Nothing is more satisfying than looking at your product – whether it’s the print or digital edition – and smiling in approval, “We’ve got it covered. We’re connecting with our readers.”
Developing relationships with subscribers and advertisers is imperative to success in today’s
fractured media landscape. The stakes are even higher as many newspapers navigate the economic impact of the pandemic.
So play to your strengths. Connect the names and faces of those involved in and affected by items in your everyday news report. Tell their stories.
As a first step, collect a half-dozen copies of your newspaper and sit down for a brainstorming session. Go beyond your newsroom. Your entire newspaper family often represents a great cross-section of your community and can contribute valuable insights. Review the editions, and pay particular attention to the names and faces of the newsmakers. Circle them in red, and make a list.
The exercise is especially helpful when examining coverage of local government meetings. Do many of the same names appear over and over? As an editor friend points out: Are you giving more attention to the folks in the front of the room versus those in the back of the room? Are you writing for the sources or for those affected by government decisions?
Circumstances and deadlines may well dictate that you report just the facts in the next edition. Then, take the next steps.
Consider these examples. A school board raises extracurricular fees to help close the gap between expenses and revenues. A city council imposes plastic bag fees on local merchants, maybe even adopts an outright ban. A county board establishes a grant program for businesses impacted by the coronavirus.
Each action presents possibilities for second-day stories and substantive content that can distinguish you from your competitors. The follow-up reports inevitably will include individuals not normally appearing in your newspaper.
There are opportunities beyond government meetings to broaden your portfolio of newsmakers. For example:
Chambers of commerce have their annual awards banquet recognizing excellence in a variety of categories. At least a half-dozen businesses are often recognized. The list is ready-made news for the next edition. Don’t stop there. Profile each of the honorees in successive editions, giving attention to additional names and faces.
Election season is past us, but here’s an idea for the next cycle. Coverage, for good reason, focuses on the candidates. How about profiling the chair of a campaign committee, the person who really drives the push for votes? Highlight someone in his or her first campaign; highlight a veteran of several campaigns.
High school sports are the heart of many communities, and head coaches naturally receive a great deal of attention. What drives assistant coaches? How are they selected, and why do they cherish their supportive roles? You’ll probably find interesting stories and new faces to highlight.
Police blotters are another opportunity to link local residents to events. Consider this report. A bank foreclosed on a house, and a court order was issued to evict the family. Police surrounded the home for two hours, and all ended peacefully. It was the 35th eviction ordered that day. That fact prompts all sorts of questions and potential follow-up stories. Did the evicted families have a common profile? Where did they spend the next night, week, month? Are there community resources to assist these families? It’s a sensitive story and one that will require extra effort to pursue. It also will result in a host of new voices on your pages.
Collecting and publishing the news is an imperfect endeavor at best. Connecting with individuals outside of the normal network of sources often demands more work. And everything is more challenging during the pandemic due to the combination of greater isolation among individuals and diminished newsroom resources.
All newspapers strive to consistently produce a report that reflects a living history of their communities. That necessarily should drive you to expand the catalog of newsmakers used to tell your stories.
News reports also don’t want to be predictable. Broadening the menu of names and faces that appear in your products reflects journalism at its best and generates solid content. It’s a win-win for your newspaper and your community.
Thankful We Can Speak Our Minds This Thanksgiving
At the Freedom Forum, we’ve thought about creating T-shirts that read: “Free speech: Complicating Thanksgiving Dinner since 1791.”
But this pandemic-era Thanksgiving, as families and friends assemble around a Zoom screen or an actual dining room table to celebrate, all of the freedoms of the First Amendment should be high on the list as we count our blessings.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution set a standard for the world. Our founding fathers said that Americans should have the right — without government interference — to speak their minds, practice a faith or choose not to, publish their ideas, assemble to protest or support a cause and petition the government for change.
“This is what is so great about America,” says social strategist Philippa Hughes. “We should be giving thanks that we can all have these amazing divergent views and nobody’s going to get killed for having these conversations.”
Shocked by the divisions revealed during the 2016 presidential election, Hughes launched a dinner club called Blueberries & Cherries, bringing into her Washington, D.C., dining room die-hard Democrats and righteous Republicans, armed with forks and knives, to discuss their beliefs in hopes of better understanding each other. Each meal ended with a blueberry cherry crisp, deliciously bridging the blue and red divide.
Later, supported by a grant, Hughes expanded her events across the country into Looking for America, which hosts art events and conversations in which people discuss what it means to be American.
Hughes’s goal is to break down the “polarization industrial complex” that’s often fed by social media. “That is a construct we have created,” she says. “There is profit and power to be had from keeping us polarized. I don’t profit from that, so why do we let others profit from that?”
Thanksgiving 2020 brings families together after a wrenching year of political upheaval and a deadly pandemic, when Americans exercised their First Amendment freedoms with newfound vigor:
On Thanksgiving, free speech will be at the forefront of your dinner table. Can you, with your Trump 2024 bumper sticker, keep things civil with your niece in the Black Lives Matter T-shirt? Hughes has some advice for how to keep this from being a dinner sponsored by Tums.
“A great way to begin your meal is just to be grateful we can do this and have this conversation at all,” Hughes says. “That’s the beauty of America … You can have deeply held views and express them and we don’t have to hate each other.”
Tip No. 1: Pretend you’re an anthropologist. Be curious and ask questions, but don’t interrogate.
Ask the kind of questions that show you’re listening, Hughes says. “Say, ‘Oh, tell me more about that …’ Try to have a sense of delight and joy about it. It’s fun to hear stories, especially when it’s your family. You had fun with them before; you can continue to have fun.”
Tip No. 2: Share your experiences in a nonthreatening way.
It can be frustrating if the other side does not seem to be curious about you. “Find ways to share yourself — real stories beyond the data and the talking points,” Hughes says.
Tip No. 3: Don’t pepper folks with facts.
When it comes to forming opinions, facts don’t always matter.
Studies have shown that our perceptions are formed more by our experiences — however limited — than anything else, Hughes says. People who are confronted with challenging information tend to dig in their heels rather than open their minds to other possibilities. “People don’t want to feel dumb.”
Tip No. 4: No name-calling. If things get too heated, step away.
Hughes says conservatives may avoid conversations for good reason. “They’ll say … ‘I don’t want to get yelled at or called stupid by the liberals.’ That’s a very valid concern. The left does spend a lot of time calling the other side idiots.”
A liberal in a family of conservatives, Hughes says, “We’ve gotten close to not speaking. If you are close to that, step away, leave the room, get some fresh air. Take a walk together.”
Tip No. 5: Empathy does not equal endorsement.
“We may never reach common ground, but at least we’ll come to an understanding of why the person believes what they … believe,” says Hughes. “The only thing we can agree on is our humanity. We don’t have to agree on policy and how to fix problems.”Final tip: Always pass the dishes to the right. That’s not a political statement, it’s just etiquette.
This column expresses the views of Patty Rhule, vice president of content innovation, Freedom Forum.