City Council
Become a reporter and sooner
or later you are going to be covering meetings -- school board meetings,
city council meetings, board of supervisor meetings, board of trustees
meetings, etc. Meeting coverage is where a lot of new stories originate.
Many papers today are trying to cut back on direct meeting coverage.
Meetings take a lot of resources. The reporter has to attend a long
meeting that may or may not result in an interesting story, do followup
with interviews, and then write the story. To do a good job, it helps
if the reporter covers the same group each time it meets. That way
a reporter can follow the evolution of decisions. Allt sounds fine,
but multiply that by all the school boards, city councils and boards
within a paper's coverage area and you can see why in today's efficiency-minded,
bare-bones staffing why meeting coverage is being curtailed.
But the skills learned in covering meetings is the staple of reporting.
You've got to gather information from a variety of sources, MAKE SENSE
of that information, and put into a story form that explains it to
others. CITY
COUNCIL helps you practice those skills.
You have to understand how a meeting operates, and for that you've
got the agenda. You've got to know what happened and for that you
have a set of notes that look like the type of notes a seasoned reporter
might take at a meeting (a novice would probably take too many notes).
And to be a really good reporter you've got to go behind the facade
of the public meeting and interview those involved to add value to
meeting coverage. CITY
COUNCIL lets you simulate phone interviews.
And like many meeting stories CITY
COUNCIL adds complexity by requiring a multi-element lead.
There is not one single "most important" event in this meeting.
In fact, this simulation is based on an actual meeting I covered years
ago. My solution, because I had the option, was to write eight stories
from the one meeting. The facts in CITY
COUNCIL have been massaged just enough to make one story
with a multi-element lead possible.
Complete the CITY
COUNCIL simulation and gather notes. The write a story.
The simulation allows you to go through the notes in any way you want,
much as you would do the day after a meeting when you sit down to
write the story. But, in general you probably want to follow this
order:
- Review the agenda.
- Review the notes
- Go back to the agenda
and decide what is most important.
- Start making phone
calls to get more information on the most important item(s).
- Go back to the agenda
and find the next most important item and make phone calls. Repeat
until you've covered most or all of the items.
There may be a few items on the agenda you don't feel worthy of
followup. But you resulting story should contain a little information
on practically all the items on the agenda; each is probably important
to somebody. The roll call, the invocation, the approval of last
meeting's minutes, for instance, are regular parts of meetings,
but rarely result in anything you'd want to include in your story.
CITY
COUNCIL also simulates the practice of a lot of boards.
There is the simple agenda that fits on just a few pages. And there
is backup to the agenda that board members have access to. Because
that extended agenda is often available to members of the press,
it is available to you here. The way it is implemented in this simulation
is that you click on an item and you get the extended information
on it.
As noted, the notes on each item are simple and often use incomplete
sentences. This is how you eventually will take notes. Too many
beginners take too many notes . . . and do so with this assignment.
Understand the concepts of what is happening and be efficient with
your note-taking. You have the luxury here of going back and double
checking. Later you'll rely on the confidence of your experience
in taking notes.
Complete the simulation and come back. Before you write the story,
we'll discuss the lead.
CITY
COUNCIL is located at www.rcameron.com/journalism/citycouncil
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