Welcome the November Need to Know series on elections reporting lessons — tips and tools we used to help newsrooms cover 2024 candidates. Each week, Sunlight Research Center staffers will share solutions and resources that can help deepen your newsroom’s accountability reporting and help you continue informing readers about elected officials.
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Ahead of the 2024 elections, Sunlight Research Center began teaching reporters how to systematically dig deeply into the backgrounds of candidates. Our goal: Help newsrooms equip their communities to make more informed choices at the ballot box.
We prepared reporting checklists to give reporters a starting place. We created timeline and source list templates so they could more easily organize their research and see where events and people overlap in potentially newsworthy ways. We developed a tool to analyze candidates’ personal finances over time. (You can access all of these resources in our online toolkit.)
From July through early October, more than 200 journalists from nearly 90 news organizations across the country attended trainings with Sunlight Research Center and our partners at MuckRock and OpenSecrets through the generous support of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation and the Knight Foundation.
Newsrooms told us how helpful the lessons and the tools were, but we also heard how they did not have the capacity, especially at smaller news outlets, to do deep reporting work. That gave us an idea: Our team of experienced investigative researchers could help increase journalists’ capacity by doing some of the digging for them.
In the good ol’ days, newsrooms had research desks that tracked down basic documents and data so reporters could do their jobs more efficiently. Imagine the impact dozens of local news organizations could make with access to that kind of support.
Through the Knight Election Hub, Sunlight Research Center has been fortunate to work with ambitious media outlets that are working to help their audiences make more informed decisions at the ballot box.
Over the next four weeks, we’ll share with you some of the resources, tools and lessons learned from our training sessions and research help desk. We hope you can use these lessons as you plan your continuing accountability coverage and start thinking about the next election on the horizon.
Share with your network
- Putting Elections Lessons to Work
- Following federal funds
- Backgrounding the bench
- The voters’ guide to elections
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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.
Here are some resources we offered to help foster healthy, responsive and resilient news organizations in 2024.
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?
