Earlier this year, we spoke with nearly two dozen editors, reporters, academics and media innovators about how news organizations can better listen to their audiences, cultivate diverse sources, and reflect a broad range of views. We did so because the traditional media — print, radio and TV — play a crucial role in our democracy, especially during election years.
One of their key contributions is providing modern town squares, where people present their views or see them reflected in stories, reports and columns, while also hearing and learning about the views of others. When they provide dynamic, respectful town squares, print, radio and TV news organizations strengthen our pluralistic society, in which beliefs are shared without fear of reprisal.
Local news operations are particularly situated to serve as a community’s meeting place. Surveys from organizations like the Pew Research Center and the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin show Americans favor local news operations or consider them more trustworthy than national organizations. Yet, even local newsrooms can lose that trust if they don’t adequately reflect their cities and towns.
Informing a community while also reflecting its values requires news organizations to guard against a singular culture taking root in their operations. This starts with hiring journalists who are trained in the essentials of the craft: listening to others, questioning one’s biases and being curious. It also means hiring journalists with diverse experiences, perspectives and backgrounds.
Those tasks have grown harder given the collapse in the financial model of local journalism over the last two decades. Still, news organizations run a dangerous risk if they fall prey to the groupthink that characterizes monocultures. Journalists may misconstrue the reality of a situation if they aren’t receiving input and information from a cross-section of people, sources and beliefs. Newspapers, especially, will miss the opportunity to create a broad public forum that comes with publishing a diversity of views and rebuttals to those beliefs in their opinion pages.
A staff with wide-ranging backgrounds and experiences certainly helps editors to better perform their jobs. Editors need to know how liberals, conservatives and moderates think about issues. Or how perspectives differ among various ethnicities and races. Or how people of faith or of no faith respond to a matter. Or how Americans from rural communities or inner cities see the world. Then, they can more appropriately cover their cities and towns.
Fortunately, instructive examples stand out:
—During Martin Baron’s tenure as The Washington Post’s editor from 2013 until 2021, the newspaper hired from different communities so it could better report on and understand topics and people. For example, the Post employed reporters whose personal backgrounds could help it better understand the larger evangelical culture, bring their insights from growing up in rural America, and relate to families in drug-plagued neighborhoods.
“People who’ve lived very different lives enrich our newsrooms,” Baron once explained. “They help tell the stories of those who otherwise would not be heard or not be fully understood.”
—Trusting News supplies news organizations with resources and tools to reach their communities. Among other things, the nonprofit encourages newspapers to ask pointed questions when seeking audience feedback. They include:
If you could be in charge of our reporting team for a day, what would you assign them to do?
What do you wish journalists understood about how you see the world?
And whose voices have we missed?
Trusting News reports that asking such questions has resulted in changes in national and local newspapers. The Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times, for one, began to clearly differentiate news reports from opinion pieces.
—The University of Texas’ Center for Media Engagement lists five factors that help journalists connect with their communities:
Build relationships in the community long before a crisis hits.
Showcase various voices, including across political lines.
Examine the framing of a story, avoiding “catch-all” labels for people with different political beliefs.
Think outside the story, especially examining biases that may influence a report.
—Diversify newsrooms by race/ethnicity, age, gender, political beliefs, sexual orientation and socioeconomics.
Promoting viewpoint diversity helps ensure all members of a community are heard. It sparks the kind of healthy debate a town needs to resolve its public challenges by elevating the best arguments over various issues. At the very least, pluralism within news organizations will provide space to question prevailing narratives or to poke holes in decisions before they’re made. In the end, that will strengthen the “reverence for evidence” that Baron rightly terms essential for quality journalism.
