Items in the Briefing come from county commission agendas, state agency announcements, court filings and the regional press. Selection is on whether there is something worth saying, not on how much attention a story is already getting.
That second half matters more than it sounds. A short-term rental ordinance in a county of nine thousand people will not be covered by a metro daily, and it will determine what that county looks like for a decade.
A note on sourcing that applies to everything I file here. When a story involves workers, I want to know who is not being quoted before I file, and in this region that question has an increasingly predictable answer. The poultry plants, the carpet mills in north Georgia, the construction crews putting up everything currently going up on the plateau: these workforces are substantially Latino, they are frequently the people most affected by the decisions in these items, and they appear in regional coverage mainly as a demographic statistic.
I am bilingual and I make the calls. That is not a virtue, it is the job, and it is the reason my items sometimes run a week later than everyone else’s.
The Briefing publishes Monday at seven, Central.