How a newsroom used videos to revamp its “About Us” page and get on the record about its ethics and mission
The Red Line Project, an online news organization by students at the University of Illinois Chicago and their advisor Mike Reilley, is providing transparency about its mission, ethics and reporting process on its recently revamped “Our Principles” page.
The page is equivalent to an “About Us” page, something most newsrooms have. The question is: are those pages effective?
At Trusting News we encourage newsrooms to highlight and make information related to a newsroom’s mission, owner, ethics, funding, correction policies and contact information easily accessible to users and easy to share.
An “About Us” page could answer questions like:
- What is your news outlet’s mission?
- What communities do you cover, and how long have you been in business?
- What do you value, and what are your standards?
- Who works in your newsroom, and how are they reachable?
- How do you make money, and do your funding sources influence your news coverage?
These questions represent what we have heard users ask (or complain to) news organizations about. People want answers to these questions, and if they can’t easily find the answers they will be left to fill the information gap themselves. If they do that, it means they probably won’t give journalists credit for many of the thoughtful decision-making taking place in newsrooms every day.
We find that a lot of newsrooms have information answering these questions somewhere, but it’s not always easy to find — and it’s almost always written using journalism jargon. Creating an “About Us” page is one way to group all of this information in one place, making it easily accessible for users. (We have tips for how to create an effective “About Us” page in this Medium post.)
A case study: The Red Line Project
When revamping the “Our Principles” page, the journalists at the Red Line Project linked out to the page from the header of the homepage of the news organization’s website. By doing this, the journalists made it a lot easier for users to find answers to questions about their ethics and reporting processes.
On the page, the newsroom features two whiteboard videos explaining their reporting and editing process.
In the video explaining their data reporting process, the students explain the process: find an idea, research the idea and find data. They outline what each of these steps involves. For example, for the idea step, they explain how they find out what else has been done on the topic. The video uses animation to explain the process and was created using VideoScribe.
The video also explains basic elements of reporting, like how they speak to outside sources and experts and how they fact-check.
Another video on the page explains the digital reporting process. In this video, they explain how the reporting process starts with an idea (what’s the problem?), continues with research then leads to interviews and the gathering of photos and video (depending on the medium of the final product).
Reilley said the students worked to create this content to help “give readers an understanding of our foundational reporting and editing process, and how and why we cover certain issues.”
The students started working on the new elements for the web page in late July 2021 and launched it, along with the videos, in October 2021.
In addition to helping users better understand their reporting process, the page serves other purposes too.
Reilley said the Principles page also:
- Provides students a link they can share with potential sources who question whether they should talk to student journalists or are unsure of what The Red Line Project is.
- Helped the UIC communication department leadership and faculty better understand their approach.
- Became a teaching tool. Reilley said, “I have my incoming students each semester read it the first day of class and ask questions. It helps them better understand our commitment to accuracy, fairness, diversity, etc. It’s particularly helpful for sophomore students in my Digital Journalism class who have no previous journalism training.”
Now that the page is finished, students are linking to the page from stories they publish. This allows people to find answers to any questions they may have about the reporting process in the story itself. This is a good best practice because remember, people will be the most curious about how the journalistic process works while they are consuming your news content.
A Q&A with Mike Reilley, the journalist behind the work
Read the Q&A with Reilley below to learn more about the process the team used to create this content, how their team is using it and what the response from the community and newsroom has been.
Trusting News would like to thank Mike Reilley and the entire Red Line Project team for their time, effort and dedication to building trust with their community through transparency and engagement strategies like these. Through this work, we are able to learn more about what works best to build trust with the public. Without their willingness to experiment, we would not be able to share what works best for building trust with the journalism community. If you are experimenting with building trust, let us know here.
Describe what it was like to produce this content. Did it come easily to you? Was it challenging? Did it make you think differently?
My UIC Advanced Data Journalism class in the fall 2021 semester did the heavy lifting with the multimedia and development of the page. They met with Lynn Walsh the third week of the semester and then started building the content. I provided them with a series of principles pages from professional newsrooms to read over the summer, shortly after I finished taking the Trusting News for Educators course online. (Educators, would you like to learn how to include trust-building strategies in your teaching? Start with these sample assignments.)
Our challenge was to use what we found in those newsroom guidelines (Seattle Times, SF Chronicle, etc.) and adapt them to both a Chicago audience and to a student-driven publication. As we mention on the page, we adapted some of the guidelines directly from those news outlets, credited them, added some of our own and tailored them for our neighborhood coverage.
Developing the commitment to diversity standards was extremely important. Thirty-five to 40 percent of my students each semester are Latino, African American or Asian. They cover issues in those communities. So I think it was important, both internally with the students and externally with readers in Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods, that we have a strong, clear commitment to diverse coverage.
Would you use this trust-building strategy or content again? If so, would you do anything differently?
Of course. It would be interesting to refresh this page on an annual basis and develop some new areas. I’d like us to outline some of our photographic editing standards and make them a little clearer. With the world changing all the time, we need to freshen up our standards. I’m going to build that module into a couple of my fall 2022 classes.
How would you rate the difficulty of producing this content?
The multimedia was challenging but also a lot of fun. The students had to think through it from a clarity, content and visual approach. It took two rounds of editing for them to nail it down. The guidelines we wrote took a few weeks of summer and early semester work (I got them started on it early) and we had the entire project up by October 2021.
How would you describe the user response to this content? If there are specific comments you would like to share, please share a link to the comment, screenshot, quote, etc.
We just added Disqus comments to the site four days ago (Facebook ones crashed on the old site), so we don’t have a lot of comments yet. But as we push the new page out on social, I’m sure we will.
The pages have been very advantageous for student reporters reaching out to sources. Many of them question a student journalist and aren’t sure what the Red Line Project site is. So the student either has them look at the principles page or contact me (and I share the page with them).
How would you describe the response from your newsroom after publishing this content? Were people excited to work on this or see the content publish? Were people skeptical? Was it hard to convince people this was necessary?
This was an easy sell to the seven students who worked on the project. Most have had three or four classes with me and understood the importance of what we’re doing. They also had a lot of field reporting experience and understood our reporting, editing and production standards.
How else are the students using the concept of transparency in their reporting?
In my basic Data Journalism class, we’ve been using Twitter threads to help explain our data reporting process. Students are required to keep a “data diary” of what software, steps, sources and analysis they use in producing a data story. These can be produced as sidebars, but they can be distilled into a short Twitter thread introducing the story and explaining in the sub-tweets how it was produced. This is a nice complement to the Principles page.
Here are a few examples:
- Janette Romero (COVID national data)
- Chris Katsaros (COVID Illinois data)
- Charles Tharpe (COVID/domestic violence)
How I taught this in class: In the second week of the course, I show them a series of Twitter threads written by professional data journalists and challenge the students to do the same with their final projects.
Please add any other thoughts or comments you would like to share with the journalism industry. If you would recommend other newsrooms try this approach, what would you say to persuade them?
I think the videos and graphics would be a great thing for professional newsrooms to add to their about or principles pages. Those pages tend to be pretty dry, and a little visual support could go a long way. You also can share them over social channels as a way to draw more attention from readers.
At Trusting News, we learn how people decide what news to trust and turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We train and empower journalists to take responsibility for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust through transparency and engagement. We’re co-hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the American Press Institute. Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Read more about our work at TrustingNews.org.
