Media Society Update: our Management Systems
Here's the fourth and last post in this week's series of Media Society updates. This update is an overview of our management and administration by Dominic Cameron, Vice President of the Media Society.
The Unglamorous Half: the Media Society Management Systems
My colleagues have written LinkedIn updates this week about the parts of the Media Society you can actually see. Events, the Substack, the mentoring. Read those posts. This one is about the plumbing underneath, which nobody writes about until it stops working. It is no less demanding.
A new Council took over late in 2024. We focused much of the first year on unexciting things.
A membership system (based on Join It) that actually knew who the members were. A website we were not embarrassed to send people to. A brand from this decade. And more besides. The everyday software the Society runs on, chosen on purpose rather than inherited from whoever set it up last. Our Director of Marketing, Peter Walker, did the branding and the website, and the look of the Society is his.
Then the governance, which is the part I cared about most. At the 2025 AGM, the members voted through a plan to rewrite our Articles, the rulebook a charity is legally bound by. Fixed terms. Limits on how long any of us can sit. A proper process for appointing people, and a code of conduct. A society that spends its evenings asking the media to account for itself ought to be able to stand the same question.
One thing easily overlooked. The Media Society has no paid staff. Not a small team. None. Every event, every newsletter, every panellist chased and thanked, is somebody’s evening after their actual job. The person who negotiated your venue, wrote the description you read and answered your email about tickets was doing something else at six o’clock. The membership system and the emails that reach you are run, most weeks, by one person with a little help.
So, we cannot spend our way past any problem. We find people who will give their time, and then try hard not to waste it.
Where has it got us? Events about media issues that matter are still the main thing we do, and still the point of us. But they are no longer only in a room. They go out online, on our YouTube channel and through the Substack, so you can be somewhere else and still be there. And the Mentoring Scheme has finally made one of our charitable objectives deliver for real rather than sit in the Articles.
Two years ago none of this was obvious. Renewal in a volunteer outfit turns out to be a hundred small decisions to do the boring thing properly, taken by people under no obligation to bother. Not photogenic. But it works. The Media Society President Nigel Dacre led us here.
Come to something this autumn. Better still, join us. Our industry has never been short of opinions. Somewhere to have them out loud is rarer.
Dominic Cameron, Vice President, The Media Society