A council has granted permission for a regional daily to film a meeting for the first time, after previously refusing to allow it.
The Manchester Evening News was allowed to film Salford City Council’s budget meeting on Wednesday after the authority made the surprise U-turn and contacted the paper the day before.
It meant local government and trade union reporter Jennifer Williams was able to film part of the meeting on a Nokia N8 phone, which the paper had recently upgraded its mobiles to, and upload it from the council chamber.
And the paper also created a live blog covering the meeting using CoveritLive, which had 3,500 viewers as it was happening.
Paul Gallagher, head of online content at the MEN, said: “We did make an approach before and said it would be nice to do live video and they wouldn’t allow us to do it. They said there was no chance.
“We haven’t been able to live stream it but we have been able to film video from the public gallery.
“They didn’t really explain the reasons why they changed their minds but obviously we are really pleased that they have.
“It does seem like councils are gradually coming round to this way of covering council meetings and they are seeing it’s a way for more people to get involved and follow what’s going on.”
The MEN’s coverage of council cuts last week saw it nine live blogs in 48 hours to report on budget meetings.
A spokeswoman for Salford City Council said they had been asked about it a while ago and it was something the authority had been considering.
Eric Pickles last week called on councils to allow bloggers and citizen journalists the same access to council meetings as mainstream media, saying videoing and tweeting should be allowed to boost transparency – but the spokeswoman said the decision to allow filming by the MEN was not related to this.
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Hats off to the MEN and Bolton News (see yesterday) for doing this. “Town hall telly” is, inevitably, a comical notion on the face of it. But both newspapers have highlighted an important issue, which is that the proceedings of all council meetings should be available for consumption this way – and it should be councils themselves who expedite it. I have yet to hear a cogent argument against it being standard practice. The cost, in terms of equipment and bandwidth, is minimal – most council rooms and Chambers are wired for sound already – and it requires minimal maintenance and superintending. Further, to ask “who would watch?” is to ask the wrong question. Council committees and full council meetings are de facto open to the public (apart from meetings where some portions of the proceedings are subject to a piece of legislation that excludes press and public, as any reporter who is a regular attendee will be aware). The fact that public turnout for council meetings is low – except, typically, where someone has a personal interest – is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an advocacy for not enshrining the right to access in law, in the first place. It is instead an argument in favour of finding ways to enable greater engagement. One of those ways is through the use of technology. Another argument in favour is that if, as seems likely, the relentless contraction in our industry means that we simply cannot cover council proceedings to the extent we would wish, then other ways must be found to make the democratic process transparent and elected representatives accountable. It’s worth remembering that TVs are already available in the high street that can switch between IP delivery and “conventional” broadcast content. As these two channels converge to become a seamless single channel, anyone who can stream content will do so because they know they are able to reach an audience. Why should councils be any different? It is extraordinary that local councils and, by extension, local councillors have long demonstrated an excessive fondness for monitoring their – mostly blameless – private citizens on CCTV. Yet, inexplicably, most of them apparently have little enthusiasm for allowing these same citizens – whose national and local taxes fund their activities – to return the compliment!
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