Mission statement and dedicated team guide KXLY’s improved election coverage

This is a series on Better News to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) share replicable tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. 

This “win” comes from Melissa Luck, news director at 4 News Now/Morgan Murphy Media, which is based in Spokane, Wash., and also serves Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. 4 News Now participated in the Knight-ASU Tables Stakes program in 2018-19.

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:

1. Create a mission statement

What we did and why: We needed a mission statement to make a promise to ourselves and to our audience about how we would cover this election season differently. We needed a set of values that said not only what we would do, but what we would stop doing as well. This needed to be a forward-facing document available on our website so that our audiences would understand what we were promising and to ask them to hold us accountable. We want to inform and empower, promising our viewers not only to give them information, but also to show them where to find information on their own. Here’s a link to our mission statement that is not only on our website as a page, it’s attached to other articles we do this election season.

What worked well: Getting buy-in from our elections team was the easy part. We all agreed on the type of coverage that would be useful to our audience. We came away from our first meeting with a general outline of what that mission statement would be. We said we were going to do this differently and knew it had to also be a multi-platform approach. It’s as much of a reminder to our team as it is a promise to our audience.

What didn’t work as expected: As a traditional TV newsroom, most of our journalists were not familiar with the concept of a mission statement for coverage. It was harder than I thought to get our team to go beyond typical news promotion taglines like “we’ll find the truth” and turn that into specific promises like “We’ll go beyond talking points, stump speeches, fliers and campaign ads and find out if they’re telling you the truth.” When we perform this exercise again, we’ll have a better foundation for creating that mission statement.

Try this:

• Allow time for true brainstorming. Ask your team what type of journalism they want to do and see what words can guide the creation of a mission statement.
• Read other mission statements! There are great resources and examples out there that serve as a great starting point. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel
• Push your team to go beyond taglines and instead make real, audience-focused promises. The specificity matters if you want to drive real change in your newsroom.

Anchor Derek Deis interviews a Gonzaga Law School professor for a story about how to find information in judicial races. (Courtesy of KXLY)

2. Dedicate a team to the work

What we did and why: We’re a small enough newsroom that everyone will be involved in our election coverage. But, we needed some in-house experts. Our election branding is 4 The People, so we created a 4 The People Team. The team combines anchors, reporters and producers so that we have buy-in from all areas of the newsroom. While they’re all covering daily news, this team knows there’s an expectation they’ll keep election-related stories top of mind and pitch those stories and angles accordingly.

What worked well: There are journalists in our newsroom who took this immediately and ran with it. We don’t typically have beats in our newsroom, so having something like this for reporters to latch onto gave them the push to be experts in this field. Several members of our 4 The People Team have driven the bulk of our coverage, making it their personal mission to tell issues-related stories and deeper dives about the campaigns. Not only are they generating their own story ideas, they’re also establishing themselves as experts on the coverage and viewers are sending them story tips and comments.

What didn’t work as expected: Not everyone understands how to do this type of coverage. There’s a reason TV newsrooms default to the typical election coverage: it’s easy. Many of our journalists have worked in newsrooms or learned in college about the “traditional” way to cover campaigns. That makes it harder for them to think outside the box to tell a deeper, more audience-focused story.

Try this:

• Make it feel special. It’s fun to be “picked” for a team, so create opportunities to share information and help people understand why they’re a good fit for this special coverage.
• Communicate. We have a private Teams chat dedicated to this group where we share story ideas and angles. I also use this channel to share research that I see about election coverage and what audience research shows about what people want from their news sources.
• Assign specific “beats” within the team. Every community has many races that deserve your attention. Figure out the ones that will likely generate the most stories during the election cycle (our governor’s race in Washington, for example) and assign reporters to be the experts on those races.
• Show more examples. We can’t expect traditional journalists to understand an audience-focused approach if we don’t show them what that looks like.

KXLY uses a form on its website to solicit questions from voters.

3. Listen to your audience

What we did and why: Too often, journalists think like journalists. We get stuck in the rut of what we think is important and we assign stories based on that. We also get a lot of communication from candidates and campaigns and that allows them to drive coverage. To really do audience-focused elections work, you have to listen to your audience. For years, we’ve used Hearken to drive conversation with our audience. We’ve been able to tell our audience that their questions and their opinions drive coverage by using their questions and even their interviews in our stories. This time, we used a tool through the audience engagement platform SecondStreet. We have an embed link where people can share their questions with us and we’re using that to guide story coverage and interview questions.

