Happy July! We’re using this holiday week to point to a series we’re publishing this year that we hope will help newsrooms talk about some of the more difficult topics surrounding election coverage. API’s Critical Conversations on Elections guides are here to help you save time while getting some core thinking shared among your staff, on the record.
During election years, newsrooms are so busy watching and covering the candidates and their campaigns that it’s hard to anticipate every possible development. Our Critical Conversations feature is designed to give you prompts for these discussions, so that when you face certain situations, you won’t be saying, “I wish we’d talked about this.”
Some Critical Conversations will be meetings, some might be brown-bags; some conversations might not require an in-person gathering at all. For each conversation, we’ve included printable agendas for structuring your discussion. We’ve also suggested potential participants from across your news organization.
We’d love to hear from you on the election-related topics for which you’d like conversation prompts. What do you expect your newsroom to be grappling with this year? Email your ideas to me at lilly.chapa@pressinstitute.org.
Our series so far has included agendas for discussions on:
Preparing for misinformation
Misinformation often pops up without warning — that’s the whole point. It’s designed to hijack people’s minds. But there are ways to plan for how you’re going to handle certain kinds of falsehoods.
What will your news organization do when politicians lie? What about when you’re interviewing people in the community who believe something that is patently false? How can the newsroom respond to fake content?
These and other questions are covered in the first installment.
Covering public opinion polls
Polls can be tricky to cover, whether they’re your own or those from other news organizations or institutions. Experts say that they sometimes see poll coverage that lacks depth or context — or reads too much into a poll’s results.
To avoid common pitfalls, newsrooms can consider a conversation about it in advance, following the agenda we’ve developed in consultation with polling editors and experts.
Election Day snafus
Despite all the planning for it, Election Day can present developments that catch newsrooms off guard. Problems at the polls, for example, can be challenging to cover because you want to alert the community to them but you also don’t want to overstate isolated incidents.
Be ready for these developments by talking about them in advance, using this discussion agenda.
We hope these three will help you launch important discussions. We’ve got other Critical Conversations agendas in the works, but in the meantime, we’d like to know which topics would be most helpful for your newsrooms, so please reach out and let us know.
