Last month, Shasta Scout published an election coverage article on allegations of voter suppression over a recommendation to institute one-day voting in the county with limited absentee ballots. The nonprofit news outlet covering California’s Shasta County reported that most Elections Commissioners in the county advocated for stricter voting laws due to concerns about election fraud.
“We’ve had a lot of uncertainty and instability around our local elections process,” says Annelise Pierce, the founder of Shasta Scout (who also wears multiple hats as its managing editor and community reporter). It’s a challenge she considers when developing their election coverage.
Shasta Scout covers the issues and stories that matter to the 180,000 residents of the county with a focus on civic reporting.
“We’re a rural community, very deeply conservative, mostly white, and we’re a place where there’s been a lot of extremism over the last several years, which has deeper roots in the long-term history of the area,” Pierce explains.
In this article, Pierce shares three tips for independent news outlets covering elections, from local to presidential.
1. Talk to your audience and find out what they want to know
To help build trust in news, Pierce says they try to provide coverage that’s very “responsive” to their readers’ needs. They put out audience surveys and use social media to get feedback from readers on what they care about. The publication then uses those reader responses to formulate questions for candidates.
One of the most impactful ways Shasta Scout covers the election is through their Meet the Candidates series, where they publish in-depth interviews with individual candidates. The profiles are a way for voters to be informed on how their candidates would answer different questions.
“It allows [readers] to better understand who they’re voting for on a personal level,” says Pierce. “People really like that.”
This year, Pierce and her team picked three races to cover in-depth, rather than trying to cover every race. For those races, they’ll introduce each candidate one by one through their Meet the Candidate article.
If you want to know more about your readers but are unsure of where to start, get in touch! Our Indiegraf Experts team has all the know-how to help make the most of audience research.
2. Start relationship-building early
Election coverage provides an excellent opportunity for newsrooms to build long-term relationships with candidates. Pierce describes her work as a journalist during an election as “trust-building” with possible future officeholders.
“The work I put in during election season has just paid off so much when those people enter power because they’re now connected to me,” says Pierce. “They have my cell phone number, and they’re willing to talk to me.”
Shasta Scout has seen that voters are relying on these profiles even during voting. Their analytics show that people are pulling up candidate profiles on election day.
3. Use election coverage to reach news-avoidant readers
Although Shasta Scout’s core audience is already civically engaged, the outlet still uses the election season to try to reach new readers who want voting information. In response, Shasta Scout’s readers have said that they feel the publication’s election coverage is more fair and less biased than other media outlets.
“Elections are a time that we can increase our circulation distribution to more news-avoidance types who are being drawn in because they know it’s important to vote and they want to find out information about voting,” she says.
Pierce recommends other local publishers to maintain a dashboard on the site where readers can easily access all election coverage, just like Shasta Scout does.
“When people are voting, it’s a tense time. They’re in a hurry. They’re trying to decide, do they really have time to do this? You want to make it as easy as possible for them,” says Pierce. She also suggests that publishers create an info bar on their website that directs readers back to their election coverage.
At the end of the day, Pierce advises other local news publishers not to “try to take on more than you can do successfully.”
“It’s better to cover a few races really well than it is to try to cover everything from a shallow, superficial, horse-race coverage level,” she says.
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