I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months thinking about how we should be covering the news in light of huge changes in the news business and the world we’re covering in the last two to three years. How do we, as a small news organization, use our resources most effectively to inform our readers? The most fundamental and important way is to do more original reporting, which is where you’ve seen us focus most of our resources this year. We hope to have hired three additional reporters by the end of 2017 – not a dramatic increase for larger organizations but a big expansion for us. But it’s not only a matter of numbers. It’s how we deploy those resources. More specifically, how do we react to this new environment to do what we do better?
One of the two or three things I have focused on on this front is the difference between reporting the news and being a guide to the news. Lots of outlets publish news and surface lots of new facts about important stories every day. Many fewer act as guides to the news. This has always been or at least used to be one of the key things TPM did, something that differentiated us from other news websites. So what do I mean by a guide? Here’s how I think about it. There’s reporting the news, putting out new stories or posts or whatever on new information on key topics. I think of it as putting a succession of things in front of you as a reader. There’s narrative and context. But mainly you’re left to make the connections between the stories on your own. Guidance is different. It’s helping you keep up to date on the status of evolving stories, understand their progression over time, have the view the reporter has of what might be coming next and make sure you know the key facts since you – as a person with a life and a job – can’t keep track of or remember all of them. I like to think of this as what it would be like if I had an assistant whose job it was to make sure I always knew the relevant facts and developments in the most important stories. That’s the guidance dimension I’m talking about.
Of course there are countless aggregators, topic specific newsletters and features in other publications that do similar things or may achieve the same purpose. My focus though is how we should do it, making use of our specific organizational strengths and how we cove the news. Key to this is a very specific use case and publishing promises that define and bound the specific format.
So here’s what I would like. Take a subject like voting rights, a topic under which I’d include voter suppression, voting access, redistricting, voter ID, civil rights and voting rights enforcement, et al. This is a topic I’ve been deeply interested in and immersed in for more than two decades. It’s always been a core reporting topic at TPM. But recently I have not been able to follow it as closely as I’d like. I saw last week that the Supreme Court intervened to allow Texas to continue using the current gerrymander while it evaluates its constitutionality, despite the fact that a lower court had ruled it unconstitutional. I already knew there were on-going developments in Texas on the redistricting and voter ID front as well as parallel developments in North Carolina and yet other states. But while we’ve been following these developments closely as an organization, I have not kept up on all the details. So I’m hazy on the details and I know I’m missing stuff.
As I reader, I’d like to read something on a regular basis which brought me up to date on the key details. I’d want it to be short and concise since that’s the core issue in the first place – I don’t have a lot of time. I’d also like a bargain, an implicit agreement with whoever was producing this update, that if I take a few moments to read this brief update I will know the key on-going developments on the voting rights front, have a sense of the big picture about what these developments mean and know what new events appear to be on the horizon that I should be watching for. Since I’m not all over this story right now, I have a persistent and not pleasant feeling that I don’t know as much as I should and that I’m missing key details. For this update to achieve its purpose I would need to be confident that it told me the key details and let me know what to be looking out for. That’s the bargain. I’m agreeing to take a short amount of time to read this update and in exchange you – you being whoever is putting it together – promise me that I will know those key details and developments.
We publish lots of stories every day. But these will be different because they have a very specific promise or bargain behind them: a short investment of time – I’m thinking of only a few hundred words – in exchange for a defined bundle of current knowledge.
It’s not all the information. That’s not the point and that’s not possible since it’s a massive issue affecting everyone in the country either directly or indirectly. It’s the key details, the ones that matter and are critical to understanding on-going developments in the story. If I want to dig deeper, I can. If you don’t mention something in your update I’m going to assume that means I don’t need to focus on it. I’m trusting you a lot to use my time efficiently and make good on that promise.
TPM Readers aren’t a general readership. They tend to be highly news literate and politically literate. That helps because I don’t need you to explain to me what voting rights are, what the voter ID issue is, or that partisan or racially gerrymanders are a major issue. You can cut to the chase assuming basic background knowledge.
Now, to do this with any effectiveness, reliability or efficiency you’d need it to be produced by someone who’s really immersed in the topic. That’s good! Because we have people like that. There is a small number of topics we’ve covered very closely over the years. Health care legislation is one of them. Voting rights is another. The Trump/Russia story is one we’ve been on for months and are likely to remain on for some time to come. There will likely be others. But there will never be very many, unless the size of the organization expands dramatically, which I don’t foresee. Because there are only a few topics and stories we can follow in that depth.
How often would we publish one of these on a given topic? I’d figure once a week or maybe once every two weeks, probably less frequently at first as we get our sea legs. We’ll start doing these – along with other new features of the site – on an expressly experimental basis. I’ve been calling these ‘sum ups’ in my head. But that’s a terrible title. So I’ll definitely try to come up with some better label.
Stay tuned.
