A city council meeting isn't a story. It's a pile of decisions that happen to share a room.
We've all gotten used to one article per meeting, as if that were a judgment about what mattered. I don't think it ever was. I think it was a headcount problem.
Here's the meeting that convinced me. On Monday, September 28, the Charlotte City Council met for six hours and twelve minutes. The headline was a trial 10 p.m. curfew for minors, which passed 9-2. Charlotte's other newsrooms led with it, and they were right. That's the vote families were going to feel.
It was also one item.
What else was in the room
By the middle of the next afternoon we had seven stories out of that meeting, on two of our papers.
Five ran in The Charlotte Mercury. The curfew was one, including a promise from the police chief about enforcement that isn't written policy yet. Then landmark status and a tax break for the First Union Tower. Then an annexation policy that never asks about affordable housing. Then where a $125 million housing bond would put homes. And then two church cemeteries made historic landmarks, and the enslaved people believed to be buried outside the fence.
The other two ran in Fourth Ward Charlotte, which is our paper for one neighborhood. The council had extended the landmark status of an old house there to cover the whole property. To explain what changed, we had to go back to the council's own minutes from 1976.
None of those is a sidebar to the curfew. Somebody who lives next to a parcel being annexed and somebody with a fifteen-year-old were at the same meeting for completely different reasons. One article is only going to help one of them.
The thing I didn't expect
I figured reading the whole meeting would get us more stories. I didn't figure it would show us how little of the night was actually counted.
We could check exactly one vote tally against anybody else's reporting. The curfew, 9-2. That's it. For most of the rest, the chair just announced the result. No count read out loud. One annexation result was never announced out loud at all, and we caught that in time to rewrite our own first paragraph before it ran.
So our stories say which votes were counted and which were only declared. If you write one recap, you never have to deal with that, because you only write up the vote everybody watched.
Reading that closely caught us, too. We'd been spelling the city's chief financial officer's name wrong. It's Matt Hastedt. We fixed it in two older stories and put a note on each.
Then the next night gave us a harder one. The town council in East Hampton, Connecticut, where our newest paper is, held a workshop about setting up a new sewer board. They didn't vote on anything. A recap would have had nothing to say. The East Hampton Mercury ran four stories, and every one of them tells you what the members were leaning toward and that none of it is decided.
Why it was always one
Picture one reporter at that Charlotte meeting. Six hours of it, one night, and room for one story. She writes the curfew. The annexation policy, the housing bond and the cemeteries stay in her notebook.
Nobody decided those didn't matter. There just wasn't anybody left to write them.
That isn't our problem anymore, and here's why.
I use an AI for the heavy lifting. By the day after the meeting it had the full transcript on file, thirty speakers identified, and 53 of the people and organizations named in that room tied back to what we'd already reported about them. Then it wrote a first draft of each story. It learned from my own writing, so the drafts sound like me.
Sounding like me is the easy part. The judgment is mine. I decided this meeting was seven stories and not one. I decided what each one led with and what got cut. I checked each one against the record. And each one ran when I thought it was ready, not before.
That's the arrangement on everything we publish. The AI does the first draft. I do the deciding.
I'm not saying nobody else covered this stuff. Some did. Charlotte has reporters who've sat through a lot more of these meetings than I have. I'm saying something smaller. Once the fourth item on the agenda costs about the same to cover as the first, "we could only afford one story" stops being true.
A meeting is the steadiest source of local news a town has. It's on a schedule, it's public, it's on the record, and almost nobody has six hours to sit and watch it.
So somebody should tell them all of it. Including how much of it never got counted.