Jill's Journal: How do you report on a 7-minute meeting?

How do you report on a 7-minute meeting? It’s not always easy, that’s for sure.

But it happens more often than one would think.

I well remember the day of two-hour school board meetings. In fact, as Sherri Nelson, the curriculum director for the Brandon Valley School District, and I were leaving Monday’s Board of Education meeting seven minutes after we “pledged our allegiance to the flag of the United States,” we talked about that very scenario.

A seasoned reporter like myself can only smile when a meeting wraps up in record time. But a seasoned reporter like myself sometimes has to scratch her head and go, “Now, what am I going to write about?”

Sherri found it fascinating when I told her there was a time when school board meetings lasted for hours, yes two, three hours. I took her back to a meeting that was held in a classroom at Robert Bennis Elementary so many moons ago, where parents of third-graders that year let the school board know that implementing larger-than-promised class sizes to meet budget projections were by no means acceptable.

As I recall, the school board heard them loud and clear that night, and ended up keeping their promise by limiting the number of elementary kids in a classroom.

There were other long meeting nights, too, like when the District was planning to build the new Activities Center. A multitude of time was spent on deciding if the new bleachers should have backs on them or no backs on them. As you can see today, the no backs argument won. Essentially, it came down to cost. But it also came down to discussion, and lots of it.

City council meetings can be that way, too. I’ve sat in on hundreds of them, sometimes for hours on end. Let’s be honest, after the first couple of hours, no one wants to be there any longer and we tend to tune in and out of the dialogue going on before us, unless, of course, it’s some beefy stuff.

If you think I’m kidding, all you have to do is inquire about our city attorney who preceded Lisa Marso. There were many occasions that she’d nod off as the meeting took place. And who could blame her? Sometimes, the discussion went on and on and on for two, three or more hours, and oftentimes, that same discussion was repeated over and over again. But it dealt with heavy topics, like deciding which paramedic company would be hired to provide the city’s emergency medical services or if Holly Boulevard should be two lanes with a turning lane or four lanes with a turning lane or two lanes with a median or four lanes with a median … Trust me, I heard each and every proposal, and of course, we decided on the two-lane, turning lane proposal, minus the median (largely for snow removal purposes and angst from business owners).

So, how do you report on a 7-minute meeting? As I noted above, it’s not always easy, but you dig deep, you use a little history from previous stories on the topic, and of course, when possible, you toss in a photo or graphic of some kind into the mix, and before you know it, that 7-minute meeting turns into a 12-inch story in the next edition. Now, that’s news.