Author: Alicia Barron

The first thing you notice is the weather. That’s because on KSTP-TV’s Nightcast, it actually is first. Every night, “Forecast First” — there’s no anchor intro, just a meteorologist who pops up out of prime time to do what meteorologists do — appears even before the headlines on the Minneapolis station’s 10 p.m. news program. It’s a familiar segment in an unfamiliar spot and a fitting introduction to a broadcast that’s not afraid to reshuffle the standard formulas. Because what follows is not business as usual, but rather an evolving experiment in reimagining the late news.

KSTP’s bet is that in-depth and investigative reporting, longer stories and interviews, and a focus on issues with broad community impact rather than just the latest “breaking news” will appeal to viewers who already know the day’s headlines and want more substance. Perhaps it will even attract new ones who may have given up on local TV news altogether.

The idea for Nightcast germinated last April, when News Director Kirk Varner and his colleagues considered devoting the entire late news, which was struggling compared to the station’s other newscasts, to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, they opted for a more permanent transformation. The new format, inspired in part by ABC News Nightline, builds on two of KSTP’s strengths: its seven-person investigative team and its reputation for strong storytelling. “And so the idea was, can we create a broadcast that would really speak to those strengths and be different, really try to take a different approach to late news, being more thoughtful, not being a slave to story count,” says Varner. After three weeks of rehearsals in what Varner calls a “working lab,” the new program premiered on May 5, barreling right into the May book.

Each weeknight broadcast starts (after “Forecast First,” of course) with what the producers call the “front end” — a slickly edited set of highlights of the stories to come, sometimes as long as 1:30 altogether. Nightcast is built around a signature “cover story,” interviews, and a very small number of other packages produced either by the investigative team or one of three reporters assigned to the program, who also take turns contributing same-day stories when they’re not working on something longer term. “We really wanted to walk away from the idea of ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’” says Varner. “The idea would be: What’s the most interesting thing that’s out there today?”

Routine crimes that might top a conventional newscast — shots fired at a St. Paul police officer, for example, on one of the nights I watched — are relegated to a “what else you need to know today” section, often deep into the program, often just as voice-overs. “There are so many stories on any given night that would normally be a lead or that you’d move a reporter to,” says Nightcast producer Stacey Alletto. “And we have to always ask ourselves, ‘Does this have relevance?’ And that’s probably been one of our biggest challenges: learning how to make those decisions.”

There are long chunks of sound from public officials, experts, and other newsmakers. And perhaps most unusual, Alletto and her fellow broadcast producer Alan Hoglund, who work with the reporters to keep an elaborate calendar of stories in various stages of development, are encouraged to mix up the recipe as each day’s distinctive ingredients dictate — not bake them in by the book. That goes not just for format but for story length. The current record for a single report — by Jay Kolls on police presence in Minneapolis’s so-called “Autonomous Zone” — is 10 minutes. “One of the things we want to keep as part of the soul of Nightcast is that idea that we’re flexible and innovative,” says Varner. “We’re willing to color outside the lines to get a newscast that has something really unique and original to it.”

There are also familiar elements. There’s a warm and fuzzy franchise called “So Minnesota.” The meteorologist (Wren Clair, or Dave Dahl on Fridays) comes back with more details and the 7-day, and there’s an affable sports guy (Joe Schmit) with scores, stories, and a signature kicker called “Nightcap” — TV’s equivalent of a viral video. There’s even a bit of banter with the anchor — anchor, singular. Varner threw out the traditional dual-anchor formula, and now Kevin Doran and Lindsey Brown take turns anchoring most of the program solo, with that night’s partner only showing up to deliver the “what else you need to know” items I mentioned earlier.

“I thought the idea of looking different needed to be more than just cosmetic,” says Varner. “And we thought if we were doing a show that was built around longer-format stories, then could we recast the anchors as being not just people who were reading intros…but also giving them more freedom to ask questions of reporters and weave a show together that was more than just script page, script page, script page.”

So far, the ratings are up slightly month over month and year over year, but it won’t be the relatively rapid ratings success we reported on recently in New York, where the Univision station’s late news went to #1 in Adults 18-49 among all stations, not just Spanish-language, with a similar approach. Varner says his bosses at Hubbard Broadcasting, including his GM Rob Hubbard, understand that this experiment will take time. “The objective now is to market it and put it in front of those people who aren’t necessarily normal loyalists to the television station,” says Varner. “And that’s obviously something you don’t do in a month or two. We’re not in the instant success category. But we are pleased with the growth of the product overall.”

WATCH the 9/29 edition of “Nightcast”

All this raises the question of who benefits most from the formulaic structure of most newscasts. It certainly makes life easier for producers who have to lather, rinse, repeat night after night, but I suspect the regularity is reassuring for viewers too — something steady and familiar in chaotic times. It’s no accident that Varner hasn’t extended his daring experiment to any of his other newscasts throughout the day. Perhaps the boldest aspect of Nightcast is its unpredictability.

