Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Traditional TV news stations can take an audience-centered approach to election coverage by following the lead of nonprofit and digital news outlets.
I don’t need to tell you this year’s election season has been noisy. The drama of the presidential race is sucking the air out of the room. Pew Research found that people were tuning out of the race (and therefore tuning out our coverage) before the summer even started. That can be detrimental to the down-ballot races that have a significant impact on local audiences.
I also thought about how formulaic our TV news coverage of elections has become. Because of staffing levels and old habits, we often default to horse race coverage. We cover political contributions, we cover in-person candidate events and we probably stream a debate or two. But, dayturn coverage doesn’t get to the heart of what people actually want to know about candidates before they cast their vote.
I started to wonder how we could do this better. How can we provide relevant, useful coverage of candidates and races in our local communities? Turns out, nonprofit and digital-first newsrooms are already doing this and have been for quite some time. It was time to take those audience-focused principles and upend the type of coverage TV newsrooms typically do for elections. This election season, we are determined to cover races and issues by informing and empowering our audience.
Here are four pieces of advice from our experience rethinking our election coverage:
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