Finding Something Worth Writing About

"I want to write about water."

Marge hears this about once a week. She sets down her coffee, very slowly, the way you'd set down something you might need to throw later. "Water," she says. "The whole thing? Oceans? Rain? That stuff in the jar Councilman Pruitt keeps bringing to meetings?"

Water is a topic. You can't write a topic. You can write a story. Learning the difference is the whole lesson, and it's the step where most beginners stall out and go reorganize their sock drawer instead.

Topic versus story

A topic is a subject. Schools. Roads. Water. Housing. A topic is big, vague and permanent. It'll be here when you're dead.

A story is something specific that happened, or is happening, to specific people, and it has a reason to be told now. Somebody did something. It cost money, or changed a rule, or affected somebody's life. And there is a "now" attached: a vote this week, a deadline next month, a number that just came out.

See how each step adds a who, a what or a number? Keep asking "what specifically?" until you hit something with a name and a dollar sign on it. That's a story. Write it on your card from lesson 1.

Where stories come from

Beginners think ideas arrive like lightning. They do not. Ideas arrive like mail: regularly, mostly boring, and you have to actually open the envelope. Here's where to look.

Things that annoy people

Listen at the grocery store, the feed store, the school pickup line. "Why does my street flood every spring?" "Why did the pool close early?" Every complaint is a question, and every question has an answer somewhere in a filing cabinet. Your job is to go get it.

Things that change

A business closes. A new one opens. A fee goes up. A rule changes. A long-time official retires. Change is news because people need to adjust to it.

Things that don't add up

The same contractor wins every bid. The budget says one number and the press release says another. The sign says the park opens in May and it's September. Be careful here: a pattern is a question, never a conclusion. You go find the records. Sometimes they show a story. Sometimes they show a perfectly boring explanation, and you've saved yourself from writing something wrong. Both are wins.

The gold mine nobody wants to dig: meetings and records

Here is the least glamorous and most useful advice in this entire course. Read the agendas. Go to the meetings. Ask for the records.

Your city council, county commission, school board, library board, irrigation district and highway district all make decisions about your money in public. Almost nobody watches. That's your advantage. The other reporters in town are maybe two people and one of them is also the high school's volleyball coach.

Agendas

In Idaho, the open meeting law (Idaho Code 74-204) requires governing bodies to post an agenda at least 48 hours before a regular meeting, and 24 hours before a special meeting unless there's an emergency. So the menu shows up two days early. Read it. Look for dollar amounts, contracts, rezoning, "discussion and possible action," and anything with a vague name like "Item 7: Infrastructure Update."

And read the consent agenda. That's the bundle of "routine" items the board passes in one vote without discussion. Usually it really is routine: approving last meeting's minutes, paying the electric bill. Every so often a $340,000 contract is sitting in there between the minutes and the electric bill, wearing a little hat that says "routine."

Minutes

Minutes are the official record of what happened: who moved, who seconded, who voted how. Old minutes are a time machine. If a board member says "we've never discussed this," the minutes from 2023 might say otherwise. Pull up a year of them and skim. You'll find three story ideas by lunch.

Records

Contracts, budgets, invoices, emails, consultant reports, inspection reports. Most of it is public. Under Idaho's Public Records Act, an agency has three working days to grant or deny a resident's request, and it can stretch that to ten working days if it tells you in writing it needs more time to find the records (Idaho Code 74-103). If it doesn't answer at all by the deadline, the law treats that as a denial. Nonresidents get longer timelines. Other states have their own rules and clocks, so look up yours.

Two tools that do the paperwork for you

Writing a records request from scratch is easy enough. It is also exactly the kind of task your inner raccoon, Dale, will use as an excuse to go lie face-down on the couch. So use the tools.

• Idaho FOIA / Public Records Letter Generator. It builds a public records request letter for you. You fill in what you want and who has it, and you get a letter ready to send.
• Idaho Open-Meetings Compliance Tracker. Use it to keep track of meetings and whether notice and agenda requirements were met. A board that keeps posting agendas late is, itself, a story.

Be specific in records requests. "All documents about water" will get you a phone call from a tired clerk, or a box the size of a refrigerator. "The final report from the 2025 water system study, and the contract and invoices for that study" gets you three documents and a story.

Picking from your pile

By now you might have five ideas. Good. Pick the one with the soonest "now" and the clearest effect on your reader from lesson 1. A vote next Tuesday beats a vague trend. A thing that costs your reader $9 a month beats a thing that might matter in 2040. Save the rest in a file called "later." Real writers have a "later" file the size of a phone book. Marge's is two phone books, and one of them is just ideas about the jar.