I really liked John Robinson’s blog post about fixing local news, so I tweeted about it:
Every local editor should read this post by @johnrobinson & ask & answer how you’re going to fix local news: johnlrobinson.com/2012/12/fix-lo… — Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) December 29, 2012
Since I was tweeting after midnight, I figured my tweet might go unnoticed. But 20 people retweeted it and 17 favorited it (not all the same people). And a couple people responded. Cory Bergman, general manager of Breaking News, offered a valid criticism:
@stevebuttry don’t most local news execs know the core problem still exists? that article merely restates it without solution. — Cory Bergman (@corybe) December 29, 2012
Then Lisa P. White, a Digital First Media colleague who covers the communities of Martinez and Pleasant Hill, Calif., for the Contra Costa Times, responded with several tweets.
@stevebuttry As a city reporter this banal criticism of local news annoys me. What are the fresh, creative ways to cover local news? — Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 29, 2012
@stevebuttryAlso, there’s a lot of room between meetings coverage and long investigations. City reporters are writing those stories, too. — Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 29, 2012
@stevebuttry Isn’t it incumbent on local papers to write about the city budget, public employee contracts etc.? Not the most exciting topics — Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 29, 2012
@stevebuttry but aren’t we supposed to keep public agencies and pols accountable? And document how tax dollars are spent? — Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 29, 2012
@stevebuttry Folks think they won’t miss local papers because they have no idea that local TV news just rips us off most of the time. — Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 29, 2012
@stevebuttryIt’s easy to say ‘change local news’ without offering viable ideas. Not saying it’s perfect, but it’s not terrible either. — Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 29, 2012
While I still think John raised some valid observations about the need to rethink how we cover local news, the questions and criticisms were also valid. So I’m going to encourage John to share some specific suggestions to improve local news. (Update: John has responded.) But I’ll also note that I shared some suggestions earlier this month, asking what newsrooms should stop doing and earlier this year, I posted about how Digital First reporters on any beat should change their work and about beat blogs.
I’ll continue here with some more thoughts on how a newsroom might change some or all of its beats:
Newsrooms should experiment with new beat structures and reporting approaches. For instance, instead of having one local government reporter covering the city and one covering the county, with meeting coverage a heavy part of both reporters’ work, you might have one reporter covering how local government works, with meeting coverage a minor part of her work. (This is not a suggestion for staff reduction; you might assign the other reporter to a beat focusing on aspects of community life outside the current beat structure.)
The local government reporter would, as Lisa suggested, dig into city budgets, contracts, expense accounts and reports to find stories more interesting than the meetings. The reporter would write less about meetings and more about how the parks department and sewage treatment plant and streets department work. The reporter would explain how much the move from city trash collection to private trash collection is saving or costing the residents and how the mayor’s brother-in-law sold the city its latest batch of cop cars and how the affluent neighborhoods always get plowed first during a snowstorm.
Sometimes the reporter’s work would require attendance at meetings, but coverage may not be meeting stories. Maybe the reporter works closely with SeeClickFix, reporting on problems in the community and how they get fixed (or don’t), and what things need more thorough and permanent solutions.
The other former government reporter might be assigned to create a new beat that your staff hasn’t covered lately: Perhaps pets. Or non-profits. Or life struggles. Or commuting. Or work. Or finding work. Or families. Or social life (I don’t mean old-style society news, but how and where people are interacting in your community). Maybe the approach would be to spend a year exploring different potential beats for a month or two or three each and assessing after a year which beat(s) merit full-time attention.
Or maybe you decide you still want two reporters covering local government but don’t assign one to the city and one to the county. Maybe one works deeper enterprise and investigative stories and one works daily news. The daily news might include meetings of both jurisdictions, but fewer meeting stories. She liveblogs meetings she attends and writes advances on the big issues coming up at meetings. But many of the daily stories are how the city addresses (or fails to address) the biggest issues identified on SeeClickFix. Maybe one reporter focuses on money — taxes and budgets — and the other focuses on what government does and how it serves the community.
Maybe you shift the attention of an education beat away from what school boards and superintendents do and more toward what teachers and students do in the classrooms. Maybe you shift the attention of a health-care beat away from hospitals and health-care organizations and more toward doctors and patients and families.
