Radical idea for hyperlocal coverage: Cover what readers actually read
(Photo by David Shankbone, blog.shankbone.org)
Completing the series of posts in response to Steve Buttry, he said:
Give me a detailed vision of a single slice of your vision for how a newsroom should operate.
If I were really looking for a newsroom job right now, I might discuss the nature of a reporter’s job, or how to keep the concept of editing alive in a digital-first world (hint: the answer is not to give up on editing entirely). But I’ll leave those discussions to the serious candidates. Instead, I’ll pitch a possibly stupid, possibly brilliant attack on a problem I’ve seen at one major-city paper after another: how to cover the suburbs.
I’ve lived through at least half a dozen reinventions of suburban coverage at three big papers. They usually work the same way each time: The paper does a readership survey. It asks people what they want to read more of (everything!) and what type of news they want most (local!). Armed with these vague answers, the editors proceed to do what they had planned to do in the first place, but now with the ability to claim they’re responding to the readers.
If the paper has a bunch of suburban bureaus and zoned sections, they close them. If the paper doesn’t, they open them. Rinse and repeat. If in one reinvention they decided to take the coverage plan they apply to their biggest government units and shrink it to fit key suburbs, in the next reinvention they declare that people want regional trend stories lightly salted with paragraphs about specific towns. Occasionally, they make noises about “chicken dinner” news, which means they’ve decided that suburban news is all trivial anyway, so why not go whole hog and just give the people lists of who’s serving what at the next church supper.
No matter what, veterans assigned to the suburbs end up seeing it as purgatory, while new hires look at it as just a way-station on the route to the real newsroom.
Your mileage may differ. But Patch isn’t the first outfit to find its big plans run aground on the shoals of weak advertising and the diminishing returns of diminishing your staff. Something isn’t working.
So the last time The Plain Dealer talked about reinventing suburban coverage, I said: Everything we’ve tried before eventually fails. As I put it:
I’ve been around long enough to see newspapers take several runs at zoning. Each time, they fall back, retrench, and then charge back up the hill into the cannons’ mouths as if the last failure never happened. I can smell the fuses burning again. Maybe it’s time to take a different approach.
The plan started with a way to narrow expectations. We would focus on content that offered the most promise of an intersection between reader interest and advertiser support: rec sports, dining & entertainment, schools, community events, shopping and major local news (traffic issues zoning changes, construction). But that still leaves a lot of things to cover. How to decide?
Papers always seem to try to apply standard news judgment to hyperlocal coverage. But let’s face it: Our standard news judgment tells us that very little of the stuff we churn out for zones is actually news.
What if the answer is that at the microlocal level, you give the readers what they want — and let them tell you, every week and every day, just what that is?
“Your choice for Solon news” means our hyperlocal pages on cleveland.com will respond directly to the users’ interests. The coverage is based not on our guesses of what users want, but their actual desires: The questions and tips they send in, the responses they give to polls that drive our choices of restaurant reviews or such.
“Your choice for …” subliminally reinforces the idea that we ARE the dominant news force in Northeast Ohio; we, collectively, are the region’s choice for all types of news.
“Your choice for …” would freak us out if anyone suggested applying it to the regular coverage. But hyperlocal coverage is a financial proposition.
“Your choice for …” says that we’re not going to fall into the trap of thinking users are going to provide all the content through volunteer efforts; they still want the kind of journalism that costs money to produce. We’re not saying “you give us the news,” we’re saying “you tell us what news you want us to pursue.”
“Your choice for …” gives us a way to deal with the reality: We’re not going to be able to match Patch, or ultralocal weeklies, story-for-story on the zoning commissions and school boards. We’re not going to pay enough to get stringers that would do what we really need — not just report, but act as evangelists for our coverage in the communities.
What we can do is split up the questions that come in — some can be answered immediately based on past reporting; some given to reporters (especially if they hold out the promise of being good stories), some assigned to stringers.
We can still provide some coverage that users don’t ask for directly — planning commissions, community events. But we can make a virtue of our lack of resources by turning the choice of just which meeting or street fair we’ll cover over to the users, like the high school “you pick the game” contests. Added bonus: Users who take the time to vote will surely come back again to see whether they won. And if they didn’t, they might be spurred to nag their friends into coming onto the site the next week to vote on their side.
“Your choice for” was an idea that had its roots both in PD history and in the new world of online journalism. While researching items for a blog I ran focusing on local nostalgia, I often found the info I wanted in PD columns devoted to answering all sorts of questions from readers. (That isn’t a PD-specific idea, of course, but it was nice to have evidence that local readers would participate.) And working online, I saw the power of interaction — the times readers supplied information in the comments that we hadn’t found; the questions they asked that got reporters to dig more and improve their stories.
Crowdsourcing also offered a small part of a solution to one of the basic problems of suburban coverage: how to throw enough bodies at it. At the same time, it could generate interest: Challenge the readers to answer the questions about local history that we couldn’t, or to tell us the best place for a new resident to walk her dog.
I had no illusions about the work it would take to get this started. We couldn’t just rely on questions flooding in as soon as we announced the plan. We’d have to cajole at community meetings, promote it in print and online. In the specific circumstance of Cleveland, we would be grafting this onto existing coverage provided by both The Plain Dealer and the weekly Sun papers. That would have to be coordinated.
My proposal didn’t fly. One person actually said “your choice for” was too pushy a slogan. No doubt even if the plan had gone forward, it would have been tweaked.
But more than anything, “your choice for” was a new way to look at coverage, giving up some of our gatekeeping role. That’s very much an online thing. Under the new order of things in Cleveland, reporters are getting instantaneous reports on the traffic of each one of their posts. While numbers don’t drive every decision, you’re a fool these days if you don’t use them to work out what readers are really reading. They’re light-years ahead of the guidance we got from those old readership surveys.
Although I didn’t include it in my proposal, it would have been natural to hone the plan based on changes seen in suburban readership. Even better, we could have set up a scientific model — control suburbs vs. “your choice” suburbs — to determine just what worked. As I concluded:
“Your choice for …” may not work. But then, newspapers have tried and failed at hyperlocal with the old formula several times. Wouldn’t it at least be fun to fail in a new way?
Earlier in this series:
Why newsrooms need “digital people,” and how to identify them
What digital skills does a newsroom leader need?
Does journalism make a difference in a community?