Heading into an election, newsrooms have at least one very clear mandate from the public they serve: help us make informed decisions on our ballots. And across the country, newsrooms have responded to that mandate – in many, voter guides have overtaken horse race coverage as the primary editorial focus in the lead-up to Election Day. Utility journalism on voting logistics proliferates, and newsrooms are enthusiastically soliciting and answering voters’ questions about their ballots online and in person. 

But when we get to the other side of the election, 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 can we avoid that backslide this time? 

Consider this: Voters aren’t only voters when they have a ballot in hand. Voters are voters all the time. 

Their decisions on their ballot are influenced by more than just what they read in a voter guide in the weeks leading up to an election. Their decisions are also influenced by all the experiences they have between elections, which coalesce into an opinion of the people in office and what they want from their leadership.

A caveat: Thinking of people as voters all the time isn’t to say that you wouldn’t also consider how to serve people who can’t vote because of age, immigration status, a criminal record, or other reasons. But it gives you a people-centric way to focus your politics coverage. 

It gives you jobs to be done, jobs like: 

  • Tracking an elected politician’s campaign promise so voters know whether to reelect them in four years 
  • Helping someone get involved in an issue they learned about during the campaign
  • Teaching newly engaged locals about how other civic processes work 

Here are some tips for resisting the impulse to go back to politicians and press releases. 

But first: Something to understand about your election readers

That surge of people that comes to you only during the voting period is hard to keep around as loyal readers. 

Consider how much their need for information is being driven by an external event: the arrival of a ballot. That need is gone once that ballot has been mailed in and the election results are in. 

There’s no agreed-upon term for this yet, but there is a growing understanding that this is a different kind of person to design for. Here are some of the terms I’ve heard from others: 

  • Needs-driven readers
  • Needs-based readers
  • “When in need” readers
  • Occasion-driven readers
  • Reactive users

“Being informed” is not a core part of these individuals’ identities, so offering them a regular politics newsletter won’t help you serve them year-round.  

Ashley Slayton, Audience Development Editor at The Dallas Morning News, likens this challenge to the decision newsrooms had to make as they moved out of the emergency stage of the pandemic. Many newsrooms had created pop-up newsletters focused on coronavirus. Some transitioned their pop-up into a regular health newsletter. 

But that decision assumed people wanted regular health news as much as they wanted Covid news – and that just wasn’t true for most people. Email alerts about big, important health news developments are a better fit, Slayton says. 

What does a periodic approach look like in the context of politics and policy? What politics needs can you solve for after the election?

Tip 1: Refocus on people’s concerns 

After the polls close, community-centric coverage centers on a perspective change: People don’t have issues. People have concerns. Concerns like overcrowded classrooms in their child’s school, busy streets that are dangerous to cross, and rising rents and housing prices. 

Concerns exist all the time, not just when there’s a decision to make on the ballot about how best to address those concerns. But it’s not always obvious what those concerns are. 

Elections are a great time to gather those insights because the swell of traffic from those needs-driven readers means that for a short time, you’re reaching well beyond your loyal readers. Make the most of it by opening up feedback loops – and making a plan for keeping them open year-round. 

  • Atlanta Civic Circle is leveraging the energy of the election to build a 10,000-person regional panel, called Atlanta POV, that they’ll regularly survey. Over time, Atlanta POV will serve as a mechanism for neighborhood-level sourcing of reporting on key issues facing the region. 
  • Baltimore Beat is planning to stay in dialogue with young Baltimore residents who informed their youth voter guide. As Lisa Snowden, the editor-in-chief, wrote for API: “With our guide, we only began forging a relationship with Baltimore’s next generation of readers, thinkers and voters. We don’t want to abandon them until next election season comes around.” 
  • AmyJo Brown’s guide to using voting districts to structure community listening during election season includes this reminder: “These are data tools that will be useful to reporters on all beats, year-round. Remember the list of people you created are those who are super engaged in their neighborhoods and in local political decision-making — and they will be throughout the year, not just during the pre-election months.”
  • The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel first launched the Main Street Agenda (a riff on Jay Rosen’s concept of the Citizens Agenda) in 2022 to learn and focus on the issues that matter most to voters in Wisconsin. They brought the project back in January 2024, allowing them to spend most of the year on the effort to foster dialogue on key issues. And it won’t wrap up this week. Explaining the importance of keeping it going, Ideas Lab Editor Jim Fitzhenry said, “One of my reflections is that the conversations can’t end on Election Day. Election Day should really be the beginning, not the end of having people talk about what they’d like to see happen and challenge the people they elected to office to listen and follow through. If the conversations end, nothing changes and we’re stuck in the same vicious cycle.”

If you didn’t do structured listening work in the lead-up to the election like one of these newsrooms, you’ll still find it’s surprisingly easy to pick up on people’s concerns once you start looking for them. You’ll find indicators in the data on which race and ballot measure guides get the most use from voters and themes in questions you get from voters. And if you can’t, you can run a survey during the buzzy post-election period. 

Once you understand people’s concerns, they become an effective lens for covering the regular operations of politics and governance. How much does each decision by elected officials move the needle on those top concerns? 

