Citizens Agenda 2020: Forty stories over six days in New Hampshire
The Citizens Agenda is a model for election coverage that puts people, not the horse race, at the center of campaign coverage. Chris Faraone, editorial director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and his team decided to put the citizens agenda to work for the Feb. 11 presidential primary in New Hampshire.
After hearing about the approach in November, they began to plan in earnest in January. By the time they set up shop at their pop-up newsroom in a Manchester bar, they had conducted a survey to identify the top issues people wanted the candidates to be talking about. Armed with 1,000 flyers, they took to Manchester to put their agenda into action.
The interview with Faraone below has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why did you decide to use the citizens agenda for your primary coverage?
A: Really, we already had the idea that we wanted to cover things that weren’t being covered. I feel like this is just some of the most cringeworthy horse race coverage we have ever seen. So especially this election cycle I felt like there just needed to be more substance.
New Hampshire presents an opportunity for even our local reporters to bring issues directly to candidates. Sure, there are some exceptions — it’s not easy to get to President Trump, to the bigger campaigns. Nevertheless, on the ground — supporters, surrogates, actual human beings to interact with — how can we go beyond some of those policy proposals, but also highlight things that are in them that we just absolutely do not see or hear about at all, especially on cable news.
Q: Ahead of New Hampshire, what were you thinking about in terms of the outreach to get voters talking to you about what they wanted a candidate to be addressing?
A: We used the the wording directly from the Hearken playbook, it just really made sense. We ran it by our core crew and it just worked. We did flyers and the digital campaign.
Basically, we put together our citizens agenda after about that first hundred people told us what they wanted to know, it had about 20 points on it and we had people vote on which of those (they were interested in).
Q: How did the voting go?
A: Honestly, some things were a little surprising, some not at all. I didn’t really need the survey to tell me that everybody wants to know about environmental issues. But on the other hand I did need it to show things like … the death penalty and life without parole, a significant number of people wanted to know about that. Voter rights and ballot access. Income inequality.
When you end up seeing the coverage that came out of it, we really did focus on that, in part because of this.
Q: So you had this survey going into New Hampshire, you had an idea of what people wanted the candidates to be talking about. Once you got there, was it that Friday before you did the flyer drop?
A: It was about a week and a half before, actually. We brought 1,000 up there and I think we gave 500 to Carol (Robidoux, of Manchester Ink Link), and then we brought the rest to other places. There’s a bookstore across the street, almost every candidate actually did an event at that bookstore.
If you’re going to talk engagement, this is like an engagement carnival. Everything’s really up close and personal.
We left two signs in the bar where we were going to be. It’s an Irish bar but it’s also a club venue, and so they have everything from punk night, the only hip-hop night in town, to comedy nights. As much diversity as you could ever get in New Hampshire, it’s coming through those doors.
(In addition we put out flyers at community spaces including bookstores, bars and restaurants.) I’d say about 800 flyers went out and the back side of that flyer was also saying we were going to be up here, promoting what we were doing. And of course the URL for the general coverage.
Q: What was the response once you got up there?
A: Let me tell you, the flyers were so great.
Let’s say you’re sitting on the other corner of the bar, and you’re like, “OK, who are these people sitting over there working?” Well, that flyer kind of explained it, and if people had something that they thought we should talk about, they came over and said it. It kept on happening and it did inform coverage.
We had one woman who was there who had been a protester of the nuclear power plant. And I was like, “Oh, you know, that’s actually something that several people did write in. They do want to hear about nuclear waste and how people plan on storing it.” This is something that we ended up getting almost every campaign to respond on, you won’t see this from anybody else.
Q: I’m sure it’s hard in the hurly burly of the engagement carnival to keep track of how many people responded to you. Was it tens, or dozens?
A: You mean in the bar or overall?
Q: Overall.
A: I’d say we’re talking about 200 nodes of input across everything. And then there’s what our reporters made of that, the synthesis of it.
Here’s the great thing about using the citizens agenda: we love it when reporters know their lane, what they like to report about. We don’t try to force people into anything. At the same time, especially in the situation up there, there are definitely people who came up who didn’t necessarily know exactly what they wanted to write about. But because there was some input, we had one reporter ended up writing about the gig economy, which was something people wanted to know about.
Another one is the nuclear one. Erin (the reporter) was totally open to picking up on something. .. It definitely stands out to me as one of the best ones.
Q: Tell me a little bit about what it meant to the reporters. In addition to story selection, did it impact the way they went about asking these questions of the candidates? Were they citing the people that you had heard as the originators of these ideas?
A: No, we weren’t citing people necessarily. Although I will say, don’t forget, we allowed for people to not just write “health care,” but to say a specific question. In writing that citizens agenda, we used those questions, put them in italics, as the direction that we wanted to look at certain things.
I was basically one editor up there, and I only know so much stuff, and who cares what my interests are, right? I’ve had a lot of good editors who just have way too much of a personal stake in what’s being written about.
We didn’t get it to the point where we’re going around telling people, “Hey, we have 200 people that say a certain thing.” I think if we had done it ahead of time, and when we do it in the future, certainly for the next gubernatorial election in Massachusetts, that’s what I’m going to really aim for.
When you’re just generally looking at these candidates, it is so easy to just be like, “Sanders and Warren are progressive, these ones are centrists, and Trump is the conservative.”
Only when you begin to actually look deeper into the issues, largely with questions brought from the public, can you see the differences between these people.
With the gig economy, the Sanders and Warren campaigns for example, it’s this easy, “We want to unionize more workers.” Well, that’s not really a sufficient answer when you talk to people who are experts on the topic.
Q: How was the experience compared to your expectations of what it would allow you to do in New Hampshire?
A: I’ll go personal for a second: I was terrified this time. We had done this in 2016, had some success, stories ran in a number of cities just like they did this time. But I gotta say, we really hyped this one up. We did a lot of work ahead of time and I was really scared, just personally, that I wasn’t going to live up to expectations.
First and foremost I have to credit my reporters — they’re the ones who went out and did the work. I sat at the bar editing.
Plus just having just something to go off of. We could’ve made our own list but … I can’t tell you how many people came in saying that they wanted to write about Bernie bros or something like that. And I was like, “If you’re hearing it all day, then it’s not something we want. If it’s something that everybody else is writing about, then it’s just not something that we need.” That’s a good first prompt but having the actual substance is a better second prompt.
Q: And was it 40 stories that came out of this?
A: Yeah, there’s 40 stories. I can’t believe it. From Wednesday to Monday.
Q: So you were terrified. How do you feel now?
A: I feel just a bit relieved. This is year 2, year 3 we’ll have an even better idea of what we need. I definitely want to do more multimedia, more video.
I’m just happy. I’m just happy that we did it, I’m happy that we did it the way we did.
Even after the the election people will be able to go back, for example with the gig economy stuff, we have some background stuff from Sanders campaigners. We actually got into the discussions that are happening about that on the back end of it, that stuff’s all relevant.
We talk about the interaction and engagement with the public a lot, I don’t hear enough about it from reporter to reporter. In this day and age of freelancing to have this free-flowing conversation basically between reporters, members of the public, there’s Trump supporters coming in there — it’s not like we were in a bubble.
When you’re on Radio Row, you just hear the same things over and over.
We were in a much different environment, I think that’s important, that we were talking to people who were in there. Some people leave Manchester while it’s going on, the way you would leave your town if the Super Bowl was there. But a lot of people do stick around — it’s nuts, but it’s not that nuts. And people come out, they want to talk to the media. Some just want to see Anderson Cooper, but some really want to engage.
For more on the citizens agenda, including a downloadable resource guide, visit thecitizensagenda.org.
