Conferences

Already had update on NWS. Nothing more added.

Halifax 2006 conference

Hotel Delta Halifax booked for mid-May. In terms of content, P. Schneidereit doesn’t have a lot of details. David Asper confirmed as Friday night keynote. Have a list of ideas for workshops and panels. R. Cribb asked if we go with Peter C. Newman wouldn’t it be interesting to have Mulroney there. R. Cribb felt that the book raised some interesting journalism issues i.e., did Newman cross the line? Was he talking to Mulroney as a friend or journalist… definitely worth a panel where they could both appear. Might make a good Sunday morning panel. C. Bury thought Mulroney would come before Newman would. R. Cribb also wondered about Chretien. Might be worth asking Chretien to come. This is a crucial time for Chretien who might want an audience with a bunch of journalists. Not sure where to put him but definitely as a keynote. P. Schneidereit will bring these thoughts to the Halifax committee. Even more amazing to have two ex-prime ministers and how they were treated by the media. Could have them at the same podium -- ex-PMs dealing with the media.

H. Rodrigues asked if the Atlantic Community newspaper association has been asked to get involved like we had with Manitoba community paper association. P. Schneidereit said there has been some contact. R. Friesen congratulated P. Schneidereit on getting Asper for Halifax. M. Brewster was planning to put together something for the board on where Halifax is at right now. It’s coming.

CAJ/IRE Workshop

Already hosted the CAJ/IRE workshop – It was a struggle. Came down to the wire. Asked to postpone it. IRE balked, but then we managed a compromise. With 5 weeks to go we were just getting started. It was a crunch. J. Fowler did a lot of work on it due to her being locked out. R. Cribb did a lot too. Judging from experience we’ve had over last few years the ability to plan far enough ahead is becoming frustrating. IRE put on a lot of workshops, which would explain why they’re busy but it’s giving the CAJ challenges. Ended up getting 26 delegates. We made $540 on it.

J. Fowler asked if it’s worth continuing if we don’t make much money, and is a struggle to put on. On the other hand it’s good profile in parts of the country we may not get to. It’s also good to put on these specialized events. But it’s a lot of hair pulling. If we decide to continue we need to be clear with IRE that we have certain deadlines and we must ADHERE to them. It was compounded by the fact that J.Dickins and R. Cribb were away. Those are the pros and cons. We should think twice next time. Issue is whether we continue with this. We should think about it and talk about it at the next board meeting.

J. Dickins shared concerns about the financial aspect and how we could have lost money, and the last minute planning is definitely problematic.

R. Cribb likes the fact it gets into places we don’t normally get into and it goes into a training that we need to do. Investigative journalism….it’s what we are founded on. It also gives us a relationship with IRE. And this is important. It is high end stuff and so we may not get large numbers out at these workshops. The IRE are interested in getting into Maine according to R. Cribb, which for us means New Brunswick. Could we look at St. John? From Maine it’s about 7 hours drive. Have a big newspaper in Portland. In terms of logistics there is a ferry to Nova Scotia.

R. Friesen suggested that talking further about it in January is a good one. Wanted to know who attended the workshop. Where are they coming from? J. Dickins noted that feedback was very positive.

Motion table discussion of CAJ/IRE workshop to January board meeting. Moved: R. Friesen Seconded: K. Diotte. PASSED

Membership Committee

J. Fowler has not had contact with chapter presidents because of the lock out and therefore doesn’t know what’s happening. Next big project for the committee is redoing the chapter guide. A note went out to people in B.C. about starting up a new chapter there. Student drive has been underway and has been incredibly successful. A Ryerson student working with Michelle has been a tremendous help. Generated new members. R. Frank went to Concordia, M. MacAfee went to Red River College. Students asked all the right questions. We’ve done this before but this is the first time we’ve done a concerted student membership drive. We should surely be pushing 1500 members. According to J. Dickins, the most recent numbers are not available because we’re still inputting all the student forms we received.

Board wishes to thank M. MacAfee for her hard work on this initiative and appreciate her efforts. The Wire newsletter is almost ready to go out but has run into a delay. J. Fowler was wondering if we could sustain 4 issues a year as she’s running dry on some ideas. J. Fowler has been pleased with all of those who have contributed.

