HSN’s first annual meeting in 12 years was a sparsely attended private affair. Held at the TV shopping network’s St. Petersburg headquarters May 19, only shareholders with proxy cards in hand were waved through the guardhouse gate.

The press and other outsiders were barred.

"It's standard practice to limit annual meetings to shareholders and, since this was our first as a public company again, we decided weeks ago to make it shareholders only,” said Mindy Grossman, chief executive officer of HSN Inc.

In addition to shareholder votes on corporate governance, most public companies use their required annual meetings as a forum to field shareholders’ questions about performance and strategy while staging a media event for the press and securities analysts.

HSN’s last annual meeting drew only a half-dozen individual investors and a lone reporter. It was the second one presided over by former chairman and chief executive Barry Diller. The first, staged in the network call center/studios, drew 200 to hear his plans for the network. The following year, Diller, who controlled three-quarters of the company’s shares, saw no need even for other directors to show up for the session in a small conference room, but he did take questions.

At HSN on Tuesday, the whole affair lasted about 15 minutes, Grossman said. Attending were fewer than two dozen people, 10 of them directors who were re-elected, and most of HSN’s top executives. No rank-and-file employees or other investors made it. But people there represented voting power of 93 percent of outstanding shares.

Will Grossman open the meeting next time?

“I’ll consider it,” Grossman replied. “But I have a whole year.”