Covering Elections, Making it Worthwhile

Two years ago, while preparing to kick off coverage of what promised to be a long summer of political rhetoric, The Telegraph came to a startling conclusion.

That’s how I began a front-page column six years ago on our attempt to change radically the way we covered elections two years earlier.

Looking back, there really wasn’t anything radical about it. All we decided to do was:

• Find out what voters have to say.

• Write about the issues they say are important to them – whether the candidates are talking about them or not.

Today, as we evaluate our recently completed coverage of the 2000 New Hampshire presidential primary, those basic tenets haven’t changed much.

Sure, we’ve built upon them, tinkering with innovative ways of getting voters’ voices onto our news pages.

But while the methods and techniques may have changed, the overriding principles have not.

That was true four years ago, when we joined with The Associated Press of New Hampshire, New Hampshire Public Radio and New Hampshire Public Television to form “Voters’ Voice,” a Pew Center-backed partnership whose goal was to make the primary campaign serve the interests of voters.

And it was true this year when we tackled the presidential primary on our own.
So here are some of the things we did – above and beyond the more typical day-to-day news coverage of Primary 2000:

• First, a front-page column recruited volunteers for our Voter Advisory Committee. We sought local voters who would be willing to meet Telegraph editors to assess our coverage, participate in editorial board interviews with presidential candidates or share some of their knowledge and life experiences with our reporters.

  More than 75 readers responded, providing us with an important database of names, party affiliations, professions and their responses to two important requests: Name three issues you want the candidates to address. Name three things candidates do that make you lose interest in elections.

• From that group of 75, we selected 12 voters – four Democrats, four Republicans and four Independents – and met with them about once a month.

  Sometimes, the meetings were off-the-record, an opportunity to have a frank debate about the candidates, issues and the media. Other times, a reporter would chronicle their thoughts for upcoming news stories. We even watched the final TV debate together over pizza and soda at one of their homes.

• That 75-person database proved invaluable. The responses provided fodder for follow-up columns and they were a godsend for reporters writing issue stories.

  On three Sundays in January, for example, we explored health care, education and guns/crime with front-page stories based on interviews with voters who had told us these issues were important to them. Full-page graphics identified where the candidates stood on these issues. Related voter-survey information came from Public Agenda (www.publicagenda.org).

• Still, these issue stories were only a part of it. We needed to do more – to reach into our community to hear whether candidates were addressing people’s needs.

  So we spoke to local clergy and lay leaders. We spoke to members of the minority community. We spoke to senior citizens. We spoke to first-time voters. We even spoke to people who never vote. Stories on what they had to say ran on four Mondays in January and the Sunday before the Feb. 1 primary.

Was it worth it? Yes it was, if you can believe members of our Voter Advisory Committee.

• “I thought The Telegraph’s coverage was really top notch,” wrote one.

• “The lengthy analysis pieces in the paper were definitely helpful,” wrote another.

• “Our voices were heard and the paper did provide a community service by printing stories of details and not just sensational news-selling stories,” wrote still another.

• “You provided a glimpse into your concerns over fairness in reporting, equality in the coverage and integrity, while attempting to provide an informational service to your readers as well as entertain us and sell papers. It was a great view,” one member wrote.

Kind of makes it all worthwhile, doesn’t it?

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For an archive of The Telegraph’s Voters 2000 stories, www.nashuatelegraph.com.