Varner is thinking of bringing two more of the station’s frontline anchors into the Nightcast rotation, perhaps even building each night around a specific anchor’s strengths and interests. Nightcast is an exercise in dynamic innovation, driven by conviction and optimism. “There’s a quality over quantity thing here that we think has a real shot of succeeding in the marketplace,” says Varner. “And the more validation and feedback we get on that idea, the more we all feel like, ‘Okay, we’re doing the right thing here.’”

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“Yes. Isn’t that incredible?” Esteban Creste, VP and news director at Univision’s New York station WXTV, is taking a well-earned victory lap. The station’s late news, Solo a las Once (Only at Eleven), won the July sweep in Adults 18-49 and came in second in Adults 25-54 — that’s against all New York stations, regardless of language. “It’s not only that we’re number one,” Creste says, “it’s number one during these times that people are desperate for information.”

Almost a year ago exactly, Creste and his team made a big bet — one that’s now paying off. As we reported last September, they decided to revamp their late news completely, throwing out the rule book in favor of a bold new format. Armed with Magid research that said viewers wanted in-depth coverage of critical issues in their community, Creste jettisoned the usual mix of short packages and voice-overs to focus on two or three major topics and newsmaker interviews every night. “There were big issues out there that people really care about and that affect their lives. We needed to go in-depth into that, and that is not just a matter of doing a 90-second package or a 30-second VO,” Creste says. Now, the individual reports get whatever time they need to tell the story. The current record is eight minutes. “I always have the theme: Don’t do long stories, do extensive stories.”

“On regular days, other newscasts might lead with a fire,” Creste says. “We might lead with what we decide is important for our viewers. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but it’s based on research. We know what they care about.” Creste calls standard breaking news fare “hit and run,” and he’s not afraid to ignore routine stories or push them far down into the program, often as voice-overs. ”I don’t care that I might not be first reporting on a hit and run,” he says, “but I do want to be first to do an in-depth analysis of race relations.”

When I caught up with Creste recently, he walked me through the previous night’s lineup: two long stories on the debate over reopening schools amidst the pandemic right off the top. The newscast was covering the school issue and its ripple effects every night. “This decision has huge ramifications for every single home,” Creste says. “And it’s not just the education of the kids. It’s the economic impact at home, it’s the health of the grandparents, it’s sending the kids to school not knowing if they’re going to get sick or not.”

Solo a las Once is “solo” in more ways than one. Yisel Tejeda is the sole anchor. Ironically, she lost her male co-anchor to budget cuts before the format change, but in the new incarnation, it turns out to be a virtue. “It was, in a way, the perfect format to dig deep into those issues,” Creste says.

There’s still a meteorologist on the broadcast — we haven’t left Planet Earth entirely — but Creste dropped the sports segment when the pandemic hit and doesn’t plan to bring it back. There is occasional news coverage of cultural events, but no celebrity or pop culture stories: “We let the network take care of that,” Creste says. “But in the newscast, we’re going to give them the real stuff.” (The station’s 6 p.m. newscast has stuck with a more traditional approach.)

As you can imagine, there were skeptics in the newsroom. “At first, there were some members of the team who weren’t too sure that this was going to work,” Creste says. “[I had to] show them the light, convince them that this was the way to go. For them, it was hard all of a sudden not to cover the hit and run. Old habits are hard to change. You’ve got to talk to a lot of people. Let them know exactly what you’re doing. Be open, be transparent. Answer questions, allow them to ask you questions and answer as much as possible.”

Today, the newsroom staff has come around to the new format, Creste says — big time. “Now, this thing is flawless — a well-oiled machine. They love it. They really love it, and they come up with ideas all the time.” Creste also gives a shout-out to his General Manager Roberto Yañez and Univision corporate executives Chris Peña and Diane Kniowski for their support. (WARNING: Do not try this at home unless your bosses back you up.)

The health and economic crisis of COVID-19 and the movement for racial justice have inspired many local stations to double down on service journalism, but Univision and Telemundo are building on a long tradition of deep connections between the Spanish-language news organizations and the Hispanic audience. We’ve reported on Telemundo’s coronavirus-related projects, and our story last year on Creste’s station discovering the power of WhatsApp for its consumer segment 41 A Tú Lado (On Your Side) remains one of our most popular to this day.

To keep that connection strong, Creste urges his team to stay in touch with the community — a habit he worries some journalists have lost. Before the pandemic made it hard, he urged his reporters to spend part of their weekend in the often struggling areas they cover, and he would regularly do the same. “Walk the ground. [Explore] the neighborhood, observe people: what they eat, what they listen to. Talk to people — you know, what reporters used to do.”

The lesson sounds pretty simple. Do the work to find out what your viewers really need from you. But that’s not the only thing Creste has learned from his successful innovation. “The biggest lesson is that we sometimes underestimate the intelligence of our viewers or their interest. It’s okay to try something new. We broke the mould, and we see that people wanted this. They wanted more in-depth. ‘Tell me more, give me the whole idea, the whole picture.’”

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The two headlines of 2020, a worldwide pandemic and a nationwide conversation about racial equality, both underline the critical importance of including the voice of the audience in our journalism. Whether it’s identifying and answering the questions folks have right now about the coronavirus, or ensuring that the full range of diverse voices in our community are represented and heard, authentic listening and meaningful audience engagement have never been more critical to the mission of journalism.

