Part of being a journalist on a local paper is keeping in touch with the local community.

Depending where on the food chain you are this can vary from invites to posh soirees hosted by local dignitaries (the Editor) to council committee and public meetings (us). You will be shocked to note that we get the bum end of the deal.

Check the time on the post. If Blogger is working it should be 11.15pm. Yup. And I just got home from work.

There is a hot issue in Oxdown* and tonight a group of residents set up a public meeting to discuss the issue. If this group are the only thing standing between Oxdown and the horror-which-cannot-be-named, then all I can say is 'pack up now.'

Now I should probably admit that any meeting at 7.30pm on a Wednesday night is never going to prove impressive to a reporter on a weekly paper whose deadline is noon the same day. By the time the paper comes out any story I write will be 8 days old, hardly putting the 'new' in news, and since Wednesday is usually the day we get to skip off early, lurking around for nearly three hours is never going to be popular.

The meeting started badly in what was effectively a small cupboard jammed full of about 50 people. By the time a new venue had been found I had given up taking shorthand notes to use my notebook as a fan.

Once things settled down into the new room things got even more farcical. We were given a press bench (me and a reporter from one of our competitors) near the front and we watched everything unravel.

An impressive number of councillors from two of the three leading parties had shown up to talk to the public, mistakenly thinking this would be some kind of productive meeting. Unfortunately, thanks to some cack handed chairing it soon emerged that this would in fact be The Meeting From Hell.

A stream of people got up to explain how when the issue had first been raised two years ago (are alarm bells ringing yet re: the whole 'new' aspect?) the MP and various councillors had fudged the issue.

The MP, who was more reasonable than I would have been, took about twenty minutes of verbal abuse which ended with 'Well why don't you tell us what your position is' and him saying 'I am totally, categorically against this horrible prospect, as I've been saying, erm, for the last 2 years.' Groovy.

The meeting lasted about an hour longer than it needed to, mainly because the chair took it upon himself to respond to every point raised one by one, while basic questions were ignored / badly answered by the experts. It got to the point where we were muttering about staging a coup, where I would get up and chair the meeting while the other reporter answered all the questions.

So to add insult to injury, after an hour and a half some knobhead gets up from the floor to say that what the campaign needs to do is to go to the national press. Yep. His reasoning? "No-one in the local press gives a toss, we need to get a contact in the nationals to go public with this."

Perhaps he could have talked to the correspondent for the Daily Mail sat at the press bench...

... Oh no, he couldn't. Why? Because there bloody well wasn't one. So after nearly two hours of drivelling this is the shite we get. Now don't get me wrong, the issue is a good issue. I even agree with what the people involved stand for. But the idea that the local press isn't giving them space to debate it or support to raise it is so ridiculous it made me want to stab him with a biro.

The problem was once he'd made his point - much to the disbelief of both of us sat on the press bench - everyone who said something after that prefaced it with a look at us and a 'record that, write *this* down' to the point where I wanted to get up and walk out of the meeting, which by this time had degenerated into mudslinging and defamatory comments which were completely unpublishable anyway. But of course if I did then that would be a sign the press didn't give a toss.

Week in week out we cover stories that the nationals would laugh at. Changes in bus routes, problem youths, car parking charges, boundary rows, planning issues, the bread and butter information about your town. Sometimes it's boring, but for the people involved the stories are important - and in some small way we often get to change things. Okay it's not Watergate, but in some small way we are doing something good for the community. We do it without resorting to chequebook journalism, building contacts and often taking a fair bit of abuse.

Reporters from the nationals pop up every so often, generally nick the best parts of our stories and then go round and offer a couple of hundred quid to take a new picture and get a couple of new quotes. They don't follow things up, because at the end of the day they don't care what happens in your town long term. They want something that will stir the emotions of their readers that day.

The moral of the story? To be honest, there isn't one - I got home with steam coming out of my ears and wanted a whinge. But if you want to take something away from this 'don't insult the poor reporters who come out to cover your stories' would be a good start.

* The name of the town I work in has been changed to protect the guilty. And me, as - much as this evening work was hideous - I would generally like to keep my job.