Lessons Learned
An editor's thoughts on reader feedback

For two hours, I sat, I watched and listened to my very best readers talk disconsolately about the just-concluded presidential and senatorial campaigns. Their vocabulary, their analysis, their body language, their strategic silences built to a crescendo of new understanding and humility about our jobs publishing a newspaper and practicing public journalism.

The questions that raced through my head: How can newspapers stimulate citizen interest in politics and government when the public is so disenchanted with the politicians themselves? How can we satisfactorily educate the public about the issues when the public is bored by the issues? How can we be trusted informers about the polity when readers have learned to distrust us at a far more basic level because of an incorrect obituary or the wrong address in a fire story?

How can we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on reporters, newsprint, promotion only to have our most committed readers tell us that no matter what we do, there is no true motivation for them to engage in the campaign?

Let me stop for a moment to say that I am chastened, but not defeated by these questions. The journey depends on The Records's engagement and commitment. But, any presumption that the media can fill a void created by disengaged and non-heroic politicians has disappeared. Only with that humility can we retrace our journey and learn anew. And, there definitely are lifelines to grab, if we listen very carefully to our readers.

But, some of those lifelines will require far greater introspection that even dedicated public journalists may be willing to consider. It will begin with the most fundamental of questions: Do we work for the reader or do we work for ourselves. Can our chief tool - words - prove as effective as we wish? Or does the very existence of a staff by line set up for more failure than we might realize?

Let me first share some valuable insight from a group of readers and voters - one of our four very carefully selected focus groups that helped The Record gauge the effectiveness of our campaign coverage. Keep in mind, these are the elite: well educated, securely employed, politically savvy newspaper readers. And, I am using their words because when I heard them, they carried some real punch.

1. The real issue is not the press. It is the candidate. "Once they are elected, they (candidates) just sit back and go with special interests who benefit them." "It's what you can do for them, not what they can do for you." "Four years come and go, but look back and the promises they talked about, nothing for the most part has panned out." "How many times are you going to hope a person you voted for will do good for you. We're not 21 anymore." "When I was 18, I was interested; My 18-year-old son doesn't care." "We're seeking someone truly heroic." "I would read if there were more dynamic personalities running, someone who was totally different, radical; someone who would make it interesting."

2. The issues themselves are not compelling. "We're not dealing with Communism anymore. There are no issues to rile the people up." "The election was not about issues; it was about slinging mud." "There is no great difference between the candidates and their promises." "People made up their minds very in the campaign."

3. Let's not kid ourselves. Time is the enemy. "There is no time . I do 12 things at once. So, the television is going while I am preparing dinner and picking up the phone." "Who has time to read the paper everyday." "Time is definitely a factor. Who has the time to read a paper for an hour and a half a day."

4. What? Trust the press? "How much do you trust what you read. A lot of people don't. You always question whether it is true." "It's slanted by who wrote it." "If you read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal on the same article, you get two versions." "When you read something in the paper, something you know something about, it is really off the mark. So, it influences my view about how they cover politics."

So, let's review the obstacles to success: 1) Disenchantment over the lack of dynamic political leaders; 2) Boredom about issues, or the lack thereof; 3) The perpetual lack of time; and 4) The very well chronicled loss of confidence in the press itself.

This after publishing a special full page called Campaign Central for 60 straight days. The coverage included: scores of enterprise stories on issues, candidates and the voter's themselves; dozens of charts comparing issue stands of the candidates; analyses to determine the truthfulness of campaign ads; polling to determine the quality of life issues that resonate in North Jersey and relating candidates positions to these priorities; interactive on-line and cable television programming; bibliographies and Internet linkages that gave readers more information about what they needed to know; and direct ways for the candidates to talk and write to their constituents.

1. Put ourselves in perspective. The first step is as spiritual and psychological as it is empirical. We can't get so committed to public journalism that we actually think we can turn the tide by ourselves. Even if we were more trusted, the individual voter and our reader has to be accountable. Let's not kid ourselves: Given the choice between a State of the Union address and a verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, the president loses out.

