9/08/2015

More tweet experimenting

This one is another experiment. I can't tell you what it's for, because I'm not sure what it's for. But, I often say things on Twitter in the moment, and I want to be able to get more people to read them. 

So here is my journalistic work-day digested via tweets. 





Council began at 7:00. One of the first items on their agenda is always Matters from the Public. Anyone can speak up to three minutes on any item that doesn't have a public hearing on the main agenda.  Often these are on issues I don't write about, but I think are significant enough for people to know what's being said. The tweets do not do what's said justice, most of the time, but they hopefully inform people and whet appetites for people to want to know more.





Both of these people need to be heard to fully explain what they were saying. I often think about creating podcasts that are just annotated versions of Matters from the Public. Real people's voices say much more than I can summon in words.




I'm hoping my fellow journalists are paying attention to this and are readying stories on the third anniversary of Sage's disappearance.

My job, though, is to monitor what's happening with Charlottesville and Albemarle government as it pertains to the built environment. The phrase "built environment" is jargon, I know this, but it's all around us, and there are ways to affect that happens.  Part of that is through monitoring decisions that are made by passing the consent agenda.










I love that people are paying attention.

Oops.  I left off the unit in the tweet. $12,500, not $12.5 million. I'm not perfect, but corrections can help me become more accurate.

I have a policy of not tweeting things that I'm likely to write about. I want to save the facts for my article. I'm going to write in the next few days about many transportation items that happened at this meeting. But, I had to make an exception for this.

I took a break from tweeting for a while. I'm not writing about the next issues I'll tweet, so the medium was perfect to help me pay attention.











So, that would appear to be that. I'll spend several hours later this week revisiting the meeting, and these tweets help me remember where I was by connecting me to the moments I was in City Council chambers watching it all. That will help me as I sort through what's going to be a confusing story to write, but I'll get something good written by attacking the confusion with research!

This is my life. You can look through what I do and see that I'm sad about my lack of a personal life. But, I'm much happier than I've been in a long time because I genuinely love this. I'm excited to be able to share what I know, because I want more people to pay attention to local government and to spend less time paying attention to national government. We can't affect national government, but we can change our "built environment" by understanding better how complex our communities are.

I'll conclude this experiment by previewing tomorrow.

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