I wrote in 2009 about the illness and death of my 16-year-old nephew, Patrick Devlin, who was working on his Eagle Scout project on his deathbed. The metro newspaper covering his area never wrote about him, except for an obituary written by the funeral home. They didn’t write when his sister, Kat, had a stem-cell transplant for a related blood disorder. And they didn’t write this Christmas, when Make-A-Wish sent Kat and her parents and her best friend to Hawaii.
I guarantee you that the routine beat reporting of that newspaper every day produces at least a half-dozen stories that would be less interesting to the community than a half-dozen or more stories they could have done about the community events that showed support for the Devlin family. The Devlins’ health struggles have been a community story, with Scouts and schools and workplaces rallying for support in a variety of ways that were as important as the meeting stories their newspaper was covering and more interesting. A smaller weekly paper made brief mention of the Eagle project when it was completed, in another story about local Eagle Scouts.
I’m not going to identify the Devlins’ local newspapers here, because those stories are happening in communities everywhere, outside the beat structure of local newspapers, so they go uncovered or undercovered. Kat is shooting hundreds of photos from Hawaii, and I know her snowy New England community would enjoy seeing her photos and reading about her holiday trip.
I’m not saying that Make a Wish or illnesses or Scouts should be a beat in your community. But if you took a traditional beat that isn’t generating much interest and redirected that reporter to covering patients or families or non-profits or community life, you might be more likely to learn about stories like this. (I should note here that many news organizations do occasionally tell stories like those in the Devlin family, but they aren’t structured to find the stories or tell them regularly. We tell them when someone on our staff happens to hear about a family facing an unusual challenge.)
I don’t know of a news organization that has a pets beat. But every local news organization covers pets occasionally. And when you do, you hear great feedback from readers. The Denver Post set traffic records when it posted a slideshow of a Maine coon cat encountering a mountain lion through a glass patio door.
What if we made pets a local beat? I should be clear here that I am not the pet lover in our home. I tolerate Duffy, our schnauzer. Someone who liked pets would think of lots more ideas for covering a pets beat, but I can get you started. You’d analyze databases of local pet licenses, reporting on the most popular local breeds and names. You’d report on whether adoptions at local shelters are up or down. You’d report on leash laws and new dog parks and exotic animals that violated local laws. The beat wouldn’t be all about funny cat videos, but if someone local had a cat (or dog or horse) video that went viral, you sure would report it. You’d do investigative projects on puppy mills and dog fights. Like the government reporter networks with elected and appointed officials and activists who push and prod the local government, the pets reporter would network with veterinarians, animal shelters, dog catchers, pet stores, breeder associations and pet care businesses.
As I write this, I am questioning myself: Do I really want someone converting a local government beat to coverage of pets? I’m not sure I do, but I encourage the conversation and consideration: Which do people care more about in your community: pets or local government? Find out. I bet your community has more pets than it does voters, especially in local elections. (Nationally, we have more cats and dogs than people who voted in November.)
Maybe pets aren’t a full-time beat. Maybe they’re part of a combo beat: pets and families or pets and gardening. Or maybe a non-profits beat covers the animal shelters and organizations that take pets to nursing homes or provide assistance dogs to people with disabilities.
Or maybe you cut a government beat back to 60 or 80 percent of a reporter’s work and have him devote one or two days a week to a beat such as pets or families or non-profits.
Maybe rather than launching a new beat, you might reconsider some beats you’ve lost as you’ve cut staff: religion (perhaps with a shift away from religious organizations and more toward people living their faith), business, agriculture, environment, transportation (in each case considering a different approach).
In each of these cases, your approach needs to figure out how you can engage the community: Who is blogging about pets or family or faith or business in your community? Can you aggregate or curate their content? Do you need to aggregate or curate community content in your topic area from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram or other social media? Can you provide a place for people to submit their photos, videos or stories of pets, sermons, church choirs, new businesses, etc.
A news organization that takes the time and the risks to find and cover different stories in the community will learn valuable lessons for other newsrooms. Share those lessons with me and I’ll blog about them (or link to your blog posts about them). Or if you’re already covering some new areas and learning some of those lessons, share your stories in the comments here. Which topics should your newsroom consider for new beats or expanded coverage?
Update: I thought about our beats at TBD as I was writing this post, but then forgot to mention them. Erik Wemple, editor of TBD, did an outstanding job of thinking of creative ways to cover the Washington community, finding slices that no one else was covering well.
