What national reporters can learn from Indiana’s Banner-Graphic
To earn trust, spend time in the community & don’t pull punches
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Consistency, fairness, and trying to cover issues that are important to the readers. It may sound like a journalism cliche, but that’s what has made the Banner-Graphic in Greencastle, Indiana a well-read and generally trusted source of local news.
And the tiny news staff –two at last count–doesn’t hesitate to cover tough stories, drawing on its well of trust among its readers to hold a local official accountable for mismanagement or report on the traffic ticket of a relative of one of the journalists. This willingness not to pull punches is what makes the paper credible, and a source of news that residents must turn to, if they are to find out what is going on in their community.
On a typical day at the Banner, Eric Bernsee, the editor, is shooting photos at a local nursing home, then heading out to cover a government meeting, and then hustling back to the office to write — and edit another reporter’s story.
On other days, if Bernsee has a breaking story, he might file from his phone. Occasionally, when a student from DePauw University — Greencastle’s second largest employer — gets into trouble with local law enforcement, Bernsee will field a call from a big city lawyer asking that the student’s name be excised from the closely read police log that the paper routinely prints.
That’s one of the easier questions Bernsee might field in a day’s work. The answer, he says, is a polite but firm no.
Had more reporters spent time in communities such as Greencastle, where a prominent local Democrat had virulently criticized Hillary Clinton at a public meeting in the fall of 2016, maybe they would have seen the Trump wave before it hit the shore. That could have helped them to understand that Trump’s frequent attacks on the press and the judiciary are both a reflection and a cause of the deeply rooted cynicism many are expressing about journalists, and journalism.
“We serve our communities,” says the University of Missouri j-school grad, who lives in Greencastle, the largest of the communities the newspaper serves.
“I always get calls of ‘don’t put that in the paper.’ We put it all in. It’s all or nothing. My ex-wife’s traffic ticket was in the paper. If something happens to us, we put that in the paper too.”
When a local high school athletic director got busted for drunk driving, a small story made the paper. “If you cause a wreck, you might get even more than that,” Bernsee said.
“That’s the only way I know to do it. You do it for one, you do it for all.”
The paper has deep roots in the community, and relies on residents to be its eyes and ears when the staff can’t be everywhere at once. A question about spending at the government-funded local convention and visitors bureau, raised by the local League of Women Voters, led to several stories and a personnel shakeup that included the departures of two agency officials.
“They are giving us that crucial information so that we know what our government officials are doing,” said Leslie Hanson, the local League president. “If they did not, there would be more secrecy.”
The paper also offers readers a steady diet of “good news,” on the accomplishments of local students, and sports teams, the upcoming cultural events at DePauw, and other types of news one can use.
Now that it is primary season in Indiana, Bernsee and reporter Jared Jernagan are busy interviewing candidates for state and local offices, and publishing the interviews. Always, these stories are placed in the same place on the front of the paper — below the fold. And yes, there is an online edition, but the printed word remains the key means of distribution.
Chris Pruett, the publisher of the Banner-Graphic and two other local papers owned by Rust Communications, came up on the news side, as editor of a small paper in Linton, Indiana.
“When I get this question about my papers, and why they are successful, news wise, I use the same phrase: hyper local,” he said. “They can get state and national news anywhere. For us to survive, our focus is local, local, local.”
I spend a lot of time in Greencastle, because I am a visiting journalism professor at DePauw. I formerly covered and edited local news for The Washington Post. While the Banner-Graphic may be able to attract and retain readers, its formula can’t necessarily be easily replicated by other news operations. But some of the tricks of the local news trade can translate.
On a recent day, I was chatting with an insurance broker from Kansas City, waiting for a plane in the Indianapolis airport, about the state of the media. He lamented what he said was the “very thin” Kansas City Star, and he looks to the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for national and international coverage. He voted for Trump, and while he is annoyed by some of Trump’s tweets and other forms of communication, he is a supporter because he believes Trump is following through on economic policies that help businesses like his.
I asked him what he thought about the swirl of corruption surrounding Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt. He was indifferent. And he said, in essence, everyone does it.
“The same thing went on in the Obama administration. The media just would not write about it,” he said.
That sense that there is a “deep state,” conspiring with accommodating, liberal journalists isn’t going to disappear away any time soon. We may have Banner-Graphics in some parts of the country able to keep an eye on local governments because the reporters show up, and everyone knows them. But that same sense of familiarity isn’t as obvious in larger newsrooms.
One way to chip away at the distrust that the insurance broker, and so many others, have for large media organizations is to do more at these organizations to show their work. Road shows across the country such as those The New York Times have begun to do are a start. Reporters and editors everywhere should do more to respond to readers’ emails, phone calls, and social media messages. And there is nothing like an old fashioned, in-person interview. Seek out sources beyond Facebook and Twitter. Get out of the office, and get out of the coastal bubbles — and make repeated visits to communities now that you might need for future stories by the time 2020 rolls around.
Had more reporters spent time in communities such as Greencastle, where a prominent local Democrat had virulently criticized Hillary Clinton at a public meeting in the fall of 2016, maybe they would have seen the Trump wave before it hit the shore. That could have helped them to understand that Trump’s frequent attacks on the press and the judiciary are both a reflection and a cause of the deeply rooted cynicism many are expressing about journalists, and journalism.
