• Double-check the meeting’s location and time.
• Bring with you what you are the most comfortable taking notes with (computer, audio recorder, phone, tablet, notebook, etc.). Be sure all devices are fully charged.
• Do a bit of pre-research to answer these questions:
  • What is the meeting about?
  • What is the agency/municipal body/institution hosting the meeting?
    • Write up a short description before you go to your meeting. This will help you understand what the organization does.
  • Who do you think might attend?
    • See if you can find a list of elected officials or staff. Save this list, especially if it has photos, since it’ll help you figure out who’s who.
  • What’s on the agenda? In particular, which issues on the agenda seem to be especially significant to your community?
    • Before the meeting, make a list of 3-5 issues that you’d like to focus on.
  • What if anything has been reported about this organization or issue in the past? You can search The Green Line’s site or the site of other news organizations you like, or use Google News to try to find past stories.
• It may be helpful to look at what happened at past meetings of the committee you’re attending, or check whether other committees have talked about some of the issues that you’re interested in. The city collects information on past meetings on this website. By clicking on a council, you can find its past, most recent, and future meetings. You can also read through meeting minutes, see what decisions were made, and watch a video recording, if there is one.
• You may want to review some of the basic rules around how meetings are run, called Robert’s Rules of Order – or at least have references on hand in case something happens that you don’t understand. The full list of Robert’s Rules is a whole book, but we like to reference simplified versions that will help you understand some of the terminology, like these two:
  • Roberts Rules of Order – Simplified
  • Robert’s Rules of Order Cheat Sheet for Nonprofits
• Arrive early so that you can find a spot to sit, pick up on any pre-meeting buzz and possibly plug your recorder into the meeting’s sound system (see below).

Public meetings in Toronto are required to be open for anyone to attend. It is your right to record public meetings. You can do so as long as you are not disrupting the meeting. Under certain circumstances, meetings may be closed to the public, for instance when dealing with labour issues or personal information. However, no vote can happen during a closed session.

Learn more about when meetings or portions of meetings can be closed to the public. 

This means that if anyone tells you you can’t be there, or that you can’t record, you should ask why. Feel free to share the information about open meetings from the city website and ask why this meeting is exempt to open meeting laws.

In case you are not able to record the meeting, or run into technical problems, no worries: Public meetings are usually broadcast live and available to listen to after the end of the meeting. Depending on the committee, it could take a long time before these are posted. And of course, you can miss the buzz and the vibe if you’re not in the room, so it is important to be present and alert during the meeting whenever possible.

• Start to record: Start by sitting as close to the front as possible – this will increase the likelihood that you’ll get a good recording. Turn on your recording device. It should be placed within a few inches of your subject’s mouth or a speaker/amplifier and on a stable surface. You may even be able to plug your recorder into the sound system at the meeting. Arrive early and look around for anyone who looks official (perhaps the clerk) who might be able to help you with this.
• Check your levels: Before the meeting starts, do what you can to figure out whether your recording is going to effectively capture sound from the meeting. This could mean putting it in its place, making a small recording and then playing it back to see if you’re able to hear it.
• Timestamp: When writing down your notes, write down times when something significant has been said. This will help you return to key moments when revising your notes. If your recorder is far from you, remember the time on the clock when you started your recorder and write down the key clock times, so you can find those moments later.

Start with our note-taking template to organize your notes.

At the meeting: What should I do? 

• Start recording the meeting (audio or video, as appropriate).
• Take notes and add timestamps at important parts.
• Focus on gathering direct quotes, debate, decisions and details, like by-law numbers, names and titles.
• Focus on what is actually said, rather than describing how it was said, which could be misinterpreted. In other words, avoid noting that someone said something angrily, because that’s your interpretation of what happened. Of course, if it’s very dramatic and obvious, eg. someone starts crying, you can include that in your notes. And, if it seemed to you that someone looked angry or upset or happy or anything else, you can find them after the meeting and confirm those feelings.
• If something exciting is said, make sure you note the time and who said it so you can include the quote in your notes. If you’re going to include a direct quote, you will need to track the person down during or after the meeting to confirm their name and spelling.

If you have any questions while you’re on assignment, reach out to Anita Li, The Green Line editor-in-chief, at hello@thegreenline.to.

