usually learn about the what in a tweet, but the why and how keep us visiting stories for days and weeks and months after that. What do people really want to talk about? That’s the type of thing that breaks through the digital din on our phones.”
Under his direction, Kilian’s newsrooms have experimented with deep dives into immersive storytelling. In Cincinnati, sports reporters followed a minor league baseball player on his journey toward the major leagues, chronicling his story for six months through podcasts. Kilian’s Cincinnati team also spent a year in the city’s poorest schools, producing gripping news features from inside their walls.
In Maryland, Kilian encouraged his reporters to immerse themselves in their stories, sending them into the community to eat muskrat, a local “favorite”; to learn to surf in both sunny and snowy conditions; and to tag birds on the Chesapeake Bay with research experts.
“We can no longer be the detached voice of God where we’re observing the community rather than living in it. Stories like these had orders of magnitude higher than anything we did that year, and they made an impact because they gripped you.”
In the Digital Age, Kilian says, building loyalty to one publication is more challenging. Using innovative storytelling techniques to tell good stories on a daily basis can prompt subscribers to download and view a news organization’s app regularly, but creating that relationship is a longer process.
“We’re really living and dying one story at a time. To somebody on a phone, there isn’t a package of news that they make an appointment with every day. Whoever has the best story of the day will get read. Good storytelling is a wonderful way to be memorable.”
For aspiring journalists, Kilian encourages them to simply be human and answer the big, meaningful questions without getting bogged down in details.
“Readers don’t follow the process of government. They don’t need 37 stories on the process of a trash facility approval. You need to think: Can I do one larger story on what the plan for this trash facility tells us about our way of life? Whatever that story is, that’s the winner.”
How Reporters Work
Up through the first decade of the 2000s, it was common for newsrooms to be divided into silos, or small groups that concentrated their efforts on specific beats or different types of reporting. Newsrooms were typically divided into hard-news reporters (covering breaking news beats like crime, government and courts), sports reporters, opinion writers (including editorial writers and columnists) and feature writers. Features once suggested a concentration on soft news items considered less essential for audiences to read. It included beats such as travel, lifestyle, entertainment, food and a variety of others, depending on the size of the publication.
Today, those divisions have changed, largely due to the availability of online metrics—statistics that tell us what stories people are reading online, how long they are viewing them and whether they are sharing them. These metrics tell us people want more from their stories. It’s not enough for crime reporters to write breaking news updates on robberies—they also need to provide news features examining why robberies in a particular neighborhood have increased in recent years and what people can do to protect themselves from potential attackers. The same is true for reporters who once produced only soft news. Readers can find out about the latest Hollywood divorce from anywhere, so feature writers need to dive deeper, perhaps looking into why young people are waiting longer to get married than previous generations, if they marry at all. In the Digital Age, demands for feature reporting and writing permeate every beat in the newsroom, and every reporter must be equipped with skills for telling those kinds of stories.
Delivering the News
Before the Digital Age, the ways news organizations delivered information were not always efficient. Newspaper deadlines for stories were often early in the evening for the next day’s print edition and a week or more in advance for a longer feature story. For magazines, deadlines could range from weeks to a month in advance for editing, layout and printing. Even media with more instantaneous modes of delivery, such as television and radio, had routine deadlines in order to make their broadcast schedules work.
The widespread use of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s changed these work cycles only slightly. Even within the same newsroom, reporters treated their own online product as competition and were afraid to publish anything online before printing the publication for fear of getting scooped, or beaten, by other news outlets. Reporters would first ready their work for print, then reconfigure the story slightly for publication online.
The news cycle changed forever when audiences began turning to mobile devices as their primary medium for getting information, replacing legacy products—the older, more traditional media platforms such as newspapers, magazines and TV and radio news programs. Publications had to recognize that people were no longer waiting for the deadline product to get timely news. They could easily find up-to-date information from a variety of sources using social media and search engines. Now journalists have to think about their mobile audience early on in the reporting process, posting updates and information online as they investigate the story to get readers’ attention. They also have to add value to the story, helping it rise above the mass of information online.
It is not just breaking news reporters who have to consider mobile audiences. Feature journalists need to engage their audiences during every step of the reporting process, whetting their appetites for the story and even getting them involved as the story is developing. Feature writing and reporting depend on engagement with people affected by issues and events, and social media platforms offer journalists unique ways to find and connect with a diverse array of sources. We will explore both in-person and online strategies feature reporters can use to engage with audiences before, during and after the reporting process throughout this book.
Expectations of News and Reporters
Accessibility to reporters was once restricted to a determined few. If readers wanted to complain about an article or make suggestions for future stories, they were limited to either writing letters to the editor or calling the newsroom—both methods that could easily be disregarded by reporters. In the early days of online publishing, readers could post comments online beneath articles, but again, reporters often neglected the discussion threads.
Thanks to social media, readers will no longer be ignored. Readers can keep reporters accountable for their facts, posting about any errors or misconceptions in a story publicly on the reporter’s or news organization’s social media page for everyone to see. In the past, if someone wrote a letter to a reporter and the reporter ignored it, no one would really know about it or care. Now reporters must be responsive to social media postings in order to maintain their credibility.
When social media are used throughout the development of a story, reporters can use online platforms to their advantage, asking for information from followers and clarifying any false or misguided information before the final article is published through a process called crowdsourcing, which will be covered in more depth in Chapter 4 on interviewing.
Before the internet, finding news on specific topics was also difficult. If readers wanted to learn more about something, they would likely need to buy or subscribe to a niche publication, a news product that is tightly focused on a particular issue or hobby, targeting a specific audience uniquely interested in that topic. Otherwise, readers had to sift through the general news to get to information that interested them—and if they missed an edition, it was gone for good by the time the next publication came out.
The
