Assigned to the 2020 campaign trail? Consider a Google form on your way out
“Tell me how you think I should cover 2020!”
This might be the start of the most earnest Google form in political journalism. While citizen journalism and engaged journalism strategies have pushed for more interaction with and involvement of readers/viewers in the reporting process, building trust and improving reporting that reflects the nuances of the people, it’s taken a while to get to this point. David Fahrenthold’s legal pad/crowdsourced reporting won a Pulitzer after the 2016 election, but Matt Pearce at the Los Angeles Times is trying to bake his readers into his campaign reporting from the beginning.
This will be my first time *really* covering a presidential campaign, and I’ve been thinking about ways journalists can help voters get a better seat at the table in terms of setting the news cycle. So I cooked up this short reader survey: https://t.co/GvB9DqfoFs
— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) April 23, 2019
In two days, 3,000 people had filled out the form, answering questions like “What’s the local issue that’s most important to your community, but which you think gets overlooked by the national media?” (most frequent reply: lack of affordable housing) and “How much does it matter to you who a candidate’s donors are?” (two-thirds picked the top two options on a 1-5 scale). Unsurprisingly, 66 percent of respondents said policy-driven explainers were the stories they’d have L.A. Times reporters focus on most if they ran the outlet — but only 34 percent said they’d be most likely to actually read those stories, with personal integrity analyses and stories examining political influencers winning over more.
It’s not just about keeping the readers’ preferences and perspectives in mind. Pearce is hoping the survey can be used as a tool to build sources and potential Times subscribers. He’s emailed respondents who provided an email address with the results and plans to keep an email dispatch going. (That way, they can also reach out to him if they get angry with one of his articles rather than bashing it on social media or unsubscribing — hopefully.)
Pearce is in the early days of his first campaign trail reporting, but he took some time to explain his process for developing the survey in the first place — and why he would caution reporters to be mindful of how much the tech platforms are clouding their campaign trail perception. Our interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I think about this from the business side of things too. Out here at the L.A. Times, we’ve had this big transformation under new ownership. There’s all this investment in the newsroom. It’s very exciting to be out here, but ultimately for all this to be sustainable, there have to be subscribers who help hold up the business model. I’ve been thinking a lot more about how to provide that value to people who are actually going to pay for my journalism.
Ultimately, the goal is to show these people the journalism that the L.A. Times and I are doing. It’s one more way to provide transparency into that process and a little bit more buy-in into the process so they feel like they have a piece of what’s going on.
You know, people just really love process. If you look back to what David Fahrenthold was doing in the 2016 election investigating the Trump campaign, he had his sheet of paper and wrote down things with his pen and asked questions of people in his audience. He wasn’t that guy who was deeply sourced inside Trump world — he wasn’t one of those front line people like Maggie Haberman who are deeply embedded inside the White House with their sources, but he leveraged the power of the crowd and showed people how the process worked and the results were really extraordinary.
I’m trying to think about ways in which we can pull back the curtain a little bit more and personalize the institution and the process. I think that will hopefully lead people to have a little more faith and trust in journalism at a time when trust is at pretty low levels.
This is the part I particularly enjoyed. I found some people articulating why they were interested in seeing coverage of more long-shot candidates. They might have a defining policy issue that catches fire and becomes really popular and that makes them somewhat worthy of coverage because that could be an influence on other candidates in the field and the campaign and the future. Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All and getting corporate money out of politics in 2016 is an example of that, as is Donald Trump and his very stark positions on immigration and global trade.
People were like, “they may not be popular, but there are reasons to cover candidates like Andrew Yang who has sort of staked himself on this proposal of universal basic income, or maybe someone like Jay Inslee who has made climate change the central focus of his campaign.” That was really thoughtful and I appreciated that aspect.
I don’t want to call it a throwaway question, but I had an oddball question in there — essentially the pragmatism-versus-purity question:
Hypothetical scenario: Which of these two primary candidates would you vote for?
- Candidate A, whose views closely match mine, but who seems like a riskier bet to win the general election.
- Candidate B, whose views don’t quite match mine, but who seems like a safer bet to win the general election.
I think a lot of people were wrestling with that question on the Democratic side in 2016, with the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders vote. I was very curious about that because I think that’s going to be a really interesting question in this election. If Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, is there going to be a Howard Schultz for the center who drains away the centrist voters and opens up the path for a Trump re-election?
This is something that could be replicated by any individual journalist or by an entire publication. There was the whole citizen journalism movement in the ’90s and Jay Rosen was a big proponent of that. The thing about this process is I’m not ceding editorial control to these survey respondents. I know the L.A. Times audience is much larger than mine and they may be more different than my particular readers. I wasn’t in a position to say “this survey response is going to dictate everything I do on the campaign trail.” It’s more of a guidepost than a highway.
[Some examples: What is your plan to stop climate change? How would you work with a divided Congress? As automation, outsourcing, and the requirements for entry-level employment continue to increase, how do you plan to stimulate meaningful employment for the millions of Americans who do not have more than a high school degree? How would your presidency prevent the next “Trump” from getting elected in, say, 2028? Would you suspend your campaign if it were shown to be in the best interest of the people? If you could recommend ONE book that best represents your values/describes your ethos, what would it be?]
My question would be what are you doing to ensure that you’re controlling the way you want to cover this presidential campaign, as opposed to letting yourself be influenced by these tech platforms that are controlled by Silicon Valley?
Deep down, this is somewhat of a tech monopoly issue right now. I anticipate during this campaign we are probably going to see over and over again these huge stories about who is Twitter going to be kicking off its platform, which news outlets are going to be featured most prominently on Facebook, which candidates or parties are going to be favored by these big powerful structures that have been created by these giant tech companies. Ultimately, there is a level to which this election is going to be decided by the business decisions of these huge companies in Silicon Valley.
Part of the journalist’s responsibility is to understand that power and to also have a check on that, as well as a check on the candidates and campaigns themselves. I think we still don’t totally understand the extent to which Facebook and YouTube have changed our entire political reality. I think it’s going to be important for journalists to try to assert some independence from that power in Silicon Valley which in some ways is just as important as the power of the parties and the candidates themselves.
Fundamentally, the philosophy here is, because I’m so new at this, I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s very easy to comment on campaign journalism, and I suspect it’s very different to actually go out and do it. You have people watching your every single word for any sign of favoritism or unfairness. So to a certain extent, I want to tap into the wisdom of people to provide some feedback and some accountability for what I’m doing.
Not accountability in the Twitter way, where everything becomes a ratio or pile-on if there’s an awkwardly phrased headline. But if I do something on the campaign trail where I screw up, or if I don’t do a good enough job on a story, I feel like with a mechanism like this there’s a way where people can express their displeasure or disappointment with me — while at the same time knowing I spent a lot of time asking them what they thought and I also expressed an openness to hearing from them.
I’m hopeful that that can maybe build a healthier relationship between me and them when they don’t like my coverage that much. That’s going to happen, right? If I write a tough accountability story on a candidate that a lot of these readers like, they’re probably not going to be happy with that. That’s something true of journalism, and that’s one of the problems with subscriber-based business models — the tail wags the dog, because you end up going where your audience is the most interested. If they see I’ve been making an effort to be fair and just and as open-minded as possible and as receptive to criticism and feedback, that they’ll understand what I’m doing, and the rationale for what I’m doing.
Hopefully, the first response to a tough story they don’t like is not to unsubscribe, but to ask me why I did what I did. And hopefully, the answer I give is something they find understandable. That’s the goal. It’s not just about covering this one campaign. Ultimately, it’s about how we do journalism after 2020 as well.