Take stock of your clarity around opinion content with this step-by-step guide
“There’s so much opinion in the news!” We’ve all heard it, over and over.
Sometimes, the observation is valid, right? It’s not hard to find examples of where journalists’ own perspectives and assumptions show up in their news reporting. (Sometimes that’s appropriate and transparent, and sometimes it’s careless or accidental.) It’s also not hard to find examples of news sources irresponsibly pretending to be straightforward while actually pushing a perspective.
When news consumers complain about coverage that is opinionated, there’s a lot to unpack and drill down on. And it’s within that complicated context we want to tackle one element of the confusion: It is far too easy to consume opinion content and genuinely confuse it with straight news.
Today, we’re launching a resource designed to help you communicate clearly about your opinion content. Trusting News Guide: Opinion Audit
Users simply can’t always tell when journalists are sharing their opinions on purpose — when the opinion is the point of a piece rather than an accidental insertion. More on that is here from Professor Kevin Lerner and here from Kevin Loker at the American Press Institute.
As we heard in one newsroom partner’s audience survey: “Change the restaurant reviewer; she’s very biased.”
I taught a couple of years ago at a Poynter workshop for journalists working on opinion writing. I asked how many of them had heard similar complaints about their own writing — complaints that their content designed to share opinions was too opinionated — and every hand went up.
Frustrating, right? So what are we doing about it?
In some ways this is a problem of news literacy — not all news consumers navigate the news in ways we’d expect, and not all understand the cues we’re trying to send. It’s a problem made worse by the way news is separated from its natural habitat as it travels across many platforms. It’s very easy on Facebook, for example, to see a headline linking to an opinion column that gives no indication on a user’s feed that it’s designed to share an opinion.
And in some ways it’s a legitimate problem of news stories being written in a way where the writer’s biases and assumptions are easy to see. You won’t be surprised to know that this topic came up in research we did last year with the Center for Media Engagement. We recruited local journalists to talk to people who identify as right-leaning about their perceptions of local news. One of their top complaints was that coverage feels politically slanted.
COMING SOON: We’ll be writing more in the next several weeks about what we’ve learned so far in our Road to Pluralism work, and we’ll be launching new projects with partner newsrooms. Learn more and apply to get involved here.
The complicating factors of changing formats
A lot of changes in the news industry have made this problem more of a crisis. I want to address two of them:
- The Internet and the atomization of content. When opinion content was confined to specific pages of a print newspaper and appeared only in that context, it was much harder to be confused. Now a headline — one that in its original habitat might be surrounded by contextual clues — stands on its own in feeds of all varieties, absent of context. That’s a design problem that online interfaces have not properly addressed.
- Changing practices and standards on cable news. When I turn on the TV, it is genuinely difficult for me to tell the role (and therefore the goal) of the person telling me about the world. It might be a straight news reporter or anchor. It might be a host, helping me interpret the news. A panel discussion might include any mix of journalists, sources and analysts. Opinions flow freely (and that’s a feature, not a bug). Cable news has a growing audience, and that affects its viewers’ expectations around information overall. Many people consume less local news than national, and they’re not used to news outlets that work hard to keep opinion and news separate. If that’s the standard your newsroom holds itself to, you need to make that clear.
Why this matters to us at Trusting News
In our Road to Pluralism work, we’re addressing topics like what makes coverage seem fair, how news contributes to polarization and how our worldviews as journalists affect how we cover the news. We’ll continue to share what we learn on those topics and more.
With the newsrooms in our Pluralism Network, we decided to also tackle the fundamental problem of audience confusion. Why are newsrooms still making this so hard? Why do news outlets continue to think putting a small label that says something like “Perspectives” above a headline is a clear indication to all readers that someone’s personal opinion will follow? Especially when that label doesn’t appear in every spot where the headline appears (like your organization’s home page, or Facebook)?
Some hard truths that get in our way:
- We are too often wedded to our traditional naming conventions and habits — things that make perfect sense to us but are opaque to our audience.
- We are inconsistent within our own products (are columnists for politics, sports and general news handled the same way?) and as an industry. Labels and terms mean different things to different news outlets, yet we expect audiences to know what *we* mean.
- We need to invest in needed changes to our technology — like our design and our content management systems — that would make it easier for our audiences to place each piece of content in context.
Journalists need to take ownership over making their content types clear. The stakes are too high to let confusion linger. And there are simple things news organizations can do to properly label and describe their opinion content.
