Filling the gap when local news media are closed down
Journalists at local media have an important role informing citizens about local municipality meetings, courts and politics but the widespread closing of news outlets means that this democratic control of local decisions have been lost in many places. Trying to compensate for this is US project Documenters.org, organizing citizens and journalists to form task forces that cover the local decision-making meetings and publish the results.
The Documenters do not write normal news stories but produce a type of public record based on templatized notes.
The Documenters describe themselves as “a network of newsrooms and community organisations committed to participatory civic media. We train and pay hundreds of people to attend underreported public meetings and publish the results.”
The network was created in 2018 by City Bureau, a non-profit civic journalism lab, the organisation´s website informs.
”We focus on equipping people to access and produce the information they need. We make our work, process and tools as open and useful as possible. Documenters.org centralizes public meeting dates, times, locations, official records and original documentation at the city, county, and state-level in one searchable location.”
The organization say it has trained more than 1 700 documenters who have covered more than 2 300 public meetings across four cities: Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Minneapolis. Documenters´ website says it in total has paid documenters more than USD 300 000 for covering meetings.
”We work with civic coders from around the world to develop and coordinate the City Scrapers project, an online toolkit and open source community we convened to standardize, scrape and share public meetings. To date, more than 50,000 documents have been collected on Documenters.org from hundreds of government websites—making these public documents more accessible and searchable.”
”Documenters are engaged citizens who are recruited, trained and paid by the Documenters Network to participate in the newsgathering process and contribute to a communal pool of knowledge.”
At the meetings, Documenters may take notes, live-tweet, take photos and record audio/video.
“While our trainings and paid assignments are rooted in journalism, Documenters are not assigned to produce traditional news articles—instead, they are creating a new public record based on templatized notes that can inform a range of civic actions.
The organization offers Documenters trainings in notetaking, social media, sourcing, fact-checking and legal issues related to public governance meetings.
“All Documenters are trained to follow any reasonable restrictions on their activity according to their state’s Open Meetings Act. In addition to skill-based trainings, Documenters staff host a variety of workshops geared toward community building and programming led by and for Documenters. The Documenters Field Guide serves as an online manual for assignments.”
The Documenters Network says it takes several steps to ensure notes are a fair and accurate representation of meetings. Documenter notes are reviewed and fact-checked by Documenters program staff for accuracy and potential defamation.
“I think public meetings are workshops for democracy. I know big decisions get made at some of the most boring public meetings… but someone has to be there for us to know that.” Darryl Holliday, former reporter and co-founder of City Bureau told IJNet, published by International Venter for Journalists.
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