News editorial meetings are filled with reminders to consider what the audience is interested in and what they’re talking about.
But does this fully identify what your audience actually wants and needs to know today?
I accidentally discovered one great way to research what’s really relevant in your daily reporting: Take a vacation. No, not to clear your head, but it helps with that, too.
I discovered this trick when I went on vacation years ago, back when print newspapers were a bigger deal (I still love them, for the record). You could ask the carrier to hold all of your papers and deliver them when you got back.
I flipped through all of those papers page by page and asked myself, what do I really need to know? What things did I actually care about? How would my life be affected if I didn’t know what was reported while I was gone?
The answer was shocking. During the entire week that I was gone, there were only a couple of small things that I even remotely cared about. If I had thrown all of those papers directly into the recycling bin, my life would not have changed.
It’s no wonder that people have been spending less and less time consuming traditional news outlets. They don’t think they’re missing anything.
This experience led me to think about our daily news coverage in different ways:
- What things are happening that will affect people’s daily lives?
- Are a large number of people affected?
- What do people really need to know?
- What big changes are on the horizon that people need to prepare for?
- Where does this fit in the big picture?
Sometimes we mock things like road construction and consumer news as trivial items, but they do affect our audience’s everyday lives. The same is true for a lot of the important issues revealed by enterprise journalism.
The bottom line: Don’t get bogged down in minor crime news that involves few people or small political skirmishes that will be irrelevant by tomorrow. Focus on what actually affects people. Your news outlet and the public will be the better for it.
Jon Ellis has worked in small-market TV news for 20 years in assistant news director and producer positions.
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