Planning Your Campaign Coverage

-- Excerpted from Poynter Election Handbook: A Guide to Campaign Coverage, 3rd Edition.

Conversations with editors, television producers, and news directors about what has and hasn’t worked for them produced one common piece of advice -- you can’t do enough planning. They also offered scores of ideas and suggestions, with the reminder that you can’t do it all. From their observations, we offer this list to help you plan your campaign coverage.

Tips on Putting Together Your Plan

• Plan early, plan well, plan to have it all come unglued
  At some point, probably in the closing weeks of the campaign, the best-laid plans for issues-based or other coverage will be sorely tested. Campaign frenzy will demand staff and resources you don’t have, and you’ll be asked to make a choice between covering the "news" or sticking with the plan. Expect that to happen, and make the unexpected part of your planning. Build flexibility into your coverage so you can stay with your plan.

• Include everyone in the planning process
  Bring together the editors, producers, and reporters who will be involved in the project to decide what you want to accomplish. Getting everyone thinking along the same lines from the start will save time, minimize conflicts, and bring out more new ideas. Don’t forget to assess staff, space, and other resource needs and to get early commitments from everyone involved on who will do what. That’s particularly important in multimedia partnerships.
  
  
• Expand your team
  Think about including people other than the political or government reporters. Ask those on your staff who know a subject best to do issues reports, even if they have no political reporting experience. The education or health or crime reporter might love a chance to get involved in political coverage. That will give you a more knowledgeable look at the issue and how it affects people, and it will free the political reporter to do other things.
  
  
• Get wired
  The Internet offers an almost unlimited opportunity to provide citizens with information for which there’s no time on television or space in the newspaper. Start with a primer, basic information on registering, voting, and election dates. Add biographical information on the candidates, job descriptions, and links or other references to places citizens can get additional information on the candidates and the issues. Archive your special reports, profiles, issues stories and comparisons, Ad Watches, and other important stories. Build a databank on campaign contributions.

• Be open
  Let your readers/viewers know what you are planning and when they will see it. That will prompt some to look for special reports and features they might otherwise miss. If you’re taking a very different approach to coverage, explain why. Tell the candidates, too, so they aren’t surprised and don’t feel ambushed or sandbagged.

• Speak for the citizens
  Reporters participating in citizen-based projects have discovered that asking questions in the name of citizens is empowering. Candidates evade many questions that journalists ask along the campaign trail. They’re less likely to do so when told the question comes from Citizen Jones. So find out what the people in your community care about and what they want to know from the candidates. Then ask in their name.

• Stay in touch with citizens – and consult with them, too
  Remember things can change, fast. So develop a way to stay in touch with citizens. Citizen panels and call-in lines are two such techniques. Use the panel members as a sounding board, spending a few minutes each day talking with different people about their reactions to the candidates and your coverage. Or sit down, once or twice during a long campaign, with a dozen of your readers/viewers and ask them to critique your coverage and talk about their reactions to the campaign in general. These techniques will help you keep your coverage on track as new issues emerge and priorities shift. And you’ll get good story ideas.

• Don’t lose citizens’ voices when they matter most
  In the final weeks of the campaign, breaking news seems non-stop. Citizen involvement seems like a nice, but impractical, idea; there’s just no time. Yet this is also the time when you most need to know what citizens want to know, what questions they want answered, what they still don’t understand, how they’re responding to the candidates, and whether your coverage is still working for them. Build in time to continue your conversations.

• Network the voters
  If you want to encourage people to vote, do more than run a "vote" banner or a "reminder" box or broadcast public interest spots on election day. Throughout the campaign, urge people to participate, to discuss stories you’ve reported, to talk with their friends about the issues and the candidates, and to encourage their friends and neighbors to participate and to vote. As one citizen put it when asked about those "Be a Good Citizen, Vote" reminders, "I’ll listen to a friend before I’ll listen to you."

• Repeat, repeat, repeat
  It’s amazing – scary actually – how many intelligent, interested, committed voters say they didn’t see, or spend any time with, those early issues stories or that wonderful full-page or five-minute candidate profile. It’s important to do these in-depth reports early, but it also means you’ll need to find creative ways to repackage and repeat critical information later in the campaign, a time when people’s interest is at a peak, they are fully engaged, and they are consciously beginning to deliberate on whom to vote for.

• Save some of your resources for the end
  People who intend to vote want useful summaries in the form of special reports and voter guides just before the election, even if they have read or seen or heard every single campaign story along the way. For both the conscientious and the not-so-conscientious voter, the days just before an election are study time. They cram just like a student getting ready for a final exam. Give them what they want when they need it. And don’t skimp on the secondary contests or third party candidates. For many voters, this may be the only neutral report they’ll see.

