So this past Tuesday I attended a City Council meeting as part of an assignment for my reporting class. And by attending I mean I didn’t go. I frankly had more important things to do, like sleep. If you think sleep is not important, you should try getting the swine flu, like I just recently did. I slept for two days straight, and I’m pretty sure the only reason I didn’t die is because I was too sleepy to die. Of course the day I finally get up the energy to go back to class, my reporting teacher decides to make us cover this City Council meeting. Unfortunately, the meeting started at 5 in the evening and is probably still going on. I, like many college students (including most of the others in the reporting class), have way too many things on our plates to be spending six hours sitting in a building that does not involve a bouncy castle. I was however able to catch some of the meeting on television. Yes, they air these meetings on live television, bumping the Jonas Brothers to third on the list of the stupidest things on television (both are still chasing those TV priests who inspire people to give their money to them… er… God, via yelling and hair gel). Anyway, this is what I could gather from those five minutes: absolutely nothing. These meetings are run by trained politicians, who are well versed in the art of making nothing into something and making that something very boring. These people could sit there and argue about the proper spelling of the word “is.”
Anyway, the main agenda of the evening was a bill on reducing the size of houses in Boulder. As a person who does not currently live in a house and will probably never own a house in Boulder, this issue was about as interesting as a lecture on proper sod removal technique. But apparently to everybody else it was a huge issue. And by everybody else I mean the ten lonely wackos who showed up to the goddam meeting. I mean, these people got up to the podium and referenced emails they sent the council before hand. That’s right, this was my assignment and I still did less research than these people. Most of these people were mad that the character of the city was being compromised by these large buildings. Now, I’m not here to nitpick, but since when did Boulder have character? If by character you mean rich snobby businessmen surrounded by pot smoking vegan hippies, then yes, Boulder has tons of character.
Besides, who are we to tell rich people how big they can build their houses? Frankly, when I get rich, I’m not going to ask my neighbors for permission before I start building my mansion. Do you know why? I won’t have neighbors. I’m going to buy my own damn island. And yet here are these concerned (by concerned I mean filled with jealous hatred) citizens of Boulder who are insisting that large mansions are an eyesore upon their neighborhoods and corrupting the youth of America and solely responsible for decreasing literacy rates and inner city violence in Colorado (even though everyone knows the real culprit is Hannah Montana).
I think by now I’ve properly illustrated how stupid covering this City Council meeting would have been. Now, I’m not saying I haven’t covered stupid things as a reporter before. But do you know what made those meetings way more interesting and captivating? It was the fact that it was in my own community, and I could really connect with the issues at hand and feel like I had something at stake. Haha I’m just joking. It’s because I was getting paid. They should give ADD kids money to pay attention, because I’ve somehow been genuinely interested in things like duck habitats and solar panels where normally I would have fallen asleep so fast I would have fallen face first into the duck pond (by the way, I was at that duck habitat for three hours, and the only thing I never saw were ducks).
In my opinion, to make the reporting class truly representative of today’s journalistic environment, they should pay us very little money and then fire us so they have money to hire fifty new web design nerds who spent their college years creating viruses and spilling hot pocket cheese on their sweatpants. Forgive me if I’m a little mad about this, but it’s very frustrating when your chosen profession, your true passion (or in my case, the only thing I don’t completely suck at), is slowly disappearing in the real world. I swear, every journalism professor I have just sits there and tells me how much it sucks to be a journalism major. So to prepare us, these classes try to teach us diverse journalism skills, like web design, architecture, flipping burgers, pole dancing, prostitution, etc. Because the world will always need doctors and lawyers (to sue the doctors), but sometime in the future (like yesterday), people will no longer need journalists. Instead of paying for poor reporting and plagiarism, they can get it for free on Twitter. While we journalists are stuck with all of our morals and ethics of reporting, Twittering idiots can bypass all of that and just write “Obama calls Kanye West ‘jackass,’” even after Obama requested it be left off the record.
Now, there are probably some of you who are thinking to yourselves, “Mitchell, if you would just buckle down and do the stupid reporting assignment instead of writing stupid notes about it you would be done already and you would stop complaining and I could go back to mindlessly Twittering.” Well, unfortunately I have writers block, and when I have writers block I find that the best cure is to write about something else. So really, by reading this, you are all helping me to write my article for reporting class. As such, I feel I have the right to blame all of you when I get an F on this paper.
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