Follow-up interviews

You may want to do an interview before, during or after the meeting. Before you do that, think about why you are doing the interview. If someone said something interesting in the meeting and you’d like more information, that makes a lot of sense. If you have a follow-up question to something that happened at the meeting, think about who might be the right person to answer that question. Avoid asking a citizen about why city officials made a particular decision. You can ask the citizen for their opinion on that, but they won’t be able to explain the actions of the city officials. Similarly, don’t ask officials about how citizens feel about something — the citizens themselves should speak to that.

Once you’ve identified the right person to talk to and have tracked them down, start by identifying yourself. Say something like this:

"I am a resident of the City of Toronto working in the public interest to document civic events and meetings. My documentation is made publicly available in collaboration with The Green Line, a Toronto-based news organization.”

You’ll also want to make sure the interviewee knows why you are interviewing them and how you will use their answers. You could say a version of this:

“I would like to interview you because I’d like to know more about <fill in the blank>. I think your opinion will be insightful because <fill in the blank>. I’ll use the information that you share with me to help give my work context. Your quotations and name could be published through The Green Line’s work.”

In some cases, you might agree to use the person’s information off the record. That makes they’ll give you context, but they don’t want to be referred to in your notes. You should consider whether this is a reasonable request. Here are some things you could weigh:

• Why does the person not want their name used? Do they have a reasonable reason, e.g. they’re afraid of getting in trouble from their employer, or being retraumatized in connection to something bad they’ve experienced?
• Are they providing you with background information that you can verify separately?
• Are they criticizing someone or some decision? If so, they probably need to have their name included – otherwise, by being anonymous, they’re not being accountable to the person they’re criticizing.
• Are they offering you a tip that you can research elsewhere? If so, get as much information as you can so that you can run it by other people who will be willing to let you use their names.

If you’re unsure about whether it’s ok for someone to be off the record, get in touch with staff at The Green Line, who will help you think this through.

Start by transcribing your audio:

• Otter.ai is a great tool that can transcribe your audio for you.

Make your notes complete and accurate:

• Check facts such as
  • Title names, pronouns, ages
  • Dates
  • Locations
  • Making sure what someone said is true
    • For instance if someone in a meeting refers to a past meeting or event, research what they referred to.
• Check your spelling.
• Listen back to the recording to get the exact words the person said and put quotation marks around them.
• Spell out any abbreviations.
• Include hyperlinks where needed for context.

Submit your notes:

• Submit your final notes to your editor in a Google Doc. Feel free to highlight anything you’re unsure about or need checked.

LEGAL ISSUES

Defamation law: 

When you’re publishing something about someone, you need to be careful what you say about them. Think about how you would feel if someone said the same thing about you – would it hurt or embarrass you or make people think less of you? If so, it could be defamation and you could be sued. Canadian courts have concluded that a wide range of negative statements about someone may be defamatory, including any suggestion that someone is dishonest, immoral, a pedophile, a terrorist, a terrorist supporter, a racist, a human smuggler, a corrupt politician, or many other descriptions that are unfavourable or unflattering. Any of these could be a hint that the person is being defamed.

But, what if someone is a criminal, or is incompetent? Then, of course, you can include that in what you write and publish – but remember that it’s hard to conclusively prove that something is true. You can’t use anonymous sources or rumour for this. And it’s not enough that someone said it — it needs to actually be true. In other words, your statements need to be iron-clad.

One more thing: We have agreed as a society that public bodies can’t work properly if members are always worried about being sued for defamation. As a result, you can’t be sued if you report things said in a city council meeting or the meeting of a subcommittee, as long as you do so truthfully and without intending to harm the person you are writing about. This is also true when it comes to public documents, which include any matters of public record. Again, what you report needs to be an accurate representation of what’s in the document and you need to do it without malice.

