How a local story gets covered, step by step

Understanding how a local story gets covered serves two purposes: doing it yourself if you live somewhere with nobody left to do it, and reading what reaches you with better judgement.

The path, with an everyday example: the council is going to pedestrianise a street in the centre.

1. The tip-off

Every local story begins with someone finding out about something. The usual routes:

• A public document: a meeting agenda, a notice in the official bulletin, a tender.
• A tip from a resident, the most common route and the least reliable.
• Something you see yourself: roadworks starting without any announcement.

In our example, the tip comes from Tuesday's meeting agenda: an item about "amendment to the traffic by-law".

2. Verifying it is true

First, confirm it exists. It sounds obvious and it is where most failures happen: much of what circulates in neighbourhood groups dies right here.

The minimum verification:

1. Find the document. If it is a council decision, it must exist somewhere: minutes, file, notice. If it appears nowhere, that is a bad sign.
2. Check the date. Make sure the document is current, not a project shelved three years ago.
3. Confirm the scope. "Pedestrianising the centre" and "pedestrianising two blocks on Saturdays" are very different stories.

3. Finding the sources

The classic rule is two independent sources. Locally, the ones usually needed:

A common mistake is stopping at the first two: publishing the council's version with a veneer of neutrality. The shopkeepers on the street being pedestrianised have another view, and it is part of the story.

4. Adding context

This is the step separating a press release from a news story. The fact is that a street is being pedestrianised. The context answers what readers actually want to know:

• Has it been tried before? What happened?
• What does it cost and where is the money from?
• What happens to the parking being lost?
• Who does it affect and from when?
• Can objections still be filed? Until what date?

That last question is the most useful and the most forgotten. A local story that does not say what the reader can do is only half finished.

5. Writing it

No frills, with the traditional structure because it works:

1. What is happening, in the first sentence. No preamble.
2. Who it affects and when. So anyone living there knows within two lines.
3. The detail: figures, deadlines, phases.
4. The voices, starting with those affected.
5. What the reader can do: objection deadlines, where to consult the file.

And one rule that avoids most trouble: if you have not checked it, you do not write it. Not even with an "apparently".

6. What almost nobody does: going back

Local coverage has a chronic problem: the announcement gets reported and the ending never does. It is published that the street will be pedestrianised, and nobody ever learns whether it happened, happened late, or was left half done.

Returning to a story six months later is among the most valuable things you can do in local information, and among the rarest. If you report on your area, putting a calendar note to revisit it is probably the best habit you can adopt.

If the result is a piece published on a website, make sure your RSS feed works: that is what lets people in your area find it without visiting your homepage daily. On this page we explain how to register it with Snurkel.