Print Newspapers and the Promise of the Real

Slate's Jack Shafer explains why, a year after he announced he was canceling his subscription to the print edition of The New York Times in favor of using its newly redesigned website and its Adobe-powered Times Reader, he re-upped for home delivery. Why? "Even though I spent ample time clicking through the website and the Reader, I quickly determined that I wasn't recalling as much of the newspaper as I should be," Shafer writes. "Going electronic had punished my powers of retention. I also noticed that I was unintentionally ignoring a slew of worthy stories."

Shafer's experience is backed up by a new paper on "Newsreaders' Recall and Engagement With Print and Online Newspapers," which finds that people who read print newspapers remember a lot more material than people who read online papers -- and which also has some serious relevance for the question of in-person vs. virtual events. Shafer writes:

'Can Meetings Save the World?' Yes.

A terrific cover story by Barbara Palmer in our January issue asked a simple question: "Can Meetings Save the World?" Barbara presented many examples suggesting that the answer is yes -- from PopTech and the Women's Conference to the Creativity World Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative. Here are two more:

High-Level Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety: In response to the nuclear disaster resulting from last month's earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is convening a meeting of foreign ministers and nuclear-agency officials in Vienna on June 20-24 -- according to IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano, "to learn the right lessons from what happened on 11 March and afterwards."

Fighting Childhood Obesity: Slate magazine's crowdsourcing project -- called The Hive -- uses the collective wisdom of its readers to generate solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems. Capping off an ongoing discussion about childhood obesity, next week Slate and the Cleveland Clinic are hosting an "all-star conversation" with "the top thinkers, scientists, doctors, political leaders, and policymakers in the field" at the Bank of America Conference Center in Cleveland. It seems that vigorous online debate is one thing, but to get really serious about something, you need to talk it over face-to-face.

Convene On Site: Economic Significance Study

PwC's Robert Canton, with Roger Dow, U.S. Travel; Deborah Sexton, PCMA; Michael Gehrisch, DMAI; Bruce MacMillan, MPI; John Graham, ASAE; and Joseph McInerney, AH&LA.

Two years after the meetings industry's allied organizations got all Five Families (as a huge fan of "The Godfather," I mean that as a compliment) on the question of figuring out, once and for all, the true value of meetings and conventions, they have their answer: $263 billion. That jaw-dropping number was front and center at the press conference in Washington, D.C., this afternoon where the Convention Industry Council (CIC) presented the results of its landmark new study, The Economic Significance of Meetings to the U.S. Economy. Conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), with support from an alliance of 14 meetings- and travel-industry organizations, the study found that meetings contribute $263 billion in direct spending and 1.7 million job to the U.S. economy every year -- not to mention $106 billion to U.S. GDP.

'A Large Source of Visitors and Revenue'

In response to Arizona's controversial new immigration law, U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has called for an economic boycott of the Grand Canyon State -- especially as a meeting destination. Grijalva said in a statement:

We are calling on organizations not to schedule conventions or conferences in the state until it reverses this decision. This is a specifically targeted call for action, not a blanket rejection of the state economy. Conventions are a large source of visitors and revenue, and targeting them is the most effective way to make this point before it's too late.

Well, if anyone still needs a reminder that meetings mean business, there it is. As Steve Moore, president and CEO of the Greater Phoenix Convention & Visitors Bureau, tells Convene: "This issue clearly demonstrates the volatility of the convention and visitor industry. In this economy, it is more important than ever that we do everything we can to attract visitors to Arizona, not discourage them. Like conventions, visitors also have choices, and we will never know the full impact critical issues have on those choices."

Indeed, I can't help but wonder if meeting professionals should be, well, flattered. Because look at the economic and political muscle their conferences and conventions are perceived to have! But as a matter of policy, does Grijalva's idea make sense? Would it send a clear, powerful message, and garner the results that Grijalva is seeking? Or is it likely to do more harm than good, possibly opening the Pandora's box of unintended consequences?

The Nice Thing About Meetings Is ...

Do face-to-face meetings make people nicer? That's one way of looking at an article about the frequently vicious nature of anonymous Internet comments that was published in The New York Times the other day. What really jumped out at me was a quote from Kathleen Taylor, author of Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain:

"We're evolved to be face-to-face creatures. We developed to have constant feedback from others, telling us if it was O.K. to be saying what we're saying. On the Internet, you get nothing, no body language, no gesture. So you get this feeling of unlimited power because there is nothing stopping you, no instant feedback."

It's similar to what Richard D. Arvey, Ph.D., head of the Department of Management and Organization at the National University of Singapore, wrote in a recent Point/Counterpoint column for Convene about whether virtual events are an acceptable substitute for face-to-face meetings (digital version here, registration required; text-only version here):

Real-time, face-to-face interactions also allow us to develop strong relationships, obligations, and social identities that are often hidden in virtual environments. Moreover, face-to-face meetings set up expectations regarding future obligations, social support, and opportunities.