Dave Jamieson‘s beat was going to be pedestrian life in Washington. I think that would have been a good beat and would have generated plenty of news. But the Washington Metro transit system became hugely newsworthy shortly after we launched, so Dave covered Metro more than walking. Kevin Robillard‘s beat was fact-checking local news figures (largely a political beat, but he wasn’t limited to politics and the beat was defined more by the reporting technique than by topic). We had a three-person team covering neighborhoods. John Metcalfe blogged about weather. Amanda Hess covered sex and gender issues. Jenny Rogers was our list reporter, her beat defined not by topic but by story form. She later took on groceries as a beat.
Some said that TBD failed, so maybe you should dismiss everything we tried there. But I argued that TBD was never given a chance to succeed. Allbritton Communications began shifting away from the original business strategy even before we launched. But our traffic was outstanding, and I think that reflected both the wisdom of Erik’s beat coverage and the hustle of the reporters in developing their new beats.
I launched the poll before adding this section on TBD, so these beats aren’t reflected in the poll. But feel free to vote for them in “other” if you like them.
Another update: Jen Connic and Jack Lail have blogged on this topic and Josh Stearns blogged about it in October. And I’ve added lots more tweets below the poll.
Another update:
This post is generating some Twitter response. I especially like the point that the answer to this question will vary by community and that we should ask the community’s help in deciding how to cover it:
@stevebuttry @corybe @lisa_p_white I’ll add a post on ways to address local news, tho I think it is different for each community.
— John Robinson (@johnrobinson) December 30, 2012
@johnrobinson I agree – it’s different or every community and the community should have input. @stevebuttry @corybe @lisa_p_white
— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) December 30, 2012
Answer: Ask your community RT @jcstearns .@stevebuttry asks: What beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/wha…
— Brittany Binowski (@binowski) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry Great points on getting coverage closer to the community. Something @patchtweet and hyperlocal do very well.
— Jeff DeBalko (@jeffdebalko) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry how about something like Google’s 80-20 idea for beat reporters. Four days of beat, 1 day of coverage reporter wants to cover.
— Matthew Schott (@matthew_schott) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry Like traffic, development are huge local issues people talk about, but they’re not covered well because they’re “boring.”
— Jen Connic (@jenconnic) December 30, 2012
A good question & survey from @stevebuttry The challenge with transformation is rethinking everything you already know. stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/wha…
— Scott S Downs (@scottsdowns) December 30, 2012
A logical sidebar to the local news beat discussion by @stevebuttry – what changes are necessary in headline writing? poynter.org/how-tos/newsga…
— Scott S Downs (@scottsdowns) December 30, 2012
.@stevebuttry @erikwemple Here’s a local news org with a pets beat: annarbor.com/pets/
— Jen Eyer (@jeneyer) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry @erikwemple Odd to see business coverage poll so low. Offices, homes, shops and restaurants opening or closing matters a lot.
— Rob Pegoraro (@robpegoraro) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry how about something like Google’s 80-20 idea for beat reporters. Four days of beat, 1 day of coverage reporter wants to cover.
— Matthew Schott (@matthew_schott) December 30, 2012
.@matthew_schott Ideally those should be the same. @stevebuttry
— Mark Loundy (@MarkLoundy) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry plus the transparency to explain our choices (which requires some thoughtful, insightful (gasp!) self-promotion)
— Joel Welin (@emporian) December 30, 2012
@newsfuturist @stevebuttry Diversity is an issue. Local coverage could be better if newsrooms were representative of communities they serve.
— Amy (@teruterubouzu) December 30, 2012
@jenconnic @stevebuttry As soon as school district runs $4.5 million shortfall, readers will ask, where was the local paper? Covering pets?
— Scott McIntosh (@ScottMcIntosh12) December 30, 2012
@scottmcintosh12 @jenconnic Did I say not to cover local schools? One option I covered was a beat covering local govt finances.
— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry @jenconnic The problem is trying to do everything and giving short shrift to some areas. I hear what you’re saying though.
— Scott McIntosh (@ScottMcIntosh12) December 30, 2012
@scottmcintosh12 @jenconnic You’re always giving something short shrift. I’m saying reassess priorities & approach.
— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) December 30, 2012
Rethinking beats in 3 acts: @johnrobinson: johnlrobinson.com/2012/12/fix-lo… @stevebuttry: stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/wha… @jcstearns: pbs.org/mediashift/201…
— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry @johnrobinson @corybe Thanks for the thoughtful response, Steve. Some good ideas here. But for papers that cover lots of cities
— Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry @johnrobinson @corybe I think we need a broader approach. We don’t have the staff to add a nonprofit and cover city govt well.
— Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry @johnrobinson @corybe but a city reporter could make nonprofits, faith and social services a regular part of her beat.
— Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry @johnrobinson @corybe The way we approach city reporting at @cctimes is pretty broad, more than mtgs coverage and budgets.
— Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry @johnrobinson @corybe but I agree we could do a better job by doing more stories that originate outside city hall.
— Lisa P. White (@lisa_p_white) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry @lisa_p_white @johnrobinson @corybe I’ve done both city and faith/SS/NFPs, as JR knows. If you combine them, you’ll miss stuff.
— Lex Alexander (@lexalexander) December 30, 2012
@lisa_p_white I’m not surprised.@stevebuttry @johnrobinson @corybe
— Lex Alexander (@lexalexander) December 30, 2012
@stevebuttry Utility, watchdog, quality of life … old ideas, yet few do it well. Thanks for rekindling the fire
— LaurenceReisman (@LaurenceReisman) December 30, 2012
Worthwhile topic on modern beat structures at local papers from @stevebuttrystevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/wha…
— Tom Moore (@tfmoore) December 31, 2012
Old school substance, new school breadth. Building and securing the audience no matter the substrate.
You have shared more compelling reporting. I rate this your most compelling vision. It sure feels like the most I empowering step forward into the future of publishing.
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I blush, Bill. Thanks for those kind words.
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[…] 12/30/12 UPDATE: More on this topic John Robinson and Steve Buttry. […]
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Great post, as usual. I’ll respond in a bit — New Year’s vacation, you know — but, like you, I have had several previous posts about what editors should do. I also think that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. But I’ll elaborate later.
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Thanks, John! You have blogged about improving local news coverage frequently. I may curate some of those links here. I certainly look forward to your elaboration.
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I can already see the derisive comments – ‘so digital first journalism is about replacing coverage of local government with coverage of local pets’.
And hopefully that’s not what you’re saying, because as boring as it is and as boring as readers might find it, the watchdog role is still essential. But you’re right, does it require attendance at every meeting, or could resources be better spent elsewhere sometimes? Particularly to engage with the community on issues or topics they feel passionate about.
A mantra I’ve heard repeatedly from research done for local newspapers in Australia is “four times the faces”. Basically, from what I recall, the research shows people in the community want to see people from the community that they know. That’s engagement and relevance for them. Also, being part of the community by telling community stories.
Keep in mind the research was specifically about readers of local newspapers and their print product. With a lot of suggested changes to give readers what they want – whether it be pets, family, school life, community events or, a big one, solutions to problems in the news. Crime? Police are doing x&y, or you can take these practical steps to stay safe(r).
These aren’t exactly new ideas, but the community paper isn’t necessarily serving the community any more. It’s almost back to basics.
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Thanks, Dave. I actually thought about that potential criticism myself. And anyone who would make that criticism is misrepresenting my blog post, so they probably are misrepresenting the work of local government in their coverage. I gave multiple examples of ways to rethink local government coverage without shifting resources away from local government. I don’t think that writing meeting stories is the best way to perform the watchdog function. And I am OK with shifting some resources away from coverage of local government if your community cares more about other topics, issues and slices of community life. That’s a call that should be made community by community (as some tweets I will be adding note).
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Pets and Religion are two areas of American life that get very little coverage relative to the importance they have in the lives of members of our communities.
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Also love the TBD Pedestrian Life beat. I notice that I’m particularly tribal: depending on whether I’m in the sheet-metal and steering-wheel tribe or the shoe-leather tribe my thoughts, for instance, on powering through a yellow light change dramatically…
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Excellent point, Tim! My son was hit in a crosswalk once by a member of the sheet-metal and steering-wheel tribe. Of course, pedestrian life isn’t a beat for every community. But every community has significant tribes uncovered.
