Printing an agenda

At one of the newspapers in my area, the city government reporter's idea of advancing a City Council meeting is to take a copy of the meeting's agenda, throw in a few extra words to string the thing together, and print.

As someone who covered that beat for years, this drives me absolutely nuts. I can't believe his editors haven't put a stop to this lazy excuse for work.

Aside from the fact that he's shortchanging all of his readers because these agendas are written by lawyers and difficult, if not impossible, to understand, he's making life harder for himself, too. Doing the legwork for the meeting in advance not only means a better advance story, it also means a reporter has a good understanding of the topic come meeting time and can save time when writing the follow-up story.

Since it's obvious this reporter usually doesn't understand what happened at meetings (sign: stringing together paragraphs of quotes, using copiuos amounts of jargon and huge holes in his stories) being forced to write an actual story to advance a meeting would help him out twofold.