City Council

CITY COUNCIL is based on an actual city council meeting I covered while working for a small twice-a-week newspaper early in my career. Some of the items here have been fictionally enhanced for educational purposes. And, of course, some names have been changed to protect the foolish.

Even as an assistant editor at this small paper I knew that someday I wanted to teach journalism and I had the feeling after the meeting that the notes from this particular meeting would come in handy some day, so I filed them away. Coincidentally, my solution to writing this story was to write eight of them. The editor was out of town and I was the only one who had to make a decision on what to run in the paper. So I wrote eight separate stories on different aspects of the meeting.

Alas, the poor journalism student in my newswriting classes these days does not have that option. Instead, my students must write one mega-story that covers the whole meeting. I use it as a kind of final exam in my newswriting classes. —Rich Cameron —City Council (rcameron.com)

Only nominally interactive, which is especially notable when you are faced with all the questions that you can possibly ask each source. Still, it looks like a good tool for teaching accuracy, cross-referencing, and news judgment.

It’s a stretch to call this a “game” but I’ll file it there anyway becasue I don’t have a separate category for “simulations.”