Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Pet Peeve: lack of bill numbers.

A pet peeve of mine is when news outlets manage to go on and on about a piece of legislation without ever mentioning the bill number as if they can't afford the additional 8 characters worth of ink or 1.5 seconds worth of air time. That's a disservice to citizens who want to investigate the matter further and comment to their legislators.

To their credit, I've noticed the Tennessean has been doing a better job of including bill numbers this year and gone a step further by frequently including contact info for legislators.

The rest of you professional journalist: give the average citizen a bit of a hand and include those bill numbers. Thanks.

In the meantime, here's the State of Tennessee's search page for legislation. Ya might wanna bookmark that page.

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