The American Press Institute will continue to move forward with efforts to help accountability journalists do their jobs more effectively and engagingly. Here are some additional questions that all news organizations can consider and pursue:
Audiences
How do your write for your current audience and expand it at the same time?
When competing with national/international media on an accountability story, how does a local news organization break through the scrum and achieve impact?
How do you maintain audience and impact with an ongoing accountability story, such as an election or an environmental crisis?
How do you handle/recover from mistakes and still maintain your impact and audience?
How can journalists determine if their accountability reporting is achieving maximum impact?
Process
What percentage of decisions about accountability coverage is made by the editor? By the reporter? Mostly dictated by audiences?
Brandon Rittiman in the KUSA newsroom in Denver.
How can newsrooms use data to inform the best choice of platforms for accountability stories?
Balance and resiliency
How can accountability reporters — who get more feedback from audiences than most other types of reporters — deal with hostile audiences from a workflow standpoint? From an emotional health standpoint?
Why do some accountability reporters stay in the business while others — also good reporters — have chosen to leave or not return?
How can newsrooms provide an outlet for reporters to discuss emotional health?
Obstacles
Are smaller editing staffs resulting in reporters make their own decisions (good or bad) about accountability story choices? How can reporters prepare for this shift?
Social and digital media are important for impact of accountability reporting. How can reporters fill the gaps left by reduced or inexperienced social media teams?
How can accountability reporters — especially those who write about politics — work around the real or perceived ideological biases of their news organizations?
Learning
How can cultural competence be encouraged and taught?
Would training specifically for time management be valuable?
Which reporters/writers/journalists do high-impact accountability reporters admire and learn from? Why?
Share with your network
- 7 characteristics of effective accountability journalists
- Effective accountability journalists exhibit broad curiosity and eagerly adapt to new technologies and platforms
- Effective accountability journalists think about multiple audiences
- Effective accountability journalists work hard to create context for their audiences
- Effective accountability journalists smartly balance their time on story choices, audience interaction
- Effective accountability journalists spend considerable time building relationships with sources and readers
- Effective accountability journalists build connections and teamwork within their own newsrooms
- Effective accountability journalists find their own way and direct their own work
- Looking ahead: Some questions to start a newsroom conversation on improving accountability efforts
- Acknowledgments
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The press will be much more effective in serving people and strengthening democracy if it learns from what researchers are learning. Among the examples and takeaways, you will find that news leaders and non-news experts alike value the opportunity to think differently about the challenges in front of them, about how local news can change and how research can ask different questions.
When community members are no longer voters, their needs become diffuse once again and there is no clear, focusing mandate. So many newsrooms slip back into the usual: politics coverage driven by politicians and press releases. How do we avoid that backslide?
How can we avoid that backslide this time?
We see in research how trusted messengers matter for news that’s shared. We know Millennials and Gen Z pay for or donate to support email newsletters or video or audio from independent creators at higher rates than newspapers.
