Local News

It's more than the city council, cops and courts

By Frank Denton

To understate the situation profoundly, 2001 is not the year many American editors will be expanding our staffs and newsholes. Any of us who avoids the opposite will be very fortunate.

At the same time, when circulation, readership and public confidence are faltering, this is not a year to backslide on our commitment to quality journalism.

If we can’t do more, we certainly can do better.

The successful editor this year will capitalize on the fact that we have important resources beyond staff and newshole; we have fresh research, innovative ideas and new understanding to help us do more with what we’ve got.

A key is local news.

Like other readership studies for many years, the industry’s expansive Impact Study of 100 newspapers and 37,000 readers reported in April that strong local news is one of eight solutions to build readership.

And not just any kind of local news. While not necessarily discounting the traditional institutional news we have always covered so thoroughly — government, crime, courts, accidents —Impact found that our real opportunity lies in “intensely local, personally relevant and people-centered” news. (See sidebar, page 7.)

But if that means we can’t just go to a government building, attend a meeting, check the police log or court docket, file an FOI or call a public official, what kind of news is that? And where do we find it?

Answers are as close as your bookshelf, courtesy of ASNE.

Three important books — the heavy ones with wire bindings that you were given at the conventions in 1999 and 2001 and really did intend to read on the plane home — offer terrific insights, ideas and processes for broadening, deepening and enriching your local news coverage.

So take a break from your budget-dicing and hand-wringing, pull out these books, and invest some fresh thought into your newspaper’s journalism.

The most daunting work — in thickness as well as in theory — is also potentially the most global or far-reaching opportunity. The Local News Handbook, produced by the Readership Issues Committee in 1999, offers an entirely new way of thinking about and designing your local report.

Its premise is that most newspapers are seriously limiting themselves by attempting to cover only one or two dimensions of their communities. If the bulk of your local report is crime, courts, local government and accidents, then you are missing most of the real-life, Main Street issues and other phenomena in your town. The handbook does not denigrate the importance of those traditional areas but offers new ways of looking at them and — as important — some non-traditional areas of potential coverage important to readers.

The handbook steps back from conventional coverage and beat structures and asks the primal question: What is local news?

Remarkably, among the libraries of scholarly studies, textbooks and industry reports, no one apparently had ever attempted to answer that question in any methodical way. A thorough search of the literature did come up with one 1981 Newspaper Research Journal article titled “Defining Local News.”

Its definition? “ ... (T)he entire set of news topics (government, crime, schools, sports, obituaries, etc.) originating in the local area, with the geographic boundary for what is local set in terms of a city or county boundary or the limits of a metropolitan area.”

And how did those authors define “news topics?” They asked the managing editor of the local newspaper!

The Local News Handbook takes a more theory-driven approach. (Please note that theory does not mean ethereal or pedantic; translated from the academic, it means how things work.) This approach invokes some thinking about the roots of and need for local news.

The handbook starts with this: “Local is derived from the Latin word locus, which means place, and it is fair to say that most of what people care about are the events, people and institutions that touch their lives most directly in their place in the world.”

That place is community, a concept that can be complex but need not be for our purposes here. The handbook points out that most people want and need to live in a community and commonly define themselves by their communities. There is much more on this notion in the book, including extensive citations for more reading.

The handbook crafts its definition of local news around the relationship between the individual and her or his community — what the person needs and wants from the community and wants to give back. Through an extensive survey of the scholarly work in a number of disciplines — geography, political science, sociology, social psychology, communications, community development — the handbook develops a framework of 10 major ties between the individual and the community. (See sidebar, page 9.)

Some of them reflect our traditional local news coverage: government, safety, education, proximity, utility. But the book offers some fresh ways of designing that coverage.

For just one example, the chapter on safety cites some new thinking to suggest that we may be thoughtlessly overcovering crime, as well as covering it in destructive ways. Crime is highly visible, of course, and because it often involves conflict, emotion and struggles of right vs. wrong, it naturally generates some pretty compelling stories. And it’s easy to get; just check the daily reports at the cop shop.

But the handbook points to the concept of cultivation: When the mass media barrage the consumer with fictional and real crime stories, much of it somewhere else, the consumer may come to believe his or her town is a much more dangerous place than it really is. This might lead to paranoia, excessive security concerns and demands on legislators to “crack down on crime,” whether there is much of it or not. That could skew public-policy priorities toward redundant laws, excessive prisons and overprosecution. Furthermore, overcoverage of crime may be the main reason readers complain of “too much bad news” in the newspaper.

