How the Star Tribune added clarity to opinion content
We know a lot of news consumers feel like the news is too opinionated. There are of course a lot of valid reasons for that, but one reason is particularly frustrating: It is far too easy for users to consume opinion content and genuinely confuse it with straight news. They can’t tell the difference.
Sometimes, I can’t tell the difference either. Way too often I’ll see a headline in my social media feed and wonder about the perspective the newsroom is sharing, only to realize upon clicking through the piece is actually a column.
We’ve been talking about this for years (since we launched in 2016, honestly) at Trusting News. And this year, we put together a guide for newsrooms to invest in clarity around opinion content. It walks journalists through auditing the types of opinion content they share, how that content is described and labeled, and how they are explaining why and how they publish opinion content in the first place.
Find it here: Trusting News Guide: Opinion Audit
One of the newsrooms we worked with as we were putting the audit together is the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Their team has unveiled some changes as a result of that process, and we’re excited to share them with you here.
A case study: How the Star Tribune added clarity to opinion content
The Star Tribune team wanted to label and succinctly explain each piece of opinion content, every time. To accomplish this, they added a two-sentence explanation to the top of each opinion story explaining what editorials, reader letters, commentaries, etc., are. In the short explanation, they also linked to longer explanations where readers can find out more about the content. This is extremely helpful for users because not every reader is familiar with the terms we use to describe opinion content.
Here are examples of labels atop letters to the editor, editorials and commentaries.
Another way they are adding transparency and clarity to content is by linking to a commentary writer’s professional bio when possible. Not only does this increase transparency, but it also means readers don’t have to Google the writer’s name.
They’re also adding a list naming Editorial Board members in print every Sunday. Online, the “Editorial Board” byline is clickable and leads to an explanation of who they are and what they do.
The newsroom will also occasionally print a full explanation of what Star Tribune Opinion is and what it produces. This will be a shorter version of their updated “Guide to Editorial and Commentary,” which is on the Opinion homepage.
One element of their guide is 10 tips for people writing commentary to submit to the newspaper. A guide like this can be extremely helpful for the public but also for a newsroom.
A Q&A with Elena Neuzil, the journalist who led the project
Read the Q&A with Elena Neuzil, the Star Tribune’s letters editor, below. She led the project, in partnership with Scott Gillespie, editorial page editor and vice president.
Trusting News would like to thank Elena Neuzil and the entire Minneapolis Star Tribune 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.
Q: Why did you want to make these changes? What caused you to want to invest the time?
We’ve found that readers consistently mistake one type of content for another — for example, thinking that an opinion in a commentary by an outside writer is endorsed by the Editorial Board. Readers also seem to have trouble distinguishing between opinion and news content. But this all simply means that we as journalists aren’t doing a good enough job explaining ourselves. After all, how do we expect readers to know what an editorial is if we don’t tell them? We also were impressed by some of the work Trusting News had done with other newspapers and found Director Joy Mayer extremely helpful in reviewing our labeling and suggesting improvements based on best practices.
Q: What were some challenges you faced, and how did you work through them?
We hoped to automate the labeling process, but as of now, it’s a manual addition we make to each piece. The digital team is still looking at an easy way to do that, but it’s harder than it seems. We just decided to go with the manual labeling route now rather than wait months to see if automatic labels were possible.
Q; How are you measuring success? Are you attaching any metrics or other data to the efforts?
I’m not sure we expect anyone to e-mail and say, “Eureka! Now I know what an editorial is!” but I hope that our labels can quietly help readers better understand what we do. The response from colleagues has been mostly positive. Not all of our wish list could be realistically realized, but everyone is behind the mission of more clarity.
Q: Who in your newsroom was involved in making the changes, and what was your process? How long did the efforts take overall?
I (letters editor Elena Neuzil) was the lead on the project, but it also involved Assistant Commentary Editor David Banks, Commentary Editor Doug Tice, Editorial Page Editor and Vice President Scott Gillespie, colleagues on our digital team, and others.
The process took many months, but we were diverted by local elections and availability of the digital team for some of that. I’d say we really started meeting in earnest with the digital team and working on our side of things in January, but it was a steady pace. Other newsrooms could likely do it faster.
Q: 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?
Readers don’t learn about different types of journalism through mind-reading. The only way to make clear what news columns, editorials, commentaries, etc., are is to tell them. And tell them again. This not only clarifies for readers what kind of content they are consuming, but it also engenders trust through transparency. Not only that, but it also starts to explain the value of journalism and each type of content offered when readers actually know the purpose of each one.
How other newsrooms have used the opinion audit
The newsrooms that helped us refine our opinion audit shared in this post some of the changes they made as a result of the process. Here are a couple of updates from them:
Jessica Palombo, editorial director at WJCT Public Media and editor of Jacksonville Today, and her staff added author bios to each column (example here) and also created a Perspectives landing page with this description at the top, differentiating the opinion work from the newsroom.
Allie Ginwala, audience engagement editor at The Concord Monitor, said her newsroom’s changes have included moving the author’s attribution up to the top of an opinion piece, using an “opinion” label in all online headlines, and articulating in their opinion policy and in a tag at the bottom of every opinion essay that the opinion page comes from community content and that contributors are not paid by the Monitor. The changes were explained in a column (which is part of a new To Our Readers section).
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.
