The Holy Grail of blogging government: Why take up the quest?

Once upon a time, there were no blogs but people always found ways to communicate information whether through what were  accepted channels of the time and some not so conventional methods.  While many bloggers today focus on providing a place to discuss media items reported on by the mainstream media, there are more and more brave souls who venture out, to not wait for the media, but to cover stories.   In this post we start at the beginning, related to covering government local and non-local; why is it important and is it something you want to do.

Whether you take the attitude that the mainstream media is your friend or your foe, there are certain realities that they deal with that you as a blogger don’t have to worry about.  They are limited by deadlines, time or word requirements and editors breathing down their necks.  Your only limit is how many words you can write that you know people would actually read.   Since they are limited and you are not, that’s one of the most important benefits of citizen journalism, you can provide more information.

For me it all began when I started attending Toledo City Council meetings and I noticed that items I heard discussed as well as commentary made by our elected officials did not end up being reported by our local media.  If you read or watched the media coverage, you really missed quite a bit that happened.  Our city does provide the live coverage of Council Meetings on one cable access channel; not many citizens have the time or the work schedule to watch it.  That’s why I started doing a rough transcript of the Council meetings, first using the cable access channel, then later using audio files.  This then grew to covering some Committee meetings and their Agenda Review meetings that were not televised and rarely reported in detail. Some meetings I still cover in person, typing while they are in progress and/or using the audio recording function of my digital camera.

That’s the first question you have to decide is what is your level of skill, since most of us are not over 100 wpm typists.  If you live in an area where it’s provided via television, it’s easy to record, even using an VCR, even easier with DVR technology.  Many local governments offer an audio transcript, some do charge a small fee, others provide as our area is experimenting with, an FTP server where the audio can be downloaded from, at times the same day a meeting took place.  Finding out this information is as simple as making a phone call to the government entity you are interested in covering.

Even if you decide you want to cover the legislative body of your state or our federal government, there are a variety of ways you can get the raw information to be able to blog about it and a number of ways you can inexpensively capture the audio as well as share some of that on your blog which we will explore later.

It can be time consuming, even with my typing ability it typically takes up to an hour longer than the actual meeting to transcribe it for my blog.  It’s worth it though because you are providing a huge community service that will hopefully inspire more people to pay attention to the interworkings that the media can’t cover.  At a minimum?  You become a much more informed citizen.

If you are ready for the quest?  My future posts will focus on the “how to’s” to help you not only get the information on your blog but how to develop a readership as well as how to partner with the media that supports you or deal with the ones who’d rather see you go away…