What worked well: The callout wording matters. I learned from Joy Mayer of Trusting News through the American Press Institute’s Elections Frameworks webinar that the question “What do you want candidates to talk about as they compete for your vote?” really generates specific questions. Previously, we would ask something like, “What do you want to know about the governor’s race” and the responses would be as generic as the question. This time, we got deeper responses with people saying things like, “I want them to talk about what they’re doing to drive down inflation.” Instead of driving toward policy and talking points, this callout prompted people to talk more specifically about the impact candidates could have on their lives.

We get responses to the callout when we talk about it on TV and pair it with an elections-related story. Putting the callout on the website is fine, but people were more likely to want to submit something after we did a story on TV that triggered something for them. Also, the more we can share that the coverage of that story came from a viewer submission, the more likely people are to participate. Here’s an example of a story on election security that was prompted by a viewer’s question.

Watch the API Elections Frameworks webinar here (use password V*fp6*Wd )

What didn’t work as expected: You really have to work to make the callout as visible as possible on your website. Because we changed to a new way of collecting responses, the callout itself got buried on our page. It also feels a little impersonal to fill out a form. Engagement is a one-on-one experience and the form now feels impersonal.

Try this:

• Make a newsroom-wide commitment to listen to the audience, then make it easy for the audience to communicate
• Setting up a voicemail or other way to collect voice messages could be a more personal way of collecting audience questions. It’s also easier to pick up the phone and make a quick call then it is to log onto a website, fill out a form and submit a question
• Dedicate someone on your staff to be the audience whisperer. Having someone who can respond to people directly can deepen the engagement experience. That person can also evangelize for the newsroom the importance of this audience connection.

KXLY’s newsletter, which is promoted on its site within election stories, newsletter has almost 400 subscribers.

4. Create a curated elections newsletter

What we did and why: We’ve had some great success in our newsroom with curated newsletters that go beyond an RSS feed of daily headlines. It was a natural fit to create a newsletter for this elections coverage. We wanted to give people another way to connect with the content; this one shows up in their inbox.

What worked well: Our 4 The People newsletter is created through SecondStreet, which also hosts our other curated newsletters. The newsletter goes out weekly unless there’s something major happening that we want to report on right away. Having this newsletter not only allows us to reach people on their time as opposed to traditional broadcast time. It gives people who are passionate about this subject a deeper way to engage in the subject matter. We’ve used the newsletter to give our reporters the opportunity to share the behind the scenes process of how their story came together. We’ve also made a habit of including links to resources like the News Literacy Project to find ways to combat election-related misinformation. The newsletter has almost 400 subscribers and our most recent edition had an open rate of 44%.

What didn’t work as expected: We intended for this to be a shared project among the 4 The People elections team, but they don’t have time and training to do so consistently. What has worked best is having one person – in this case, me – be the curator of the newsletter. I write a brief preamble to set the stage. Then, we’ve had a featured story in which one of our journalists explains how their elections story came about and things they learned along the way that may not have made it into their story. That was a shift from the original intent, but it gives our journalists the opportunity to be a part of the newsletter without having to learn an entirely new workflow.

Try this:

• Just do it. The idea of creating a new newsletter can be daunting, but it’s a powerful way to get your content in front of a passionate audience. You don’t have to settle on the final framework right away; let it evolve with what makes sense
• Find creative ways to build audience. We promote the newsletter in newscasts, adjacent to other enterprise election coverage. We have also embedded the link to sign up within elections stories on our website. You have to make it easy to find.
• Get everyone involved. Our reporters and anchors have liked contributing to the newsletter and getting to talk about their work. More contributors = more buy-in.
• Be smart about when you send. Look at audience data to determine when people are opening the email and try to send at those times.

Looking ahead

We’re hoping this type of coverage sets the tone for the future. We want our community to know that we’re covering these campaigns in a deeper way, getting beyond just polls and fundraising. We want to be a place where they know they can bring their questions and concerns and that those questions and concerns will be reflected in our coverage. I think our team is learning that it’s more rewarding to do deeper fact-checking and audience listening rather than just regurgitating campaign talking points. The real measure of success, though, is an informed audience that knows they can trust us to bring them the coverage they need to make decisions. This approach has led us to do stories we haven’t done in the past, such as focusing on judicial race information and misinformation.

We shared our goals and plans with other newsrooms in our company and at least one is using some of this framework to cover elections in their community.