Pitch This: The best questions asked by newsrooms during the 2020 election

Hearken

Published in

We Are Hearken

6 min readDec 11, 2020

By Kerrie Vila
Election SOS

Introduction

So the Pitch This Database was born. The goal was to serve reporters who are on a deadline, searching for inspiration, or just need a bit of a break.

The Pitch This Database is just one part of a broader initiative called Election SOS. The project is managed by the consultancy Hearken with the support of Trusting News, and it’s fiscally sponsored by the American Press Institute.

Nuts and Bolts

The project ran for 13 weeks from Monday, Sept. 14 to Friday, Dec. 11. In total, the pre-election database had 94 stories and the post-election database had 68 stories. The pitches came from a variety of local and national news organizations representing 34 different states.

How I built the Pitch Database

We launched the WordPress page (www.electionsos.com/pitch-this/) publicly with 25 stories in the database and continued to add stories almost daily until early December. Each entry in the database included these elements that are critical to a successful pitch:

Main question the article addresses
Potential sources
Data (if relevant)
Deadline (if relevant)
Example of other news organizations covering the topic
Value to the reader

Additionally, users could sort by topic focus (i.e., voting or misinformation) and see the nut graph and headline from the example article. This information gave users more context before they clicked on the link and left the page.

Choosing Stories

I tried to find stories that were well written, fact-checked and reliable on sites that were easy to read. However, the most important factor — besides that it had to be truthful and could not spread disinformation — was that the story asked an “engaging” question.

That could have meant a story that was underreported, like voting for people with disabilities or Native Americans. It meant stories that were more relevant locally and were being overlooked, like where to find information on down-ballot races. It also meant stories people in most newsrooms were assuming readers understood. For example, a lot of newsrooms reported on militias and voter intimidation tactics, but few asked “What does ‘voter intimidation’ legally mean in my area?” or “Where should I report non-violent voting rights infringements?”

Newsletters

Each morning I read 41 newsletters in order to source stories from the database. The goal was to find a diverse set of newsletters that served different audiences. You can see the full list of newsletters at the bottom of this article. A majority of the Pitch Database stories came directly from these newsletters.

Twitter

I also built a “local news politics Twitter bot.” The account follows every journalist from The Washington Post’s List of Best Political Reporters and their news organization, as well as a few other great reporters and newsrooms. This was the other main method of collecting story ideas. You can see the Twitter account and who it follows here.

Highlights and Insights

Favorite Questions/ Story Ideas

This is a subjective list of my favorite questions from the Pitch Database. This is not a list of the best election coverage. There was a lot of great election coverage that deserves attention but was not right for the pitch database. Most of these pitches worked because they are so simple, but if the question wasn’t asked there is a chance the issue would have been forgotten.

Pre-Election

Helping readers vote:

Helping readers find information:

Helping readers understand the COVID-19 voting and the election process:

Tackling under-reported stories:

Post-Election

Takeaways

In a time with almost too much information available and misinformation everywhere, trusted news sources have the opportunity to be the voice of reason and fact. The most engaging election stories did not focus on the rhetoric of the debates or feature a tweet-by-tweet analysis of Donald Trump. The stories that impacted the audience were stories that offered support to voters, actionable advice on how to perform their civic duty without putting their family at risk, and answered questions relevant to the reader’s daily lives.

Austin Lammers, an Election SOS fellow with the Colorado News Collaborative, decided to tackle the question, “What is an election audit and how does it work in Colorado?” It seems so simple, but by explaining the audit process to readers he helped them understand that audits are mandatory, save the state money and are good for improving election integrity. The article is concise, easy to follow and informative. A few weeks later as recounts and audits were making national headlines and being used incorrectly to claim voter fraud, The Colorado Sun re-promoted the article to explain that audits improve accuracy and are good for democracy.

It is important that newsrooms answer the simple questions and promote the readers’ trust in America’s systems and institutions when they are under attack.