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The midterms got me to thinking:
• People have really tuned out the news.
• Journalism is largely defenseless against deliberate bad faith.
• Uninformed voters are a danger to democracy.
The day after an election is generally a day for political punditry. I'm seeing it as more of a news-business thing, and here's why.
If someone is voting red because President Biden and his blue team aren't getting anything done, that's not a policy difference. That's a fact error. It's just plain wrong. It's like voting for Russia because you don't know they invaded Ukraine.
Being a recovering reporter who misses his old life every time Election Day rolls around, I wonder how we got so tuned out from the happenings of the day. I mean, Sean Hannity is a ratings giant, but he's watched by fewer than 1 in 100 Americans every night. The idea of being up on things seems ... almost quaint.
I see the issue in marketing terms. If you've lost your customers, how do you get them back? What would it take to get them re-engaged?
You start by meeting them where they are.
* * *
My views on news are colored by decades of working online. For many of my reporting days, my work was most likely to appear in an afternoon newspaper in a two-newspaper town. Moving to the online world was my way to avoid dinosaur status.
My views on news are also colored by years of online marketing, of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. When it comes to news that you should pay attention to, my response is "should" is a guilt-inducing word. If people find things interesting, they will come back for more. Should is off-putting.
Being interesting has been my guiding principle in content marketing for years. Be interesting has applied to my newsletters, too. Be interesting enough so they'll share what they learned with friends, and you can build from there.
Historically, news gathering has been organized by beats, cops, politics, business, whatever. Nowadays I think more in terms of a lens, a way to frame the information in a way that matches the thinking of the news consumer.
I call it the three Es. I'm looking at stories in terms of the Environment, the Economy and Equality.
Instead of reporting on label-shouting politics, what's the impact on equality, from gerrymandering to policy? It's a storytelling focus on the right or wrong, not the day to day.
With the economy, did you know that most people who purchase a new home buy one within 15 miles of their old home? Mention that and people will remember it and pass it along. That the Fed hiked interest rates again can slide into the second paragraph. Use the interesting as an entry to the important. And keep it really short.
Seeing an environmental angle in just about everything is vital because we're sliding towards life in a sun-blasted hellscape. This is an admittedly tricky conversation, but finding ways to keep climate change in the public consciousness seems vital. Earth hasn't had a month of below-average temperatures since 1985.
I use the term "lens" because it's not about shoehorning everything into some sort of AI-chosen demographic. It's about never forgetting what's really important. That's easy to do, considering the immediate routinely takes precedent over the important in our daily lives.
Unlike a lot of old newsies, I like it that many people get their news from late-night comedians these days. There's a human voice to it that's lacking in a lot of news, and, again, they are using the interesting as an entry to the important.
Humor is also a way to counter deliberate misinformation. The rules of journalism pretty much prevent you from ending a quote with "the governor lied today," so some next-level thinking is in order.
In today's siloed media environment, there's a lot of talk about what people think of the news business, you know, the laments of bias and fake news. The shorter version of the problem, to me, goes like this.
Getting people to follow news at all.
* * *
Change is hard and takes a long time. Sometimes it occurs because of vision and leadership. Sometimes it occurs out of desperation. It's been a long, hard slog for print news to figure out the digital age. I find more convenience and ease of digestion in their email newsletters than their websites.
It seems like local TV news has been largely reduced to something to put between the traffic and the weather, and with cable news being so locked in to ideological audiences, the attempted change of tone at CNN will be interesting to watch.
Considering the rise of podcasts, I'm intrigued by the future of radio news. There's clearly a market for things people find interesting, even at great length and depth. We may see new thinking in those 150 words at the top of the hour, or the local cut-ins from the network.
The biggest bit of new thinking will involve covering Donald Trump in ways that don't repeat the mistakes of 2016. That's such a big topic, I'll save it for a future column. But I can say this much.
It really needs to happen.
-30-
Mr. Marshall, who speaks in third person in his italicized footers, started telling people in fourth grade that he was going to be a reporter when he grew up.