Attendance:

Dave Moniz, Jim Wright, Sig Christenson, Trista Talton.

Discussion:

We selected Oct. 17-18 as our first choice for this year's annual MRE conference meeting. Oct. 3-4 is the backup date. (A conflict with APME meeting was noticed and board members decided by e-mail to change the date to Oct. 2-4)

We are looking at a downtown D.C. location once again, but planning to find a slightly more upscale hotel.

Dave Moniz will call Dave Grange, head of the McCormick Foundation, and Harry Disch, who runs the Defense Writers' group, to tell them about our date. Grange and Disch are putting together a McCormick Foundation conference that will address media issues in Iraq at the end of August in Chicago.

Sig Christenson has been assigned the task of obtaining a complete list of all embedded reporters for MRE so that we can begin recruiting from that list. John Diedrich should have a list of attendees from last year's conference, and Dave Moniz will pull together a list of the 60 journalists who attended military boot camp training at Fort Benning in December. We plan to make a greater effort to recruit broadcasters to this year's convention and open the door to MRE membership. We also plan to reach out to editors more than we have.

Trista Talton will work on creating some MRE banners and logos that we can display at the conference.

Dave Moniz will investigate MRE coffee mugs that we can distribute at the conference, and Sig will handle getting MRE pens shipped up from his place in Texas. They arrived too late for the conference last year.

Arthur Kent, in his absence, was volunteered to continue work on a conference film and some sort of video projection capabilities.

Dave Moniz will handle getting tax-exempt status in DC for the conference.

Jim Wright will contact Romensko and other media sources to drum up coverage from all media reporters around the U.S. We are planning a much bigger promotional effort this year.

We are expecting much help from graduate students at Northwestern U.'s Medill School to help with the conference. Jim Wright will follow up.

Conference theme

We discussed a theme that looks back and forward and focuses on "The Media War."

Among the panel ideas tossed around:
-- Kuwaiting for help - roadblocks to covering the war.
-- Dissection of the Jessica Lynch rescue story.
-- Media cover - too positive or too negative?
-- Pompous asses on parade: a review of the nay sayers who said embedding would never work.
-- Women: a themed panel that touches on perspectives from women journalists
-- View from the Pentagon: How did it work?
-- Officers and soldiers panel: View from the grunts, many of whom had probably
never spoken to a reporter before.
-- Gulf War 1 vs. Gulf War 2: compare and contrast
-- Editors: the Editors' war. A view from behind the desk, or, "the war within the war."
-- The Changing military: What the war showed the future will be like.
-- Gulf War 3: a look at Rumsfeld's Pentagon and the next war.
-- The TV war: Fox's boosterism and the like.
-- Foxhole ethics: what did we learn about the line separating scribes and grunts?
-- Where do we go from here? Is this now the standard for covering wars?
-- Unilaterals, freelancers and foreign journalists: who didn't get to play?
-- Photo gallery: the color of war from a photographer's eye view.
-- The Living Room War: how TV covered the conflict.
-- The Home front War: how the media, military and mom and pop connected
-- The PG rated war? Did we really see what war is like or was this a case of self-censorship and sanitizing the ugly truth?

We plan to energize PBS, Frontline, and NPR's "On the Media" to augment coverage of the conference.

We discussed creating a memorial to all journalists killed in Iraq. Will try to work with Newseum and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The board discussed creating a series of annual military reporting awards. There will be three categories of awards: Print (possibly the Ernie Pyle Award); Broadcast (Walter Cronkite) and Photo (Robert Capa). There will two levels within each award: large market and small market and a first, second and third prize. We are short on cash so the awards may offer a modest cash prize ($25) or perhaps nothing until we can raise more money. Still debating. We do plan to give away nice certificates and plaques and are seeking a sponsor.

We will launch these awards this year. Will try to get announcement out ASAP with details, rules, etc. Hoping to get some respected journalists such as Roy Gutman, George Wilson, perhaps an academician and a retired military officer to judge. Will ask Chuck Tobin, our attorney, about the hurdles in using the Pyle, Cronkite and Capa names on the awards. Some awards already use their names.

Jim is trying to finalize cooperative agreement with Northwestern Univ. Final hurdle is liability insurance.

Sig will check into final hurdles in getting our 501(3)(C) status from IRS -- A key to fundraising.

In that same vein, we will again seek corporate funding from major news organizations for conference: Washington Post, USA TODAY, Hearst, etc. Perhaps we can get $2,000 each from them this year.

We tentatively set the conference fee at $125, which includes membership. Annual membership without conference attendance will be $50. Student membership $25 and associate membership (non journalists) $50. Dave will talk to Dan Christman, a retired Army general, who heads Kinsey Foundation in DC, for tips on fundraising.

We discussed some sort of exchange program whereby we would bring military officers into newsrooms and send reporters to the military academies for a couple of weeks. Would seek sponsorships to help defray costs.

Huge item. We need to work on our website. Jim Crawley, military reporter from San Diego and self-taught net/computer guru, has volunteered to re-energize the site. Jim Wright has spoken to Crawley and believes he has some very good ideas.

We discussed organizing a fundraising committee. Jim Wright and Tom Ricks came up as potential members of the committee.

-- Dave Moniz, vice president.

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