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[…] Meanwhile, Steve Buttry adds to his previous posts on this topic with more specific thoughts on how a newsroom might change some or all of its beats. […]
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I’m with Brittany, above — ask your community. Do what Bill Watson, formerly of the Pocono Record (a Newspaper Next pilot site), did — ask what the pain points are in people’s daily lives. In his case the answer came back schools, traffic/commuting and growth and development. So that’s where they put their resources. Their education reporter was responsible for everything in the paper and online that was education-related, across all their communities. This forced a more policy-directed, holistic view. Same with growth and development issues in an area that was suburbanizing rapidly. The focus was on giving residents the information they needed in order to be able to figure out what they should do next. That was the added value.
Related: Who are the people and groups in your community who live in the shadows — immigrants, those in poverty (I’m aware of at least one newspaper that has a poverty beat), the LGBT community, older residents, etc.? Don’t just do a feature; chronicle how their struggles are different in a way that readers can see how they could be addressed. Your role is both to shine a light and to highlight the way forward.
Might do a brief blog post about the role of local news organizations as community-builders, so thanks for the inspiration!
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Please share that link here when you post, Elaine.
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Expanding on my Twitter reply: Business coverage–defined beyond “how much money did local companies make or lose”–should be a bigger part of local news. What buildings go up or down, and what sort of housing, offices, retail and restaurants will occupy or did fill them, affects people’s everyday lives a lot more than the output of many local government meetings. You walk or drive by these changes every day, and they shape where you’ll want to walk or drive in the future.
And yet if I want to find out about that kind of news in my own neighborhood, my best resource is the neighborhood mailing list, followed by blogs like ARLnow.com and then maybe Greater Greater Washington and finally the Washington Business Journal. The daily newspaper of record is often the last to cover them.
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[…] read Steve Buttry’s blog post today on what beats local news should cover with great interest, mainly since local news has always been my biggest passion. One of the reasons […]
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I just wrote a blog post in response to this post. Thanks for taking up the matter, Steve. But I do want to say I picked both transportation and commuting because I think in some ways those are the same thing. Traffic issues also fall under that. I was a big fan of the TBD pedestrian beat (and isn’t covering the Metro also a pedestrian issue?).
But I do think development needs to be added here. Development affects neighborhood changes, sometimes in significant ways, and affects everyone’s daily lives.
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Thanks for including my tweet, Steve! I think this is a great post, and love this vision as well.
I think it gets right to the heart of the matter: That news organizations today are not covering the stories that their audiences want to read — that they’re not giving their communities what they want, to the company’s own detriment.
Because, if news organizations were giving their audiences what they want — and focusing on long-term instead of short-term growth — their traffic would ultimately be through the roof.
So, how do you give your (unique) audience what it wants? In my opinion, two ways:
1. By asking your users. This can be through personal e-mails (if your website collects info on your users that have accounts), surveys and forms in news entries, and responding in the comments.
2. By analyzing your site’s data. Yes — UVs and PVs, as well as comment and reply volumes. This should be done as a site overall, but also by vertical and beat. Organizations need to know which beats do better than others (assuming that the more views a beat gets, the more people like it), and also, which articles within that beat get the most/least views. The newsroom should then writes more articles/beats on those stories that get the most views, and less articles/beats on those stories that get the least views.
IMO, the problem with newsrooms today is that they don’t have teams whose sole purpose is to analyze the quantitative data (traffic and comment numbers) and the qualitative data (comment content, personalized user feedback) and then integrate them into the editorial process and coverage — the last part being key.
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I think your post is great, and could go farther. It isn’t just about the topics of the beats, it’s about the process itself (as you also point out). There are dozens of things my local (big-city) newspaper could do to improve, but the top 4 are:
1. Show your work. I can’t tell you how many times I read an article that references something interesting or important and there is NO link or even reprint of the material. Example: Local hospitals’ Medicare payments cut or increased based on their scores on 12 measures. But the measures aren’t linked or named in the article! Even when readers add that kind of value in the comments below, the story is never updated to include their input.
2. Capitalize on your ability to provide incremental coverage. I cannot BELIEVE that we are still watching newspaper reporters start every story over as if the reader knows nothing (and sometimes, as if the reporter knows nothing!). If you’re covering a murder, link to previous stories on the murder. If you’re covering a developing story like tax assessments or school closings, for heaven’s sake install a permanent sidebar with links and one-sentence annotations. Politicians capitalize on the lack of this sort of coverage to play Etch-a-Sketch. The least a local paper can do is make it slightly more embarassing for them to say things that utterly contradict what they said last month.
