How can we prioritize candidate and ballot question coverage?

What is a Critical Conversation? | Printable discussion guide

News organizations often use blueprints from previous years to plot out their election coverage plans. But while past coverage can help guide your planning, it is important not to make it the default. The electorate in your coverage area may have changed. New issues have emerged since the last big election. What worked then may not work this time around.

Here are four agenda items to help you overcome the impulse to follow “the way we’ve always done it” model.

Who’s in this conversation?

Politics reporters and editors, local government reporters, schools reporters, and others who cover policy areas, as appropriate.

The agenda:

1. Are there non-competitive races we should be covering?

It wasn’t until a month after George Santos was elected to Congress from New York in 2022 that the litany of lies he used in his campaign became widely known. There are several theories — cutbacks at the regions’ news outlets, misplaced priorities, or the fact that a rare pre-election story about Santos’ misrepresentations was done by a tiny newspaper on Long Island and didn’t get much attention.

Another possibility is that journalists have a tendency to give short shrift to races that aren’t competitive. If there’s no “contest,” is there a story? Here is where the drawbacks of “horse race” journalism come into play. Newsrooms avoid paying attention to non-competitive races at their peril.

Consider these actions:

• Create a complete inventory of races in your coverage area. Putting them on a list doesn’t mean you’ll give intensive coverage to them all, but knowing what’s out there is a start. Assign coverage priority to each of these races, knowing that your decision could change if circumstances do.
• For non-competitive races, consider the stakes. Even in a race where a candidate is a shoo-in, can your journalism help people understand what’s likely to happen when this candidate wins? What policies will they prioritize? Does a candidate, even if heavily favored, have things in their background that voters should know about? How did the candidates get nominated; was there competition in the nominating process?

2. How can we localize national races that aren’t much of a contest in our coverage area?

The presidential race is decided in a handful of swing states. If you’re not in one of them, it might be challenging to come up with new ways to cover the presidential contest in your state. As with non-competitive races, just because there isn’t a real race in your state doesn’t mean there isn’t anything at stake.

Consider these actions:

• Have reporters who cover policy areas — health care, education, business development, taxes — help identify issues where the outcomes will be determined by who controls Congress and the White House. Put together a series on what’s at stake for your community in the election, issue by issue.
• Are there people living in your coverage area who vote in another state, which might be competitive? This may be an unusual subset, but not necessarily in communities in Florida, for example. You could consider stories about or for these groups.

3. Are there other news organizations or civic groups we trust and can partner with for certain races to spread the workload?

If you’ve assigned a level of coverage to each candidate or race and realize that some of them will get lost in the allocation of coverage resources, could a partnership help? The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University has a trove of resources on collaborative journalism.

Consider these actions:

• Consider this example for inspiration: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta Civic Circle, a civic journalism nonprofit, are collaborating on a voter guide — called Georgia Decides — that will contain information on more than 700 candidates up and down the ballot. (Beatrice Forman, the project coordinator for U.S Democracy Day, notes that this collaboration has its roots in the Advancing Democracy Fellowship, which is run by Hearken, Solutions Journalism Network, and Trusting News.)
• Create a set of criteria for potential partners. With this in hand, you won’t launch a collaboration and then discover your partner has different standards or practices than you. For example:
  • If it’s another news organization, is there a competitive concern? Could you agree that any stories, especially scoops, are published simultaneously? Who gets the final say on edits?
  • If your partner is a non-news or civic group, do you have a ready answer to potential allegations (even if unfounded) that they have an agenda or a bias, a charge that could turn off parts of your audience?

4. Where are our audience’s knowledge gaps in this election?

Even highly engaged voters can get to their polling stations and realize they didn’t fully understand every candidate and issue on the ballot. What are the best ways to identify what people are missing?

• Ask them. Community listening can happen in a number of ways – events, one-on-one encounters, or digitally. Listening can challenge your assumptions about what voters care about.
• What does your audience engagement data tell you about what people are interested in?
• Identify down-ballot races you’ve downplayed in the past. In retrospect, a school board that has become increasingly politicized might have deserved more attention at election time. For insights on this, check out Denise-Marie Ordway’s tips for contextualizing school board races at The Journalist’s Resource.