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.
On behalf of the First Amendment: ‘Dear Mr. President’
Dear Mr. President: Congratulations on your election victory.
That’s a non-partisan congratulations. The First Amendment, with its 45 words encompassing our core freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition, doesn’t take political sides.
The year 2020 has seen a dramatic increase in the ways our fellow citizens are using the First Amendment. There’s every reason to believe 2021 will be more of the same.
By this Election Day, a record number of us exercised our right to vote, the ultimate expression of our rights to petition the government.
Years of simmering injury, insult and resentment over blatant and hidden racism have boiled over into a wave of public protests, prompted by the repeated deaths of Black men and women at the hands of police officers, and rooted in economic and social systems that people of color see as tilted against them
The national crisis that is COVID-19 is tearing at the very fabric of daily life — and even as it hammers everything from employment numbers to how we sometimes can say farewell to the dying, the pandemic is sparking street demonstrations for and against health measures like masks and business shutdowns.
I write to ask that as you consider your election victory, you keep these First Amendment considerations in mind — using the order of the five freedoms, to help organize your thoughts.
Religion in the U.S. today covers a remarkably diverse form of beliefs and practices, unique in the world. Understandably, that creates ongoing conflict as overall social values and individual matters of conscience collide. Some call this a culture war. I hope you will think of it as does my Freedom Forum colleague, Dr. Charles Haynes: An opportunity to find common ground — focusing on those places where we do agree, even as we recognize and celebrate our differences.
What of free speech? For nearly a century, most battles around this freedom focused on whether or not government could restrict or punish individuals for their speech. In this next presidential term, the focus will be on relatively new ideas: There are ideas, words or symbolic actions that are too dangerous to be heard, or that the right to speak includes a right not to listen — or to be protected from even hearing.
Please keep in mind that ideas are not eliminated by silencing those who give voice to them. More speech, in more ways, is the better path. It is a proper government role to find ways to encourage diversity of thought, but not to become a “national nanny” or worse, an autocratic censor deciding what we should see, read and hear.
The next generation will be ill-served to face an assuredly contentious world if they aren’t aware of a range of ideas, concepts and creeds. A need to reinforce the key positive ideals of our society for the future must include free discussion of where we have fallen short in word, actions or law in the past.
A free press is being challenged by the triple tag team of economic loss, public mistrust and new competition. An attendant casualty has been our collective belief in “truth” — or at least accepted facts based on solid journalism, not punditry across a myriad of new information sources.
You don’t have direct responsibility to make journalism better, but things are so dire you and Congress may be needed to help ensure we have any effective journalism at all.
The number of local news outlets is plunging — and “news deserts” in which no local news media exists — are growing. The watchdog-on-government role of a free press — so vital to the informed citizenry needed by a democracy — cannot be allowed to simply evaporate.
The unthinkable for free press advocates of not long ago — tax breaks, operating subsidies, support for “public” journalism as we have seen for public television and radio — may well become over the next four years unavoidable.
What we do know, based on annual surveys the Freedom Forum has done since 1997, is that most of us support that watchdog duty. Work with that consensus.
Assembly and petition have had rebirths. When frustrated, Americans always protested, on our streets and now online. Your responsibility here starts with listening — even when others are shouting.
Yes, you must respond to those who go outside First Amendment protections into violence. But those responses must be tempered by the recognition that peaceful dissent is democracy, not disloyalty.
I write knowing you and the nation face many challenges. But I also write with the profound hope that this letter will be a reminder that these core freedoms empower all of us to freely talk with each other in many different ways, with a goal of determining the best possible solutions for the greatest number of people, in the shortest amount of time. The First Amendment doesn’t require — or provide for — perfection, but it fuels democracy.
With that spirit in mind, good fortune in the next four years.
This column expresses the views of Gene Policinski, senior fellow for the First Amendment, Freedom Forum.