The Citizens Agenda: An Alternative to the Status Quo of Elections Coverage
Jennifer Brandel, Hearken
Consider the types of news coverage that you associate with elections. What is it about? Is it horse-race poll numbers, candidate scandals, theater-style reviews of debate performances? And if it is — what actual utility do those reporting styles have when you step into the voting booth on election days to make choices?
Newsrooms are painfully aware that something needs to change. The fact that most journalists wrongfully predicted the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election was a wake-up call. They were disconnected from the experiences of many voters, and didn’t hear other narratives coursing through communities outside of urban centers. Since 2016, a vague understanding that journalists need to listen better and more broadly has emerged. But what exactly can they do differently when many of their business models still reward attention and clicks, when reporters have story count quotas to fill, or when the newsroom muscle memory for how things have always been done is so strong that any other way is unimaginable?
This is exactly where we find ourselves right now. With 2020’s federal election fast approaching and newsrooms starting to make their plans, now is the moment in which newsroom leadership has to “vote” for what models of reporting they’re going to employ to help inform, engage and equip their communities so democracy can function as intended.
Were a newsroom to actually classify the types of election reporting, some major topics emerge:
- Polls
- Events
- Candidates
- Campaigns
- Issues
- Voters
- Guides
Each of these topics has different flavors of reporting nested underneath it. For instance, when we look at stories about voters, they often fall into these types of narratives:
The Diner Safari: reporter (often from out of town) goes to a local diner to hear what “regular people” think about candidates and issues.
The Rally Recap: reporter gets quick sound bites and opinions from folks gathered at a rally to support a given candidate to paint a picture of who identifies with them.
The Demographic Monolith: reporting based on polls or sentiment analysis of one group and states how that group feels about a topic or candidate (E.g., the women’s vote, the African-American vote, etc.).
Voter Profiles: an in-depth look at a voter who plays the role of a surrogate for other voters like them. This is often paired alongside data about a demographic monolith.
While each of these flavors of reporting is about voters, voters really don’t have any power in this style of reporting, even when it’s about them. That is: voters remain the objects or subjects of reporting. Heather Bryant lays out these dynamics in her incisive paper called A Roadmap for Equitable Inclusion. Here’s a hearty excerpt from her piece to illustrate the point:
“For the person who’s most directly engaged with whatever is being reported on, there are three main roles for them to occupy: the object, the subject or the partner.
If you do a story about poverty and I am facing economic hardship, I am an object of your story.
If you do a story about poverty and I am facing economic hardship and you interview me, I am a subject and I now have some degree of a voice.
If you do a story about poverty and I participate in informing, framing and guiding the story, then I am a partner.
A partner is the form of participation with the most agency possible aside from the practitioner.
When the least empowered people are given the agency of partnership rather than the marginalization of being objects, the journalism produced is more likely to realize the goals of accountability for systems of power and the best opportunity for a more nuanced and accurate depiction of reality.”
As newsrooms attempt to listen better, there are new models to deploy that position the public as a partner, supplying them with agency to determine which information they need to make their most confident decisions possible on Election Day and beyond.
We call one such model The Citizens Agenda, in which reporters listen to what their communities want politicians to be addressing as they compete for their votes, and generate a reporting “agenda” that forms the basis of their coverage. Hearken released a Citizens Agenda Guide earlier this year that outlines the details of this model and offers exercises to help newsrooms incorporate it into their elections coverage.
To paint a fuller picture, the Citizens Agenda model is journalism in which the public is not the consumer or recipient of news, but a co-creator. It bears to reason that if citizens are indeed the most important actor in a democracy, then they deserve to have representation, power and a say in what journalism covers to begin with. Journalists are of course citizens, too, but they woefully do not mirror the demographics or lived experiences of many people in the communities their work must serve. So how could they know what information would be most useful and necessary to everyone?
The Citizens Agenda style of election reporting centers all coverage around what voters want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes. How do reporters get this information? The answer is as radical as it is simple: they ask them. Newsrooms must actually go out and listen to the varied publics they are serving, and then take those communities’ concerns and questions to those in charge. Then they must report back to the public about how candidates are answering to their agenda, so when voters hit up the polls on Election Day, the information they’re using to make their decisions centers around the issues and topics that actually matter to them.
If these ideas sound familiar, it’s likely due to NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen’s influence. He is well-known as a pioneer for journalism that treats the public as more than a consumer, object or subject, and he’s been imploring newsrooms to deploy this style of elections coverage for years.
The language around this style of community-centric journalism is still in a state of flux, and is often called: public-powered journalism, people-powered journalism, responsive journalism, or human-centered journalism. Whatever you call it, this approach is counter to the traditional model in which reporters act as a gatekeeper between those with power (such as politicians) and the people affected by the decisions of those in power.
By contrast, The Citizens Agenda approach flips the power dynamic, elevating the public as the party determining and being served by the reporting decisions the newsroom makes.
This approach centers on curiosity, not assertion and opinion. Curiosity is where the best journalism happens: it’s not just chronicling what someone said, or promoting what someone thinks — it’s about a quest for truth and uncovering new information. The public asks questions that journalists have the time and qualifications to help find. So this isn’t about adding more opinions and punditry to the mix, but research and validated information.
When this public-powered reporting model is used, newsrooms become accountable to their communities in a way that they’ve never been before, and work to repair and build trust. Trusting News has researched and documented seven key practices and subtle shifts that newsrooms can take to prove they are worthy of the public’s trust, and the number one practice is to be accessible and responsive. This is the heart of the Citizens Agenda.
As journalists ourselves, we believe the accountability, accessibility and responsiveness inherent in this model is what will make the difference between another year of status quo elections coverage that misses the mark, and reporting that truly serves to create and empower an informed and engaged electorate.
For more information, visit: thecitizensagenda.org. Sign up for the newsletter if you’d like to get updates on training, webinars and other opportunities.
This reporting model’s guides, coaching and training is a collaborative, grassroots effort between Hearken, The Membership Puzzle Project, and Trusting News.
Jennifer Brandel is the CEO and Co-founder of Hearken. She began her career in journalism reporting for outlets including NPR, CBC, WBEZ, The New York Times and Vice, picking up awards along the way. In 2012 Brandel founded the groundbreaking audience-first series, WBEZ’s Curious City, and is spreading this public-powered journalism model around the world via Hearken. Her company participated in the Matter VC accelerator in San Francisco and took home the prize for “Best Bootstrap Company” at SXSW in 2016 and won the News Media Alliance 2017 Accelerator. Brandel is a recipient of the Media Changemaker Prize by the Center for Collaborative Journalism, was named one of 30 World-Changing Women 2018 in Conscious Business, and is a 2018 Sulzberger Fellow.