3. Do not throw your own historical content down the memory hole. In the last decade, I have taken to compulsively e-mailing articles to myself because there is no way to count on ever being able to find them again. Newspapers’ search engines are horrible, Google’s caching is uneven, and libraries’ access to paid archives is subject to the whims of state budget cuts. But for readers, one of the most valuable things you can do is allow people to see your old stuff. You know what I’d like, rather than a puff piece on the new school superintendent? Side-by-side reprints of the *last* 3 superintendents’ “Welcome to town” profiles and some Monday-morning analysis of what those pieces missed.
4. Request op-eds from actual community members. As far as I can tell, op-eds consist entirely of essays from people with a specific agenda to push, many of whom don’t even live in my city. Some of that is fine — I *want* to read op-eds about the latest reserach from Brookings, or an author with a good book to advertise. But why can’t 2 or 3 op-eds a week be based on an editor’s request from a local community resident? I could list 30 people off the top of my head who have fascinating and compelling things to say if someone gave them a 600-word podium.
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[…] « What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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I’m entering the conversation late, but much of it reminds me of a possible solution that we came up with at Knight Ridder. We asked each paper to identify two or three threads that defined the community. Woven together, those threads formed a community’s master narrative, a way to decide how to allocate newsroom resources. San Jose already had identified technology and the culture surrounding technology as its master narrative (even though I didn’t hear the term until a year later). We asked other papers to do the same. I particularly remember the master narrative of the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pa: Penn State, Penn State football and a new interstate highway that would link State College with the rest of the world. The CDT very much allocated its resources to cover those compelling subjects. (Little did we realize just how important the first two elements of the master narrative would become in later years.)
I found it interesting that the term “city reporter” came up in this conversation. That, of course, is journalist-speak for “city-hall reporter.” But might it be useful to assign a true CITY reporter–the person who discovers that a new Starbuck’s is opening or that a thoroughfare will be closed for repair? No, I don’t mean “micro-local” coverage, which I believe is a synonym for the boring local coverage that John Robinson cited. Yes, I know that such intense coverage is of interest to a few folks. But reaching a few folks just doesn’t seem practical. That’s why the “master narrative” is appealing. It aims to find the threads that unite a community rather than the tiny filament that doesn’t bind much of anything.
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[…] I went off on a New Year’s Eve/Day vacation without a laptop, and all hell broke loose. Steve Buttry, Guy Lucas, Jack Lail and Jennifer Connic all weighed in on how newspapers should fix local news. […]
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[…] the responses to his original post about fixing local news. I came across the original post via Steve Buttry’s post and wrote my own response about listening to the […]
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I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but there’s nothing new here. We were having this exact same debate in the 1980s when I started in newspapers. And the industry has tried all of these suggestions, even a pets beat. Social media has added a new dimension but hasn’t changed the basic dilemma: how best to serve the readers with limited resources? Our newsroom staff has been cut from 130 a decade ago to less than 60. We’re having troubles just covering the basics. So please don’t pat yourself on the back for coming up with failed ideas that weren’t even original a quarter century ago when I first heard them. I give credit for trying, but I’m frustrated to see the same ideas recycled again and again.
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Ultimately, stories need to be about people while also providing substance. I think this is one thing local TV news has sort of figured out (though I don’t agree with the way they always cover those stories). But people connect with people. Some of our most successful projects at The Denver Post have been those that focused very heavily on a single individual to illustrate a larger point. Meeting stories, while important, don’t quite have that element. Lots of good points in here, and thanks for writing it.
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[…] which was mostly an extraordinary number of internal links): Chuck Hagel, 10; narcissism, 19; beats, 28; plagiarism, 10; what should we stop […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] Steve tells the story of the illness and death of his 16-year-old nephew, Patrick, who was working on his Eagle Scout project on his death bed. Or of his niece, Kat, who had a stem cell transplant and when Make A Wish sent Kat to Hawaii. Huge community support. Great stories about, presumably, wonderful people. […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better? […]
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[…] John Robinson’s (2012) critique of local news as boring, or maybe just covered that way. Blogger Steve Buttry (2012) has two posts with reader comments on the […]
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[…] also can change action significantly by creating a new beat, which generally involves shutting down an old beat or shifting someone from a different position […]
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