So the handbook suggests that editors invest some thinking into what crime is worth coverage and in what ways and to what degree. It also proposes that the most effective crime coverage might rise above individual crimes and address trends, causes and solutions.

Interestingly, this seems consistent with the Impact study. At first, its findings seemed contradictory in concluding that coverage of crime and courts can improve readership but that reader satisfaction is higher in papers that have fewer of these stories. The researchers say that is not inconsistent, that it may be more important how we cover crime news than how much we cover it.

Similarly, the handbook chapter on education points out that traditional newspaper coverage has been at the extremes — school board politics and policies at one extreme and cute classroom features at the other. What too often has been lost is the most important education news in the middle: the theories and techniques that, for better or worse, sweep through education and directly affect the teaching of children. For example, newspapers were very late in covering the phonics-vs.-whole-language debate.

The handbook ventures well beyond traditional coverage areas and proposes coverage of entirely new dimensions of the relationship between individuals and the community.

A surprising one is support. Some national research has found that at least 40 percent of Americans belong to one or more “support groups,” which includes book, discussion and some affinity groups, as well as the familiar self-help programs. They appear to be important ways many people are seeking community, yet a survey of editors found virtually no coverage of them.

The most intriguing area of potential coverage change is community identity. This chapter in the handbook explains the social psychology concept of “sense of community,” which is a person’s feeling of belonging and connectedness.

Researchers have developed a valid and reliable questionnaire to measure this sense of community. It consists of 17 questions, and about half of them assess phenomena that newspaper coverage can affect. The implication of this is that people with a higher sense of community are more likely to be newspaper readers — and in our coverage, we can actually build sense of community (See sidebar, page 8.)

That’s all good in theory, but how do you actually redefine, reorganize and redirect your local coverage? Again, ASNE is here to help.

The Newspaper Credibility Handbook, the report of ASNE’s four-year Journalism Credibility Project released in April, includes a chapter called “Beyond the usual suspects/Community connections.”

It suggests that a newspaper can build/rebuild its relationship with its community by taking an honest look at its patterns of coverage, gaining greater understanding of the community, challenging some possibly damaging craft practices then redefining some newsroom missions and beats.

Though it was prepared independently, The Local News Tool Kit, by the 2000-2001 ASNE Readership Issues Committee, makes similar recommendations, from a variety of different perspectives.

This book proposes that a newspaper seeking to improve its local coverage should undergo a process:

1. Methodically gain new understanding of the community through several complementary approaches. The book points out the many databases that provide hard insights into many aspects of local life. It emphasizes the importance of understanding local history, traditions and culture. And it suggests many ways that a newspaper and its journalists can routinely monitor the pulse of real life in town.

2. Assess your newspaper’s existing local coverage. The tool kit provides two important angles of view. One is a form of content analysis to measure how well you cover your community across the 10 dimensions presented in The Local News Handbook. The other assessment is of the diversity of the people included in the coverage and how they are represented.

3. Design improved coverage. This section of the tool kit offers a variety of ways to envision broader, more focused and more effective local reports. One is to look at coverage as a mural of the community, based on values. Another approach is to redefine the very nature of news for your newspaper in your town.

A chapter is devoted to the idea of the “master narrative” or the “franchise issue.” That is the idea that, in every town, there is one big story or issue that can virtually define the community. It commonly is education or growth or economic development or crime — the problem or opportunity that most occupies or worries the populace and that will matter most to the community in the long run. Several examples from newspapers suggest ways to identify the issue in your town, then ways to wrap your coverage around it. The idea is that a newspaper that truly wants to have an impact in its town should make the franchise issue its top priority, with extreme coverage, aggressive editorializing and editorial innovation. In many places, the futures of the town and the newspaper are intertwined, and who better than the newspaper can take on this defining issue?

4. Making changes. Newsrooms tend to be among the most conservative organizations, and change comes hard and slow. The tool kit can help, with a process for change and examples from a number of newspapers that have changed their coverage successfully. It includes a way to teach reporters and editors how to make stories more local, by cutting through the “layers of localness” to achieve more personal meaning for more readers. This section of the tool kit offers specific ideas for monitoring your progress, including quantitatively, with audits and scorecards.

Denton, editor of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, is editor and a co-author of two ASNE books on local news.

Books available from ASNE

The “Local News Tool Kit” and the “Local News Handbook,” are available from ASNE for $15. Order both the Handbook and Tool Kit for $25. ($30 outside the United States. $50 special price for both Handbook and Tool Kit outside the United States.) The Newspaper Credibility Handbook is available for $15. To order, call ASNE at 1-703-453-1122.