• Remember the bottom line
  What the citizens want to know, and what will determine how they vote, is how what they read or hear affects their lives. Design your coverage with that in mind. Keep asking yourself if your reporters are thinking about the information needs of the citizen-voter.

Coverage Strategies

• Explain what’s at stake
  People need a good description of the jobs up for election. If you define each position, its responsibilities and its limits, citizens have a better chance of recognizing when candidates embellish or make promises and take popular positions on matters beyond the power of the office.

• Give people basic campaign information – early and often
  Provide a calendar that includes basic civics information, starting with deadlines for filing, registering, petitions, and dates of the primary and general elections. It might also include which candidates are appearing where and when so that those interested can attend. List radio and television appearances as well. In short, give people every opportunity to be interested and to get involved.

• Do a primer on the issues
  As the campaign is beginning, determine the key issues and explain each in the context of its impact on citizens and of governance – finding a solution or solutions to the problem a particular issue raises. This might be done as part of a major project, as many of the news organizations involved in citizen-based projects have done. Or it could be through less elaborate reports featured on Sunday perspective sections or in public affairs programming. Then develop an easy-to-read, easy-to-follow "Cliff Notes" feature that lets you repeat this background information in digest form when reporting on an issue during the campaign. The repetition will help build citizen understanding, and it will help keep campaign rhetoric in perspective.

• Help citizens think through issues and candidate positions
  Elections should be as much about what as who. Before citizens decide on a candidate, they need to think about what they want the candidate to deliver, what they want government to do. That means deliberation and dialogue. Provide discussion questions with the issues reports. Encourage people to informally talk about their concerns. Host some small-group discussions and report on these.

• Assess candidates on the issues -- citizens’ and their own
  Early in the campaign, get the candidates on the record on citizen issues and on those issues they bring to the campaign, as well. The idea is to define the differences and set the discussion table for voters. And then be alert to and report any shifts. But resist the tendency to treat that discovery as a "gotcha.’’ The position change may be evidence of vacillation, or manipulation, or response to a special interest, or part of an altered strategy. But it might be something far more interesting; the candidate may have come to another judgment in the course of listening to and talking with citizens about the issue. That’s a far better story.

• Assess the candidate
  Report on the candidate’s skill at leadership, decision making, and at managing, or legislative deliberation just as you’d report on any other issue. Voters want someone who can get the job done. How effective has the candidate been in public office or how successful in private business or civic involvement? Style is an issue. So is character. Voters want someone they can trust. They look to the media to give them the information to make those judgments.

• Explore solutions
  Exposing problems is important, but citizens say over and over that they want to understand how public problems can be solved. They care more about what candidates propose to do, how they’re going to fix things, than their acknowledgment of a problem.

• Report the priorities
  Knowing where the candidates stand on an issue isn’t enough. Voters want to know how the candidates weigh the issue as well. Where is it on the priority scales? How much time and energy will the candidates invest in dealing with that issue? What will they compromise on or sacrifice to make it happen?

• Make it easy for readers and viewers to pay attention
  Create a home for the daily campaign news, a place for the daily twists and turns of the campaign and as well as for those features that don’t warrant page one or the lead-off position. Daily briefings might be a continuing VO/SOT (voice-over/soundbite) feature in newscasts or an anchored column in the newspaper, expanded in time or space for special news and feature reports. Horse-race poll results, photo-op events, and the like can go here. Make it a place people learn to look or watch for, whatever the extent of their political interest.

• Truth-squad the entire campaign
  Ad Watching, direct-mail watching, and stump-speech watching are important oversight elements. Candidates make heavy use of attack advertising and attack speeches because they often work. The task of news organizations is to treat these ads, mailings, and speeches as campaign documents to be analyzed and put in context. Attacks tell something about the person being attacked and the person making the attack. How do the ads fit with the rest of what the candidate says? There are negative attacks that are true and important. Journalists need to distinguish between the negative and the trivial.

• Take off the masks
  Increasingly, massive amounts of money are being spent on "issues" campaigns by committees whose names mean nothing to voters. These committees are ostensibly created to promote a cause, but their advertising just happens to benefit a particular candidate. And their attacks on the opponent can be far more vicious than those of the candidate. It is incumbent on news organizations to tell people not just whether the ad is true or false but what this is all about, where these ads come from, who is spending the money, and for what purpose.

• Report on endorsements
  Endorsements of candidates by citizen groups and special interest organizations – everything from neighborhood associations to the teachers’ union – can be significant signs of voting bloc support for candidates. They also are important harbingers of how a candidate might vote on various issues if elected. Stories reporting on candidate endorsements should include information on the endorsing group and its agenda. What information did the organization seek from the candidate and how did he or she answer? Was the group seeking a commitment on specific legislation?

