swilnews should be sent out approximately once a week, and should, somewhere underneath the incomprehensible stream of jokes and references, say what happened at the last week's meeting. my main advice about swilnews is that it doesn't need to be funny and it doesn't need to be 12k, it just needs to be written. so if there's a choice between more jokes per swilnews and more swilnewses per semester, choose the latter. obviously, if you can be witty, entertaining, and prompt, you should do that.
the only way i know of to actually get swilnews written once a week is for the presidents to get together at the beginning of the semester and schedule a time of the week when they will write swilnews, and then do it. we did this the first semester i was president (spring 1998), and it worked extremely well, in the sense that we sent every swilnews out on time that semester. if you don't set a time, it's easy not to do it, since it's not as important as your work.2
something unfortunate that you should keep in mind: not everyone reads swilnews, especially if it's long. so put lots of asterisks around anything important. we started putting a section at the top of swilbusiness with important things to remember for next week's meeting. obviously, this only works if the swilnews comes out before the next meeting.
the attendance list should go at the end of each swilnews, and should
be typed in exactly as is (no changes in capitalization, spelling,
etc). the exception to this rule is that if people sign something
which cannot be easily translated into ascii characters, you may mock
them using pointy brackets, i.e. 
mock, mock
.