Wonderful world of village meetings

Board meetings. Committee meetings. Special meetings.

Covering a city beat means a lot of meetings. They seem daunting at first. After all, most meetings will have along with it a deadline story in which the reporter has to summarize a meeting that lasts as long as 2 hours in nine inches - or about 290 words. Not to mention sometimes the reporter must do it in about 20 minutes.

As with any story, preparation is important. But with deadline stories, it is necessary. All villages and cities are required to make their agendas available for the public. Most times, the city posts the agenda on its Web site. Merely reading the agenda, however, doesn't end your preparation.

For Monday's meeting in West Dundee, Ill., the agenda had a very long consent agenda. Villages and cities are allowed to package several items in one line item - the consent agenda - and pass them in one overall vote. This helps move the meeting along. Of course, sometimes they abuse this. But this post is about meetings.

After the consent agenda, an item I've been following through the summer was listed. I had known quite a bit about it. As you proceed in your internship or job as a beat reporter, there will be several issues that you learn a lot about. Because it's your job to follow them. Before I began the internship, I didn't know anything about TIF districts. Now, I could teach you - and some village officials - a few things about them.

The first step after determining, with the help of my editor, that this agenda item was the subject of tonight's story was to look up past stories about the issue. A brief refresher always helps. I took note of anything about TIF districts - whether I wrote them or somebody else wrote them - to help in prewriting.

My editor encourages - and rightfully so - prewriting. When you arrive at a meeting, the only things you should look for are quotes pertaining to the main point of your story. A lot of background should be complete. After looking up past stories, you should call a village official - village clerks and village presidents often work - and get some quotes dealing with the topic.

Here's the secret: Most boards and committees get all information before the meeting. So by the time you begin your prewriting, a few hours before the meeting, they already know what is going to happen. Not to mention, they all receive meeting packets. The packets help a reporter follow along and most villages will have them available for the reporter. They are, for the most part, public documents. In this case, everybody knew that the village's development coordinator was going to request a public hearing on the TIF. They also knew the date. So the story already had the date of the hearing, what a TIF district is and a quick update on the events leading up to the meeting for those readers who haven't been following along.

Finally, your prewritten story is complete. The next thing to do is know how long it takes to get from the meeting locale to your office and give yourself 15-20 minutes to finish up the story and give it some polish. I can't recall how many times I looked at the clock and calculated in my head how long I would have to write when I returned to the office.

When I got to the office, a quick call to my night editor let her know I was about to begin the story and would be calling in 15-20 minutes with the final version. Seventeen minutes later, just two minutes after my 9:15 deadline, the story was sent. All that was left were phone calls to the area police departments to find out about any late-breaking cop calls.

Again, just another night as a city beat reporter.