My own readers were honest enough with themselves. Sure, they can point to the candidates, the issues, the press, the lack of time. But, they did acknowledge through the focus group interplay some important points about themselves. And it is not the press' job to practice in loco parentis.

Listen:

"The information is out there. It was in the paper. The Record compared records of the candidates every night. You had to sit down and read it. It was there."

"The information is available in numerous forms, and it is for any person who wants it. For those who don't, you can't stuff it in front of them."

"It is really up to the individual person. You have 24 hours a day of news everywhere now."

"We really have to do a lot of homework."

Similarly, while newspapers are more believable than television, our readers still will get most of their information from that medium, and that while they sharply criticize negative advertising (and New Jersey had the ugliest advertising of all with the Torricelli-Zimmer race), they still are heavily influenced by its omnipresence and repetition.

2. Don't let the politicians confuse 'em. Consistently and loudly, my readers made this point: The entire political system counts on you to get confused.

Our readers want to avoid campaign process news or analyses pieces that may be balanced and fair, but do not give them a clear, rapid-fire, well-documented understanding of what is actually true.

And when you give them the "truth," don't presume they will believe it unless you tell how it is true. In other words: Where did it come from?

3. Wow. Informational charts and graphics are believable. This is tough news, and not easily digestible. But, it was consistently stated and must be considered. Virtually all of the focus group members shared a conviction that charts, information boxes, and other graphics are more truthful and credible than byline stories. They simply assume that a byline means a viewpoint. Fair: Probably not. Useful to understand: Absolutely.

Of course, we are not going to forego our core business. But, is our most important job to connect with our readers in ways that meet their informational and decision-making needs? If so, do we concentrate more on pure information and comparative charts than on 60 days' worth of in-depth issues reporting?

"Give it to us in a nutshell." "Let's see how they voted side-by-side on the same issues." "Tell us what the promises were four years ago, and show us how the promises fared four years later."

This conviction was dramatically reinforced when we showed the focus groups our final weekend special section which was primarily in chart form. Just the facts. The reaction by all four demographically, psycho-demographically different groups was palpably supportive.

"Nothing is slanted. It's all fact." "You don't have to go from page 3 to page 14 to finish a story. It is all there." "I like it. It sets me up like I am about to take an exam." "It's all put together for me, the facts, the figures." "I can see where the candidates finally stand on the same issues, how each one of them deals with the economy, crime, welfare..." "It's right here. I don't have to read an article."

We spent a lot of money onthat section. And, it was redesigned at the last minute to emphasize charts, graphs, data, and information at the expense of indepth analysis - because we anecdotally were learning that our readers needed it capsulized and digestible. So, it was very exciting to register such success in their eyes.

So, is this defeatist and cynical? I don't think so. In fact, we figured out inevitably how to connect with our readers and empower them to be more engaged in the election by respecting their limitations and preferences.

Moreover, it takes a lot of skill, judgment, discipline, reporting and editing to successfully execute the kind of special section that gave it all to our readers - how they wanted it, when they wanted it.

Our readers also gave us some additional roadmaps for the future, beginning with the New Jersey gubernatorial race this year.

The Record will be going to school on our findings for the Pew project:

1. We will concentrate on easily digestible tools that give our readers a way to determine which candidate is telling the truth. And we will make sure they know how we made that determination. "Shorter versions will let people find it and keep it," said one focus group member. Everyone nodded in agreement.

2. We will rely heavily on charts that compare apples to apples, oranges to oranges, candidate to candidate.

3. We will understand better that no matter how balanced and complete we believe a story to be, the reader may still consider it "too" influenced by the author. That won't keep us from our responsibility as journalists, but it may lead to some corollary decisions: a) Inviting readers to offer up their views on the story and engaging us more through the Internet; b) Running complementary informational charts that document the story's conclusions more clearly; c) Thinking through headlines and word choices that might be viewed as too value laden by readers.

4. We will repeat our information even if some editors are self-conscious that it already appeared in the paper recently. This recommendation was made repeatedly by our readers. We don't hesitate to repeat our cable programming; our on-line product is accessible for repeated viewings. But, we are hesitant to repeat information in the paper because it is not news. But, time pressures and schedules often mean that our best readers missed an important feature; or even if they saw it, they did not fully absorb it.

