Feature Writing and Reporting. Jennifer Brannock Cox

      Chartbeat is a tool allowing media organizations to track and better understand audience trends, helping them see which stories, headlines, photos and other multimedia features engage users most.

      Chartbeat.com

      Trending topics grant reporters insight into readers’ interests, but they must be careful not to get distracted from significant news. In 2014, news organizations across the U.S. published articles clarifying that actress Betty White was not dead after satirical news site Empire News wrote a misleading headline titled “Betty White Dyes Peacefully in Her Los Angeles Home.” The story revealed that the actress colors, or “dyes,” her hair, but fans circulated the article widely on social media, believing the actress to be dead. As a result, news organizations published brief clarifications stating that White was alive in hopes of cashing in on the trending topic. For example, The Washington Post followed up the next day with the headline “Betty White Is Not Dead.”¹¹

      Walking the Line: Avoiding Pandering

      Organizations once had the luxury of providing a balanced diet of news for audiences, hoping they would read through stories about town council decisions and school improvements on their way to checking the sports scores or getting recipes. Now readers access the information they want directly online, often bypassing the local hard news. Journalists are made aware of what stories readers are talking about and sharing by looking at social media sites like Twitter and Reddit. Knowing what topics are trending with readers, journalists can pursue stories that will drive up traffic on their organizations’ sites.

      But journalists are called to serve the public, giving readers information they need to make informed decisions about their lives and prompting them to think beyond fast and simple tidbits. Journalists have to strike a balance between giving online audiences news they want to read and avoiding pandering to their less impactful interests, which they can do by producing engaging news features. Some suggestions for writing meaningful feature stories that interest readers are:

      Throughout this book, we will explore strategies for telling meaningful stories and connecting with audiences in engaging and informative ways through feature storytelling.

      Objectivity Obsolete?

      The gatekeeping process does not end with story selection. Reporters choose sources for their stories, choose what quotes and information from those sources to include (and exclude) and order the information based on their own judgments of what is most important for readers to know. As a result, reporters are often accused of compromising their objectivity—the practice of portraying news in a completely neutral, unbiased way.

      Media scholars have declared the idea of objectivity to be flawed for decades. Researchers Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese¹² argued that reporters’ individual influences—their gender, race, upbringing and a number of other factors—make it impossible for them not to have an opinion. They have a point. Consider this: Would a female journalist write and report a story on equal pay for women in sports differently than a man? Would a black journalist approach a story on racial discrimination in standardized testing differently than a white reporter? They almost certainly would, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Journalists with backgrounds similar to their sources might be able to provide unique insight into issues that others could not. But their experience could also result in bias. Other influences, such as the pressure to work under deadlines or cover certain areas, the priorities of the news organization and its owners and even the state of the nation and ideologies of its citizens, are factors that make true objectivity nearly impossible to achieve.

      Many journalists are abandoning objectivity as their ideal because they feel it inhibits their ability to tell the truth. Revisions to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics in 2014 included the addition of transparency, a method of reporting in which journalists are up-front with audiences and volunteer information about their reporting process, revealing how and why they chose the sources they did, acknowledging issues they feel are important and disclosing any potential conflicts of interest in their reporting. Transparency is not an excuse for including opinion and bias; it simply means reporters need to evaluate stories on a more human level, acting critically and looking for misinformation or gaps in information that might exist. For example, if a source tells a lie, reporters should not be afraid to call attention to the lie and correct it with the truth.

      Abandoning objectivity has its risks, which we will explore in greater depth in Chapter 5 on ethics. But journalists can use new feature storytelling methods that we will explore throughout this book to challenge sources, seek truth and tell relatable stories for their audiences.

      Trust Me: I’m a Journalist

      Trust in American Institutions 1993–2018

      Americans’ trust in institutions tends to reflect the general mood of the country. Following the Watergate scandal in 1972, trust in government declined significantly as people became suspicious of their elected leaders. Fears after 9/11 lifted trust in religious organizations to an all-time high in 2001. And news organizations tend to experience dips in trust during presidential election years, which was especially true in 2004 and 2016, as demonstrated by a Gallup poll gauging media trust over the past three decades.¹³