Are in-person meetings inherently more civil than pretty much anything that happens online? Is there anything you do at your face-to-face events to ensure that? Or by dint of seeing each other in the flesh, do your attendees always behave themselves -- even when they disagree?

The Secret History of Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! Now let's talk about what really matters: how meetings played a crucial role in its creation. To tell the story, we need to (a) consult the University of Wisconsin's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and (b) travel back to Sept. 20, 1969, when, during a speech to "a fledgling conservation group in Seattle," Sen. Gaylord Nelson proposed that the United States hold "a national teach-in on the environment to send a message to Washington that public opinion was solidly behind a bold political agenda on environmental problems." He repeated the idea "six days later in Atlantic City to a meeting of the United Auto Workers." The idea picked up steam, became the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, and eventually spread around the world.

But for our purposes, it's enough to know that Earth Day happened because someone with a good idea had a forum in which to express it -- a meeting. Or two meetings, as the case may be. And, on this 40th Earth Day, we here at Convene take some comfort in the fact that we recently retired our Green Meetings department because specific initiatives to make meetings and conventions more environmentally conscious have become, if not common, then certainly not unusual. They're just not news anymore.

We keep this up and pretty soon we won't need Earth Day at all.

Eye to Eye

I've blogged before about the importance of face time for our editorial team as a group, but yesterday morning I was reminded of its power at the one-on-one level. I drove to Maryland to interview someone for a Leading by Example profile for a future issue of Convene. Because these profiles tend to go very in-depth, whenever possible we talk to the subjects in person -- for all the reasons that struck me yesterday. The person I sat down with had an emotional and inspiring story today, and making an effort to visit him at his office and look him in the eye while he told it felt somehow ... appropriate and respectful. Maybe the word I'm looking for is "communal" -- in sharing the same space, we better shared the experience he was relating. And that will make for a truer, more interesting article.

The same forces are at work on a larger scale as well, at meetings and conventions. Or at least, I think they are. Is this what we talk about when we talk about the power of face-to-face events?

The Travel Promotion Act, or, Now What?

The news from this afternoon's free PCMA Webinar -- "How to Make the Travel Promotion Act Work for You!" -- was hopeful but also sobering. Hopeful because until now, "We have had to do the entirety of marketing on our own as destinations," said Webinar speaker J. Stephen Perry, president and CEO of the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau. The Travel Promotion Act, Perry said, "will provide for the first time unified, cohesive American branding."

But the legislation is also sobering because the situation that at least partly inspired the meetings industry to support it so strongly hasn't changed all that much. "We have a job as an industry of really convincing elected officials -- especially on the home turf, with our representatives and state senators -- of why travel matters," said Webinar speaker Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association. "I think it's a darn shame that we had to fight for so long [for funding] to get people to come to the United States. But that's all a symptom of our elected officials thinking that what we do is frivolous."

What do you think? Are you expecting the Travel Promotion Act to give your meetings a boost -- especially when it comes to attracting international attendees?

Saving Face

We Convene editors all work remotely from our homes, but lately we've been seeing a lot of each other -- at a sales and editorial conference in Chicago a month ago, an editorial retreat in North Jersey the week before last, and editorial closing for our April issue in Manhattan yesterday and today. We'd only been sitting around the table at our design studio for a few minutes yesterday morning when Hunter Slaton, one of our senior editors, looked up from the page-proofs stacked around him and said he wished we had more time to just talk -- because when the four of us are together, the ideas fly pretty quickly, especially when we don't have a set agenda.

This is our own version of "Face Time. It Matters." More than that, it speaks to the importance of not just face time but unstructured face time -- the kind that respects the power of serendipity, so you don't know who you're going to run into or what you're going to talk about. Do you allow for that at your meetings and conferences? And, while it sounds paradoxical, can you formally schedule it? Can you plan for unplanned experiences?

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

The other night my wife and I attended a PTA fundraiser for our older daughter's elementary school, and during the course of things I got to talking to the father of one of our daughter's best friends. He's a fifth-grade teacher in our school system with a passion for math and science who runs an after-school Lego robotics club, and who has been teaching long enough that his first class of students is graduating high school this year. One of them, he said, recently visited her old grade school and told him that he was her favorite teacher and that thanks to him she was planning on studying physics or chemistry in college. Part of what she remembered so fondly was the Lego robotics club.

How did my daughter's friend's father come to start a Lego robotics club in the first place? He'd always been interested in robotics, but it was only a few years ago that he heard about a robotics-in-education conference. His principal scraped together the money for him to attend, and while he was there he met everyone from fellow elementary-school teachers to master's-level professors -- all working on the educational applications of robotics. When he got back to his school, he asked his PTA to fund a club. And that was that.

My point is this: Never doubt that what you do makes a difference. People get introduced to other people, and learn new ideas, and become inspired to do things that change other people's lives -- all at your meetings. What's better than that?