5. We may spend less time writing lots of in-depth stories early in the campaign. Less may prove to be more. At the same time, we will start running informational charts earlier in the campaign and making them available not only in the newspaper, but by individual request and via the Internet.

6. No matter how well we think we are promoting our coverage off the front page, our devices do not necessarily work for our readers. We were astounded how often they missed important stories and packages that we went out of our way to promote dramatically on the front page. The Sunday of our most successful chart-filled special section carried a huge skybox on the front page. Less than half our focus group members recalled seeing that skybox. One member made a rather useful suggestion: If it was so important a special section, why didn't you use it as a wrap for the entire paper?'

7. We will continue to link our coverage of the candidates' campaigns to the issues that most resonate in our region and that help determine North Jersey's quality of life. Our own research makes it very clear, for example, that the Whitman income-tax-cut strategy has had a particularly negative impact on the older suburbs of North Jersey. In fact, recent CAR analysis shows that for virtually every dollar cut in state aid, property taxes went up a dollar. This framework will let us focus on what our own readers and Whitman's own constituents already have told us really counts: taxes and government services.

But, the real key is not what we will cover or how we will frame our analysis, but how we will package it. Packaging, indeed, may be as crucial a step in the public journalism process as any. All the preparation, all the reporting and editing can go for naught if we haven't effectively presented the material in a way that capture's our readers' time pressures.

We see this not only as a journalistic challenge, but as an opportunity to succeed - by listening to our constituents and practicing the true art of a journalist - working to make sure we connect.

Virtually every journalist encounters a new finding every month saying the public considers us biased and untrustworthy. And, most of us agree we have to do something dramatic to turn this dangerous tide.

Among the most impressive moments of our entire study was a five-minute colloquy among our key researcher, Cliff Zukin of the Eagleton Institute, and the focus group compromised of the elite readers and voters. The conversation surely emphasized this point.

"Writers are either liberal or conservative, and they put twists on stories that are not kept in check." "People are giving up on all news. The majority of news organizations are liberal. They are elitist."

This went on and on around the table. Then, Zukin - increasingly frustrated by the generality of the criticism - insisted on some examples.

Repeatedly, no one could provide a single illustration.

He asked again. There was an absolute silence around the table. The body language was still. People did not even look at each other, but stared ahead.

That may be the toughest nut for any of us. There is this absolute conviction that the media is biased, but what do we do if we can't even identify specifics together to analyze and correct? Are we battling a powerful specter rather than something more empirical?

Absolutely.

The lessons learned from this unprecedented research will benefit The Record in multiple ways.

1. It has provided us with a degree of humility about our research and capacity. We can't afford to become too zealous about the power of public journalism. We are only a part of the equation, and maybe not the most important part. It still is a system that needs courageous, indeed heroic, political leadership. And while the press can illuminate and bring issues effectively and attractively to our readers, we can't substitute for the imagination, charisma and conviction of political leadership.

2. It has given us true insight not only into how to package for an election campaign, but how to package more effectively for the future of a newspaper. We must have the courage to produce a paper for our readers first, not for our own goals and our colleagues' journalistic needs.

3. The simple decision to judge ourselves and our own efficacy as connectors to the public is a huge step in the right direction. We are considered arrogant, judgemental, watchdogs of everybody else and every other institution. Why not learn to turn the mirror on ourselves? And then be prepared to listen to our severest critics -- the readers?

4. Finally, this project proved two things to me personally about the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. At no time did Pew prescribe how to do our job. The organization was there to listen, and because it was there to listen, we were more comfortable listening to ourselves. I am not sure we could have learned as much without such a partner.

Moreover, the project crystallized how and why to rely on Pew. I would not use Pew to finance an activity fundamental to our core business. Pew dollars should not subsidize anything we need to do ourselves. But, Pew dollars can let us extend our understanding beyond our budgetary and journalistic envelope, as it did with this project.

Hopefully, the territory conquered with Pew becomes future business as usual, funded by ourselves.