R. Friesen had to leave but wanted to give a quick chapter update before he left. Having an all day writing clinic in Winnipeg on Nov 12th and will be having an AGM as well. Maggie Siggins will the featured speaker at the workshop for print/broadcast journalists. Most of the 38 delegates are freelancers, students, small media outlets and broadcasters. Not many from mainstream media outlets. Speaks to a real need for training for freelancers and smaller media outlets and this is an area where we can meet needs. Re: CNW Group participating in regional chapter events. R. Friesen tried to get the local rep to sponsor the event. They did manage to get some support. P. Schneidereit added that there will always be growing pains but it’s clearly a local initiative and the two local groups have to forge the relationships.

Membership committee to look at getting a chapter going in southwestern Ontario. H. Rodrigues to head this up. C. Bury noted that there had been one there before.

Awards

Awards committee will be talking soon. Probably not enough time to look into a supporter for the online reporting award. While we had hoped to study the demographics of our memberships for this year to see how they relate to our entries, J. Dickins noted that the number of entries has been increasing which means we must be doing something right. J. Dickins has been in contact with the CAR award judge who feels that some re-writing needs to occur with the CAR guidelines to make them more clear. This something the committee will look at shortly.

List-Serv

Asked to look into more modern program for list-serv. Difficulties of present system is that you have to receive e-mails or summaries. Some people don’t like that and would prefer just to look up messages. The old fashioned system we have has a couple of manual systems to it, esp. looking up archived messages. We could change to a modern system easily. We could go with the free lists like Topica, Yahoo, etc. This would require a sacrifice of the archived messages we currently have. If we took the archive on Eagle and housed it on our own website we could do that. Wondering how much value the archives provide. We can go on the new system. May want to look at this by end of year. Moderators are satisfied with the way things are going. But there could be a few more messages per day. Subscriptions are up to about 750 or so; a number are also students.

Resolution to move list-serv to a Web-based system and move archive to CAJ’s website.
Moved by: P. Schneidereit Second: J. Fowler. ACCEPTED

Ethics Committee

Approved it and put out a press release asking people to respond by end of August if they had suggestions for candidates. Very few responses. Board will probably have to approach people. We need a small group made up of board members who will take this on as an ad-hoc thing. It would be nice to announce this committee by the January meeting. 3-4 board members should continue working on this. P. Schneidereit volunteered as did J. Fowler and C. Bury, M. Brewster and R. Cribb. J. Fowler is making a note to board members asking people to think of some names of ethics people.

K. Diotte asked if we have an e-mail or information on the ethics committee we can use when we look at approaching people? Need to work on an invitation.

CAJ Board Size

J. Fowler and M. McClintock had a phone call a few months ago and came up with some options. P. Schneidereit had a 4th option. We have a capacity to have a large board, but the expense can become really high. Need to limit the size of the board. Bylaws allow for a board up to 24, but allows us to also cap the size of the board. Only got feedback from M. MacAfee. Can’t make any decisions tonight. J. Fowler not sure how it has been received by other board members.

M. MacAfee had had some concerns about limiting chapters ability to send people after they’ve reached the magic number of 50 if we followed one of the options. The idea of rotating directors can be eliminated as it’s not workable. National directors are good because it gives you flexibility. Could look at changing composition of the regions. It’s complicated.

R. Frank suggested that we could opt to only pay for one rep from Quebec and the CAJ fund one rep from Quebec.

C. Bury suggested that the chapters could pay for their own rep to go. Very few chapters could afford it. C. Bury would prefer to amalgamate the western prairie regions. i.e. Northwestern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. We’re not facing an immediate problem, but our bylaw isn’t realistic and needs to be fixed up. We do need to deal with it and we need further discussion on it. Need to be able to chat face-to-face.

J. Fowler will put in writing what was talked about tonight and can be put out to the board for discussion at the January board meeting.

H. Rodrigues suggested chapter presidents should be consulted on this issue. J. Fowler noted nothing we’re talking about should affect chapter presidents.

End of Agenda. New business sought. – None arose.

Next board meeting set for January 28-29, 2006.

Meeting adjourned at 9:38 p.m.