If we do this, we’ll better equip voters (and ourselves) to answer a critical question when the next election rolls around: “Did this person or administration make progress on the thing I’m most concerned about?”

Tip 2: Change your aperture. 

When people are preparing to vote, they’re focused on the single politician who represents their geographic area in each race. So are voter guides. 

But after the votes are in, voters need to understand the whole political body because most policy decisions are made collectively. The makeup of the whole city council or state legislature is what matters because policy decisions are made collectively. 

The good news is that if you did a voter guide, there’s a chance you already have much of the reporting you need. You just have to repackage it. 

How might we create guides to the new city council organized around top concerns? What would it look like to have something like “Where the new city council stands on [insert top concern here]”? 

If you have already asked each candidate for your voter guide how they plan to address homelessness and you know how the people already in office have voted on this issue, then you can paint a clear picture for voters about where the new city council stands on potential solutions. You can also give them a lens through which to follow how homelessness policy takes shape – and evaluate whether any progress is being made. 

Take it a step further by soliciting audience questions once again. A prompt like, “What questions do you have about the results and what they mean for your life?” can give you helpful framing tips. 

Tip 3: Divide your entire calendar into election phases. 

What happens if you think of yourself as always in some phase of the election?  

I’ve heard from others that this prompt is anxiety-inducing, but hear me out! Newsrooms tend to think of “election season” as the couple of months leading up to the next election and ending with the closing of the polls. 

But if we divide each two-year cycle into time-bound phases, it becomes much easier to identify a clear community need for each phase, which can help us frame coverage in voter-centric ways. 

At ONA24, Hearken’s Bridget Thoreson and I hosted a session called “It’s Never Not Election Season.” As part of the session, we brainstormed potential election phases with the session participants and tried to identify the overarching need that voters might have during that phase.

 Here are some examples of what participants came up with: 

Phase Questions to answer
The vote count and results Vote count

  • Is this normal? 
  • How much longer?
  • How do votes get counted?

Results

  • What do these results mean for me?
  • What do I need to know about these newly elected people?
  • What should I be watching them for regarding conflicts of interest? 
The first 100 days of the new administration
  • Where and how can voters’ voices be heard during this critical hiring and definition phase? 
  • How can newsrooms amplify what voters want the new administration to prioritize?
  • Who is the new administration hiring and what does that signal?
The first year 
  • Have campaign promises been kept? Why or why not?
The governance period
  • How did campaign donations influence governance? 
  • Have campaign promises been kept? Why or why not?

Of course, these are not the only questions your newsroom should explore in between elections, but they ensure that you offer something to those need-driven readers who are engaged with local politics and policy coverage primarily to make better decisions at the ballot box and follow the outcome of their votes. And taking this election phase approach can have a beneficial effect on your whole body of coverage. Make it easy for your staff to channel those audience needs by giving them a user story they can reference.

A user story is typically structured like this: “When (situation), I want to (motivation) so that I can (expected outcome).”

And here’s what it might look like: “When the city council is approaching its one-year mark, I want to know whether city council candidates voted in line with the promises they made when campaigning so that I can evaluate their trustworthiness and ability to execute.”

Tip 4: Leverage the high-attention news moment to build an engagement loop, then build editorial products around voter feedback 

In 2022, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass won a divisive election at a critical moment for the city. LAist, where I then worked, wanted to factor voters’ top concerns into how they covered the administration. But first, we needed to find out what those were. So, we spent the first 100 days of her administration distributing a citywide survey. We ended up getting 4,339 responses. 

We employed a wide array of distribution efforts to reach that many people with the survey, but the high response rate is also attributable to the fact that we distributed the survey during a high-attention news moment: the days immediately following Bass’ inauguration. 

The results helped us decide what citywide concerns to prioritize in our coverage framing and from which angle to approach them. We also published the survey results so that respondents could see how their own concerns stacked up against that of their neighbors. 

The survey told us that people’s top concern, overwhelmingly, was homelessness. Angelenos were desperate to see some progress. It was clear that this would be the issue against which many voters would assess her entire administration. (Remember that earlier point about people having concerns, not issues?) 

That led us to launch the Promise Tracker, an effort to track Mayor Bass’s promise to house 17,000 Angelenos during her first year in office. We updated it several times throughout the year, and at the end of the year, we could give voters a better answer to the question, “Well, was she successful?” Another benefit of this approach: You’ll be better prepared to evaluate the incumbents when it’s time to do your next round of voter guides. 

The survey also helped us understand how top concerns varied by neighborhood, renters vs homeowners, race, age and other demographics, which became a good source of story ideas for reporters and helped stay on voters’ concerns year-round without writing the same story over and over again. And when the 2024 election rolled around and LAist had to decide which questions to prioritize in its candidate questionnaire, they used the survey’s top concerns to guide them.

It’s easy to feel behind and opt for the business-as-usual mode of covering local government and politics in the wake of the election. But it’s not too late. It’s never too late to listen to your communities and to allow what you hear to inform your reporting. 

Here are some additional resources that can help. 

 

Ariel Zirulnick is an audience and product consultant who helps individuals and newsrooms do journalism with and for their communities and build systems that make that work sustainable. She’s also an instructor and mentor with the News Product Alliance and a sustainability analyst with LION Publishers.

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