The Modern Journalist

The Politics of News Coverage

We’ve been having a little discussion at The Modern Journalist NING social network pitting the database reporting I’ve proposed in Newspaper 2.0 versus traditional, beat-the-bushes reporting done by the Ameican media.

Of course, I am a part of the American media — or I was — for 14 years before I started working as a professor at Northern Kentucky University and truthfully every story that I wrote came from talking to people. So I couldn’t help myself but begin to see merit in what my colleagues on the social network were saying: I wanted to believe.

I wanted to believe that maybe — someone deep down — I was wrong that building up databases, creating mashable displays, searching for actual trends that cross sections of the paper (crime, politics, education for instance) and writing relevant stories that also encouraged community involvement in the information gathering and displaying could never replace the reality of hitting the streets.

Then I came back to my senses after reading this in Speigel Online:

According to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, over 60 percent of election coverage by the US media has been focused on campaign strategies, tactics or personalities — but not on actual political content.

I have no idea whether to believe Speigel — that’s my bias — but I’ve always found the Project for Excellence in Journalism to be fair. Or as fair as an organization can be. Regardless of my bias, the fact that 60 percent of the coverage — and I don’t know how they measured that or what they measured — has been about something other than the issues serves my point that we need to be focused on collecting data and raw facts.

Not simply because, as the author of the piece points out, we are drifting into an Orwellian time of truthiness (thanks Colbert). We must do it because our reporters aren’t even reporting anymore.

At a time when Associated Press stories make up an increasing number of stories in the paper, cutbacks are forcing the most gifted reporters to the sideline and Wall Street controls the purse strings, it’s important to look at what newspapers can do best and what medium they can best do it in.

This doesn’t mean ditch print. It means the Web is a data driven medium. Print is driven by stories. We should be maximizing each medium’s inherent strength, not trying to repurpose print strengths on to the Web because we don’t know how to do it.

When that happens, you miss out on the profit potential of the Web (crappy product, no eyeballs, low return rates) and your print product suffers because it’s trying to support two parts of the business.

On Friday, I’ll post the existing databases that every newspaper should use along with an outline of what a modern political news section should look like.

For now, let’s pray (prey?) the next six months of coverage has been better than the last year.