September meeting minutes

September 13 minutes. Meeting at Piccolo’s, Brighton.

Apologies – Fraser Addecott. Present – Rebecca Bromley, Rowan Dore, Jan Melrose, Jemima Kiss, Adrian Colley, Fred Pipes, John Freemantle, Alex Forbes

1 New members – K Howell, J Goodey, A Chiles, J Allen, R Bryne, H Dore, S Pandher, J Manning, J Blake, J Melrose elected.

2 Officers’ reports. Treasurer Adrian Colley said we had about £1,500 in the bank. No other reports delivered.

3 Donation to Coventry Newspapers Strike Fund. Owners Trinity Mirror are being urged to pay seniors on weekly papers £20,000 pa and evening titles £25,000 pa. Jemima Kiss recommended a donation of £50, which the meeting backed. (As an aside there’s a good piece on this at http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/2005/403/index.html?id=np12.htm).

4 Affiliation to Iraq Union Solidarity. Branch backed this at a cost £5. More at http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/index.cfm?mins=376 .

5 Renewal of subs to Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. Subs renewed at cost of £25.

6 Christmas party venue suggestions: The Cricketers in Brighton could again be an option. All suggestions welcome!

7 October AGM venue suggestion. Nelson is probably too noisy to stage the meeting next month. Fred Pipes suggested the Eagle, which has some connections with Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kropotkin) which will be investigated.

8 Chapel reports. Rebecca Bromley, from the Argus, said that agreement had been reached on this year’s pay settlement and that staff would finally have their extra money in a September pay packed backdated to April, a sort of ‘saving scheme’ she added. Generally it appears the Argus is still not a happy place to work as staff have resigned with no jobs to go to and morale is not high.

9 Citizen journalism motion (see September 6 entry below). Jemima Kiss said she just wanted to publicise the issue and ask members for their views (which you can post here on the website). She said there had been a web-based debate among NUJ members about the media’s use of Joe Public-provided pictures, particularly in the wake of the July bombings in London. She said some picture providers had an ethos that what they were providing was not for financial gain. She said it raised issues but that the impact on professionals had been fairly minimal .

Meeting was followed by dinner at which NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear, and others, were present. Your secretary had to leave at this point. So I’d be grateful if someone could flesh out the rest of the evening’s events (hint, hint).