• Check the national connection
  Candidates for Congress and for many state offices use "talking points" from the national party. Reporters need to tell people what’s behind the arguments they are hearing and identify "cookie-cutter" campaigns. At the same time, they should let voters know when a candidate takes positions at significant odds with party leadership.

• Don’t make politics a dirty word, or a dull one
  Politics is a critical element of our democracy, the way people come to a common understanding and resolution on problems and differences. And if the practice is often nasty, and uncivil, the problem lies with the practitioners, not the process. It’s incumbent on journalists to draw those lines while aggressively reporting what is going on.

• Tell people who the candidate really is
  We all are products of our life experience. People and events in our past shaped our values, the way we think, the way we respond in good times and difficult situations. We all have our trophies and our baggage. Politicians are no different. Telling their stories in ways that help citizens understand why they are who they are is more compelling – and more useful because it helps citizens judge how the person might react in the future. Spend time with them. Look at events in their lives that made them change positions. Get to their emotions. Do profiles that are just profiles, not crammed with campaign "stuff." In other words, write about them as people.

• Keep a campaign scorecard
  People look to news organizations to help them evaluate the candidates. One way to do that is to offer citizens a scorecard on each candidate’s campaign. What better way to get a sense of how the candidate leads and manages and responds under pressure?

Ask Yourself What Voters Want, Then Deliver It

We’ve said much in this handbook about listening to citizens – the people who potentially vote. They’re the people who read newspapers, watch television, and listen to radio news. Explore their values and concerns and their information needs as a way to inform your judgments.

One way to approach story planning is to put yourself in the place of the typical citizen and ask what you need to know to make a voting decision, what you need to do to sort information as you listen to commercials and debates, read the columnists and analysts, watch the pundits, and follow the daily campaign stories and special reports. Here are one editor’s answers:

• What does he/she stand for?
  Not so much what her position is on any issue, although what she says now and what her record reflects are good indicators, but rather, what is at the core? What are basic values that drive her decision-making? What might I expect when the unexpected comes up? Will she disappoint me?

• What is his/her management style?
  Can he run a huge bureaucracy and if so, how well? What does he delegate, and how effectively? How does he deal with others – political bodies, businesses, special interests, etc.?

• Is she/he a good judge of character?
  What kind of people does she select to help and advise her? And where are they coming from? What can I expect from them?

• Can I trust her/his judgment?
  Does he do his homework and understand policy implications? What is the quality of his decision-making?

• What kind of leader is he/she?
  What is her leadership style? Consensus? Bully pulpit? Nurturing? Does she inspire or ignite? Does she persuade or push? Does she look long term, or focus on the expedient and the immediately doable?

• How will I remember her/him?
  When his two, four, or eight years are over, what is likely to be his legacy? Will I feel good about his having been president, about having voted for him? How will she have changed my life? How will he have changed my town, state, or country?

Don’t stop your political coverage on Election Day

After Election Day, the focus turns from getting elected to governance, but politics never goes away. The emphasis shifts to the process of compromise and working out the tradeoffs to move ahead on any significant policy issue. Special interests are an even greater factor here. And citizen concerns are at constant risk. Some of the same techniques used in election coverage can be valuable in making sure citizen interests are included in the dialogue. Citizen panels, focus groups, and

attitude polling can be used to reflect public opinion and test both public discussions and coverage for inclusiveness. Citizen participation can be encouraged. And lots of information can be provided on how citizens can make their voices heard and achieve greater access. That will make the political playing field a bit more level.

Look for the unintended consequences

Most public-issues battles are waged over immediate and anticipated consequences. When public policy decisions come undone, it is because of unforeseen and possibly unintended consequences. Almost always, the victims are people excluded from the political process. Public affairs reporting should always ask the political question, who is at the table, and the policy question, who else should be there, because they have a stake in the outcome. Examining those stakes will often uncover unintended consequences.

Watch the longer-term trends

Politics is never static. Explore the shifts in power and the impact this has on both public policy and party or interest-group politics. Examine the changing influence that core values and social and cultural trends have on politics. Show people, between election campaigns, how politics affects them and how people can affect politics.

-- Special thanks to the co-editors of the Poynter Election Handbook, Deborah Potter and Pete Weitzel.

Deborah Potter is executive director of NewsLab, a non-profit television news laboratory that works with local stations to develop new ways of telling complex or non-visual stories. Deborah spent 16 years as a network correspondent for CBS News and CNN, where she covered the White House, State Department, Congress, national politics, and the environment. From 1995 to 1998, she taught journalism at The Poynter Institute and also hosted the PBS program In the Prime.

Pete Weitzel is a former managing editor of the Miami Herald and visiting professional at Poynter. He's now a newspaper consultant and lives in Durham, NC.

Resources
A collection of books, websites, and other materials to help reporters and editors stay in tuned with what's important to readers.