Here’s an example: You’re at City Council. A police officer appears before council and says that the police are investigating whether the inhabitants of 1234 King St. are engaged in criminal activity. If you report this accurately and without intending harm to the residents of 1234 King St., then you cannot be sued for defamation, because it was said in a public meeting. But, you could get sued if it wasn’t said in a public meeting, if you reported it inaccurately, or if you intended harm. Here are some situations where you could get sued:

• The police officer says this in the hallway outside of the meeting and you report it. You’re only protected from being sued if you report what was said officially within the meeting, not informally outside of it.
• You report what the police officer said in the meeting, but you get it wrong (e.g. you write that the officer was talking about the residents of 1236 King St. rather than 1234 King St.).
• You report the alleged crime as truth, instead of reporting what the police officer said. This might sound like splitting hairs, but it’s important: you can say that the police officer told council that the police are investigating whether inhabitants of 1234 King St. are engaged in criminal activity. BUT, if you simply said that the inhabitants of 1234 King St. are engaged in criminal activity, you could be sued, because we don’t know if the crime is actually happening.
• You intend harm in your reporting. This is hard to prove of course. One example of proof of intended harm might be if you write an email saying, “We finally got them!” Be extra super careful about anything like this, even in your notes, file names, text messages to your friends, etc.

In truth, the best defense to being sued is to do a good job! These guidelines for how to do that are adapted from the book Media Law in Canada by Dean Jobb:

• Be skeptical. If someone tells you something that seems untrue, make sure you do a good job of checking it out.
• Be meticulous. Double-check your facts.
• Be restrained. Let people speak for themselves instead of adding your own voice. Always use the neutral word “said” instead of something that assumes someone’s emotion or intent eg. “exclaimed,” “shouted,” “declared.”
• Seek advice. Ask when you’re unsure.

Attending and recording public meetings

For the most part, city meetings are legally required to be public. In rare cases where the public is excluded from a meeting (usually described as an "in camera meeting"), there has to be legal justification for doing so. In Toronto, Section 190 of the City of Toronto Act (2006) lists the reasons a meeting might not be open. You don’t need to know the reasons, but they can be helpful to have on hand in case someone tells you you’re not allowed into a meeting. Some of the legitimate reasons for a meeting being “in camera” are:

• Receiving legal advice
• Security issues
• Buying or selling land
• Considering personal information about someone
• Labour issues or negotiations
• Anything to do with lawsuits or possible lawsuits
• Education or training of the members
• Any explicitly secret information that is shared with city officials

If someone tells you that you’re not allowed to be at a meeting, or not allowed to record at a meeting, you should ask why. Feel free to show them the above list (or the more complete one on the city’s webpage) and ask which of these situations applies. If you think you’re being kept out of a meeting that should be public, take good notes on what happened because you can work with The Green Line to file a complaint to the provincial ombudsman.

The Green Line doesn’t expect you to do research beyond attending the meeting. In some cases, however, you may want to do that so that you can check some facts or offer context on a situation. You can use two kinds of sources to do this: humans or documents. In both cases, you need to make sure the source you’re using is credible. Here’s how to check if a human source is credible:

• First of all, make sure you Google your source. When you do, it can be hard to tell what to believe, because there’s a lot of stuff on the internet. One way to approach this is to ask who wrote and published this information. Is it a source you trust, like the city or a news organization you’re familiar with? Another question to ask yourself is whether the person who created the information is the same as the person who posted it. There are lots of dubious sites out there that re-post things without fact-checking them, so see if you can figure that out. You can also use what you know about your neighbourhood as a gut check. Are there any immediate red flags about what the source says? Finally, ask yourself whether the source is reporting facts or opinions. Opinions can be valid too, of course, but it’s important to distinguish between the two. All this can be tricky to sort out! Staff at The Green Line are always available to help.
• What do you find out this way? Is there any information about their job? Any past public statements they’ve made, like things they’ve published online, or times they’ve been interviewed?
• Does it seem like this person is in a good position to answer your questions? What knowledge or background do you think they have that enables them to answer?
• Does this person have a vested interest in talking to you that might lead them to be misleading? Are they paid to comment on a particular issue, e.g. do they work for a political party? This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not credible, but it’s important background for you to know when you decide whether or how to include them in your document. For instance, if you’re writing about a proposed development and the person you’re talking to works for the developer, you need to include that fact in what you write.
• Remember that you can ask a person what their connection is to the topic. You can say, “Why do you care about this issue?”

Here’s how to check if a document is credible:

• Just like with a human, you’ll want to do some background research. Who wrote the document and why? Were they interested in convincing someone of something, or is the document simply informative? As with a human, if the document is trying to convince, you can still refer to it – but you need to explain what you’ve learned about it. For instance, if you’re quoting from something written by the developer, or from a pro-development blog, you should explain that.