Use these guides from API to help navigate tricky election situations
American Press Institute,Every editor who’s touched politics and election coverage knows the feeling when news breaks: We could have seen this coming.
Yet planning ahead is something newsrooms don’t always do well.
These conversation guides from the American Press Institute are designed to help with some of the more difficult conversations newsrooms face in election coverage. They’re not going to tell you how to run your coverage — every newsroom, every community and every political landscape is different. But they can help you talk about it. So when you face a specific development you’re not saying, “I wish we’d talked about this in advance.”
These guides were first created in 2024 but are still relevant for election coverage this year. They are here to help you save time while getting some core thinking shared among your staff, on the record. Each topic, listed below, also includes a printable discussion guide:
- Getting ready for misinformation
- How will we cover public opinion polls?
- Preparing for Election Day
- Do political labels help audiences understand politics?
- How can we prioritize candidate and ballot question coverage?
- Planning for covering (and even defining) political violence
- Post-election programming
Are there election-related critical conversations for which you’d like conversation prompts? Email the API team at news@pressinstitute.org.