News

Happy new year, everybody. Our first meeting of 2018 is next Monday when we’ll be electing our branch officers and having a look at the preliminary agenda of the NUJ’s forthcoming delegate meeting.

Thanks to everyone who came to last night’s meeting and helping give Paul Holleran a good send off as he prepares to step down from his post as Scottish organiser. Here are some upcoming events of interest:

Our November meeting will take place next week when we’ll be confirming motions for the NUJ’s delegate meeting. Unfortunately, the Stills Gallery is no longer available on a Monday, so we’ll be trying out a new venue, the Edinburgh Central Youth Hostel – on the junction of Annandale Street and Leith Walk, close to Elm…

At tonight’s meeting, we’ll be focusing on the NUJ’s Delegate Meeting (DM) which is in Southport, 19–22 April. After our excellent September discussion about new ways of supporting journalism, we will have two motions to propose and discuss. If you have any other potential motions, do bring your ideas along. Thanks to Joyce McMillan for…

Our meeting on Monday 18 September will be a panel discussion about alternative ways to support journalism, looking at some of the best examples of organisations who are making journalism pay. The idea is to follow up the NUJ conference at the Hub earlier in the year and to come up with a positive proposal…

Thanks to Vic and Annie for entertaining us one last time and giving us a sneak peek of their final Fringe show at last night’s party. See their Playing Politics show at the Queen’s Hall on 25 August: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/playing-politics-the-last-hurrah

At this month’s meeting of Edinburgh Freelance Branch we’ll be following up the recent open letter about freedom of information policy in Scotland that you can read here: https://www.commonspace.scot/articles/11072/journalists-open-letter-freedom-information-policy-scotland

We’ll be meeting a week later than usual this month because of Easter. A number of us were at the very interesting Future of Media conference at the end of March and we’ll be reporting back on that – in particular trying to come up with ways to put the best ideas into practice.

Our branch meeting on Monday 20 February will be on the subject of local media in the 21st century. Joyce McMillan, political columnist on the Scotsman, will be in the chair and our panelists are the NUJ’s Scottish organiser Paul Holleran, introducing the NUJ’s local media week in March, Phyllis Stephen, editor of the Edinburgh Reporter (http://www.theedinburghreporter.co.uk) and Thom…