Riffing off of chad360's comments here at the Olympia columnist thread, I want to remind folks that if you've ever wanted to be a reporter, Olyblog is your chance.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about.

I try to every week write about what's in the city of Olympia packet. Nothing fancy, not too in depth, but its there mostly every week.

Sarah covers the local blog community.

Enpen photographs and documents Olympia art in the wild.

This is a list of "beats" that could be covered by folks fairly easily via the internet. Rob Richards has taken this reporter thing seriously, actually talking to people on the phone (what is that about)?

This list is just to get you thinking, maybe you can write about a local sports team, or cover your local neighborhood association (I'm looking at you epersona).

Crime in Olympia
Take a look at recent reports by the OPD and tell us what you think. The source is the daily summaries by OPD. I imagine this could be done at most weekly.

Watch (and edit maybe) the Oly city council meetings
Much more boring to me than reading the city council packets is actually watching the city council meetings. Though, they post movie files here for your enjoyment. And, if you're very tech savy, you can find out how to download the massive files and do some video editing and uploading for our enjoyment.

City of Tumwater Council
Similar to what I do with "This week in Olympia City Council," just for Tumwater. Ideally, you'd live in Tumwater and have some knowledge of local events and players. Tumwater posts its city council material here and you could do this weekly.

General government board meetings
The Thurston Regional Planning Council often posts the agendas and meeting packets of various county wide and specialty government groups, like the Capitol Lake Adaptive Management Plan group. You could regularly check TRPC's meeting webpage and tell us what is coming up and if anything sounds interesting.

Olympia School District
Same as the city of Olympia beat, just the board agendas and packets are here. I wish I could add Tumwater and NT to this list, but they don't post their packets online.

This isn't by any means a complete list. But, I hope to expand on these in the next few weeks with a few more details.