Council documents tell stories, not just Freedom of Information requests

The Freedom of Information Act was great for journalism, opening up a world of information on public authorities and definitely very useful when it comes to squirreling away stories (getting stories ready ahead of a holiday period such as Christmas).

While I don’t dispute the great stories that come from FOI requests, just see David Higgerson’s weekly round-up ‘FOI Friday’ for some superb stories across the UK media, it’s worth remembering what can come from sifting through council documents that often contain data as controversial as that in FOI requests – it’s just not as straight forward to find.

There’s a few ways you can find stories from council documents:

- Scrutiny committee papers

- Executive business meetings

- Councillor’s questions Read the rest of this entry »

Bullshit: Why you need to be covering council meetings

Council proceedings are not always the most exciting of meetings. Operational plans, bar charts and lots of polite beating around the bush. But sometimes, just sometimes, you’ll get a cracker like the one below. Remember, the Council is not just a faceless organisation – it has elected members and sometimes they will speak their minds. If you’re not there you can be sure the official minutes won’t make a note of it. But maybe what I’ve just said is complete and utter bullshit.

Here’s the full story as the former Lord Mayor cranks up the heat on supermarket giant Sainsbury’s

Got any Council meeting crackers? What is the juiciest economic and culture scrutiny committee you’ve covered? Let me know below.

Using Google maps to make council stories more interesting

Reporting on local councils can be a dry business, propping open your eyes and sinking yet another coffee during an Economic & Culture Scrutiny Committee is not the most exciting part of being a reporter – but it’s necessary. Journalists need to be holding local council’s to account and being at planning, licensing and other meetings is part of the job.

However, the stories about a new block of flats or a new air quality management area aren’t always the most exciting. So, how do you spice them up a little? The web allows us to quickly and easily add maps into our stories to give a sense of scale for readers. Read the rest of this entry »

Council coverage in Lancashire Evening Post

Picked my local paper to cover as part of Help Me Investigate’s look at how much council reporting there is UK local newspapers. The Lancashire Evening Post covers Preston and the surrounding Lancashire areas. It’s a Johnston Press title and is based at their multimedia/printing/production hub at Broughton, Preston.

I found that there were 35 pages devoted to news on 23/11, 25/11 and 27/11 and of these 6.25 pages were given over to ‘council reporting’.

Like others I’ve been finding there is little reporting of council meetings, more stories are created from council press releases and then a few quotes from councillors. It’s also not clear when these councillors were saying these quotes, although the councillors title and ward are always attached.

The best edition for council reporting was 27/11 when there were lots of small stories in with reports from environment/planning meetings which boosted the coverage for that day. Council reporting rarely got leads, these were reserved for crime and lots of debate about the recent decision to move the National Football Museum away from Preston to Manchester.

Am going to do the Lancashire Evening Post again next week and try to get an edition each day (I couldn’t get hold of a copy on 24/11 as it was sold out at all my local newsagents!).