By FERN SHEN
And you thought the full-body photos of columnists were riveting? Today, we learned from the group of (mostly) men sitting at one of those long conference tables (a la Season Five of The Wire) that assessment appeals are up and the ailing Senator Theatre is really ailing, (but editors are really skeptical.)

Hey, Martha, quick, turn on the computer, it’s the first draft of the first draft of history!

The Sun this week began presenting a live webcast of the 3 o’clock meeting at which editors report the stories being prepared for the next day’s paper. The page with the live webcast (you can’t go back and see it, you’ve got to watch it right at 3pm) also solicits reader opinion on which stories should make Page One. (So far, a lot of people upset about State Senator Brian E. Frosh’s handling of the death penalty bill seem to be holding sway.)

Will readers welcome this glimpse into the story-behind-the story and welcome the chance to feel like collaborators in the process of newsmaking? Will the paper be scooped when the beans are spilled about stories its reporters are chasing? Or is there no one left to scoop them?

More symbolic than anything else
A glimpse at what happened at The Spokane Spokesman Review might be instructive. Editor Gary Graham said an experiment with live webcasting of news meetings had been underway for a couple years when he took over as editor. He killed the idea in October, after determining that no one was watching.

“We never had any significant viewership at all,” Graham said, in a phone interview. “Maybe five or six people on any given day.”

The meeting-cast innovation had been instituted in the name of “transparency,” but Graham said it ended up being “more symbolic than anything else.”

That’s partly because many editors, understandably, were worried about tipping off the competition, so the memos they brought to meetings had special “NO TALK” designations in all-caps, next to the better stories, he said.

“A couple of stories, we turned the mikes off,” Graham recalled.

Having to meet in special off-camera meetings away from the public eye, much like the off-limits-to-reporters executive sessions that used to be held by Maryland’s Board of Public Works, “probably just ended up lengthening our meeting time,” Graham said.

There was one other byproduct of the brief experiment with opening news meetings to the public, Graham observed:

“It probably reduced our swearing a bit.”