Help Us Crowdsource State and Local Government News Links
Pasadena City Hall Shutterstock
Two hashtags you can use to help us monitor news from across the nation and where you live: #localgovwire and #stategovwire
One of the challenges that we face at Route Fifty covering the fascinating and varied landscape of U.S. state and local government is that we live in a big country. There’s no doubt about that.
As editors and reporters who cover the entire nation, there’s no shortage of stories that we could cover. We have to be judicious in the issues, ideas, policy challenges and news shaping our city halls, county administration buildings and state capitols that we track and cover.
What we don’t pursue for our own stories for Route Fifty often gets incorporated into our daily state and local government news roundup, an aggregated digest of news links we find interesting or important and think our readers should know about.
But having a small news team means that monitoring all that news on a daily basis can be a tall order.
So we want to try something that gives you—our community of readers across the nation—an easier way to flag news stories about state and local government that might be otherwise be overlooked or ignored.
Through a collaborative experiment with Engaging Local Government Leaders and its members, our news team at Route Fifty is going to crowdsource state and local government news links for our daily roundup. But you don’t need to be a member of ELGL to join us track state and local government news from across the nation … though it will help if you use Twitter.
Here’s what you can do: If there’s a local government news story that catches your eye, flag that link for us on Twitter using #localgovwire. Similarly, if there’s a state government news story that catches your eye, flag it for us using #stategovwire.
As part of our regular operations, we’ll monitor those hashtags and use what’s shared to help build our aggregated daily state and local government news summary. And if we end up incorporating a particular link, we’ll also credit the Twitter user who flagged it in addition to the original news source, naturally.
If other organizations and state- and local-focused news publications, outlets or organizations want to join in this crowdsourcing effort, the more the merrier!
The bottom line: It’s critically important to pay attention to what’s going on in state and local government and we think this crowdsourcing effort could help us better inform professionals who work in the state and local public sector plus other stakeholders interested in making our cities, counties and states better places to live and work.
We’re excited to help jumpstart this effort!
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive's Route Fifty and is based in Seattle.
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