Our vision
It’s simple, really. We want newsrooms to be clear internally about whether each individual piece of content features the journalist’s own opinions or experiences. And if it does, we want the author and their intent to be crystal clear to the audience, on any platform or environment in which they are exposed to it.
This is especially important when it comes to less experienced news consumers. Ask yourself if your product is designed for your most loyal consumers or if you want it to be welcoming and accessible to people who are unfamiliar with news conventions in general and with your product specifically. (Consider the common practice of having the first word of a headline on a column be the columnist’s name, with that as the only indication that the piece is sharing a personal opinion or reflection.)
Our main question for you to consider is this: How easy would it be for a casual or first-time audience member to understand that a piece of content is sharing an opinion or perspective, and whose opinion or perspective it is?
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How we’re tackling this
We designed a process for newsrooms to audit and examine the labeling and descriptions of their own opinion content.
Then we collaborated with three partner newsrooms to take it for a test drive:
- The Concord Monitor in New Hampshire
- The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
- WJCT News/Jacksonville Today
Just among those three newsrooms, we compiled a list of the various labels used on opinion content (below). It’s useful to note that the words used sometimes don’t mean the same thing from newsroom to newsroom (what is an “analysis,” anyway?) and that practices can vary even within the same newsrooms around how content is labeled and described.
The newsrooms involved found a lot of value in going through the process. Here’s a look at some changes that will result.
Allie Ginwala, audience engagement editor at The Concord Monitor, said her newsroom has some changes to the opinion section going live soon (starting with a note to readers talking about the changes). All opinion essays published online will have “opinion” directly in the headline and the opinion tag that appears at the bottom of all opinion essays will more clearly explain that the Monitor’s opinion content comes from submissions from members of the community. The print edition will see some changes too, like the author’s information featured more prominently and more details about the types of opinion content and how to submit them.
Here’s one thing Allie wrote that stood out to her about her newsroom’s need for clarity:
“Perhaps one of the biggest takeaways from the audit is that the labels we use for our opinion content might not be the clearest. Sure, we talk about what a My Turn is in our opinion policy, and our longtime readers are familiar with the term. But what about someone who sees a post on social media or clicks on our website for the first time? Do they know they’re reading a community-submitted essay and not a reported news story from Monitor staff?”
Jessica Palombo is editorial director at WJCT Public Media and editor of Jacksonville Today. She reports that each Jacksonville Today column will now incorporate two changes (example here): A short author bio is included in each, and the word Opinion will now be included in each headline, to make sure it’s part of the social media share. She plans to also create a Perspectives landing page with the columnists listed. It will include this description of how columns are written and why:
“To reflect on the news of the day, Jacksonville Today seeks to include a diverse set of perspectives. These opinion columnists are independent contractors who are paid for their contributions and are not involved in news decisions.”
Katie Brumbeloe, digital coach at The Gazette, passed along that two plans her team has are to add the word opinion to the start of opinion headlines for social media posts and to write an explanation of different types of opinion content that will be included on each opinion story page. In addition, they’re assessing the ways they describe their editorial board and their invitation to submit letters and commentary, to make sure they’re clear and concise.
Here’s what Katie said about going through this process:
“This audit was extremely beneficial, allowing us to step back and see how our opinion content reaches readers in different spaces online, where it may not appear to be opinion at first look. It’s allowing us to be more thoughtful, too, in how we explain to readers what an ‘editorial”’is or a ‘column’— jargon that is so familiar to us in the newsroom or on print pages, but is unclear to readers coming to us via social or search, or even directly on our site.”
Are you ready to get to work?
We’re now sharing this process and tools publicly. Our Opinion Audit guide walks you through:
- best practices for making your labeling and descriptions more clear
- how to audit your own content
- how to decide what to change, with reader clarity as the guide
- how to talk to your audience about your changes, and about why you publish opinion journalism in general
The guide focuses on digital content — how headlines and stories appear on news websites and around the Internet — but can also apply to print or on air products. Find the guide here.
We’re here to help, and we want to see what you’re up to!
Please let us know if you go through our Opinion Guide. We’d love to hear whether it helped you analyze your products with fresh eyes. And if you make changes as a result of the process, we’d love to share your improvements with the industry!
In addition, if you go through the guide and come up with your own ideas about how to be more clear, our Trusting News team is happy to take a look at your plans and offer some feedback.
Email info@TrustingNews.org, or tweet @TrustingNews.
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.
