Documenters group wants more eyes on local governments
Amy Dalrymple
North Dakota Monitor
Buffalo’s Fire Publisher Jodi Spotted Bear and Bismarck Documenters Program Manager Alicia Hegland-Thorpe discuss the Bismarck Documenters on Prairie Public’s Mainstreet. (Photo contributed by Buffalo’s Fire)
A nonprofit online news outlet is working to put the public back in public meetings.
Buffalo’s Fire, a Native-led news organization based in Bismarck, and the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance are bringing a program called the Documenters Network to North Dakota.
The program involves training (and paying) community members to attend local government meetings and take notes, with summaries of meetings published online.
“This really does put the power back into the people’s hands to hold our elected officials accountable,” said Alicia Hegland-Thorpe, Bismarck Documenters program manager.
Hegland-Thorpe is recruiting community members to cover meetings in the Bismarck-Mandan area as well as meetings of tribal councils. Organizers would like to expand to covering state meetings in the future.
A free orientation is set for 5:30-7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 15, at 122 N 4th St., Bismarck. Additional orientation sessions will be held in the future.
Once participants complete the training, they can look at a list of upcoming meetings and select which ones they want to cover. Documenters are paid $17-24 an hour to cover a meeting, depending on complexity and distance, with an average assignment expected to be 2½ to 3 hours, Hegland-Thorpe said.
The training will prepare participants to focus on fact-based reporting rather than opinions, Hegland-Thorpe said. Notes from the meetings will be edited before they are published.
“We also want it to be objective,” she said.
Jodi Rave Spotted Bear, publisher of Buffalo’s Fire, said this will be the first rural and first Indigenous-led cohort to participate in the Documenters Network. It is open to anyone who wants to participate, she said.
“It’s a chance to engage the community and help open the door for them to be a part of meetings that impact their lives,” Spotted Bear said.
The Documenters Network was established in 2018 by City Bureau, a nonprofit civic journalism lab. The organization, which operates in 18 other cities, centralizes information about public meetings in a searchable location.
Many of the meetings the Documenters cover are local meetings that don’t typically get media coverage. For example, a participant in Akron, Ohio, last week covered a meeting of the Vacant Buildings Board and published detailed notes, along with an audio recording from the meeting.
The Bismarck Documenters website has more information about how to participate, plus a link to area local meetings ranging from the Bismarck School Board to the Mandan Architectural Review Commission.