Sadly, however, “Audience Engagement” in many newsrooms has devolved into so-called “like-bait”: posting on social with the short-sighted goal of enticing likes and shares. In this approach, winning on social is reduced to a number like ‘share of voice,’ with the metric treated as more important than what it purports to measure. The challenge for newsrooms is to evolve beyond likes and shares, to achieve meaningful audience engagement.

“Focus on the needs of the audience, not your own.” That is the essence of a meaningful approach to engagement, says Jennifer Brandel, longtime CEO and now board chair of Hearken, a platform that helps news organizations create and manage audience engagement. She spoke recently to the local TV stations participating in the Knight-ASU Table Stakes program for news transformation about how to design more impactful audience strategies.

Before assuming your team is crushing it, take Brandel’s quick self-assessment (be honest, you’d only be cheating yourself) on the current state of audience engagement in your newsroom. Give yourself one point for each strong “YES”:

I won’t ask your score, but I will share that in my work with local TV newsrooms this informal quiz generates a lot of scores of 2 or 3. So let’s just say that most newsrooms will have an “opportunity” for more meaningful engagement with their audiences.

Why do so many newsrooms fall short in this area? Brandel notes that traditional news organizations were built in the era of broadcast on a model she notes was “closer to a parent-child relationship,” where news stations focused on “telling the audience the news,” not listening.

Brandel illustrates this well via what she calls the “engagement ring.” Does your newsroom complete the loop with the audience, or do you tend to stop once you get what you want from the audience? I particularly appreciate the term “askhole” to describe newsrooms that ASK, and then don’t respond!

The “Engagement Ring”

For Brandel, the key is to move the newsroom from an “extractive” or merely “transactional” approach to one that’s truly relational. Extractive approaches are about getting what the newsroom wants from the audience. Transactional approaches are somewhat better, in that there is at least an exchange of value between the news organization and the audience. But the key to building loyalty is a relational approach to engagement.

A worthwhile newsroom exercise is to gather a group to examine your current practices against these three categories of engagement, honestly identify where the approach is primarily extractive or transactional and look for ways to ‘move to the right’ in terms of engagement that has mutual value and builds long-term trust and loyalty.

Hearken has been adopted by many local newsrooms, especially in publishing, as a way of building direct audience relationships (not mediated by Facebook.)

Of special relevance to broadcasters is a recent case study from a Danish broadcaster. TV 2/Funen chose to go ‘all-in” on intensive audience engagement to guide its COVID-19 coverage. The results documented in this case study were impressive:

• More than 150 original, user-generated news angles to investigate
• More than 20 articles showcasing audience submissions
• 5 articles in the top-50 of most-read articles on the website
• Jump in direct relationships with audience
• Increased traffic via Google searches (one article drew 65% of sessions through Google searches and generated 4x more views than average)

By three weeks into its efforts, the station had received 400+ original user-generated news angles to explore, authored more than 50 original articles powered by that input, and impressively, saw a +32% increase in average reading time on audience-initiated articles compared to the overall average in the same period.

Deeper audience strategies are essential to coverage of both the pandemic and issues of racial justice; but Brandel notes 2020’s other critical test of journalists also looms: covering the 2020 election. Hearken has joined with other engagement groups to offer Election SOS, free targeted training for journalists covering U.S. elections, with specific strategies for engagement, trust, and election protection. The non-partisan initiative offers best practices, resources and support around election coverage and the unique threats of 2020 elections.

The benefits to newsrooms of fostering this deeper kind of community connection include:

• More and better story ideas; which result in…
• Stories that are more relevant to the audience, which lead to…
• Deeper engagement with content (measured by articles read, depth of read, session time), leading ultimately to…
• Long-term growth in trust in and loyalty to the news brand

The core difference, of course, between this approach and the “like/share this” is loyalty. A like-bait strategy has to be repeated over and over to keep propping up the clicks. Brandel says this deeper approach grows long-term loyalty, turning samplers into loyalists, and loyalists into evangelists for your news brand.

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As you head into the holiday weekend, we thought you might enjoy catching up on some of the most popular stories that we’ve published so far in 2020 — and that you may have missed the first time around.

We continue to report on the many ripple effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the significant work station groups are doing in response: here’s a project we think will have lasting impact.

Will The Rebound Change TV News Even After COVID-19 Is Gone?

Frank Mungeam’s story on five “culture-killing” phrases to avoid has great advice for any newsroom leader who wants to promote innovation: it’s not too late to stop saying these things!

5 Culture-Killing Phrases Smart Newsrooms Will Stop Saying in 2020

Frank also reported on meteorologists’ intensifying focus on climate change, a different global crisis that the pandemic has put in the shade: here’s his “forecast” for weather reporting.

Forecasting the Future of Weather Reporting

We told you how Portland’s KGW is re-inventing the 6 p.m. newscast with a solo anchor, fewer stories, more audience involvement, and greater transparency: check out the story behind The Story.

“The Biggest Risk of All” — Transforming a Legacy Newscast

And finally, against the backdrop of nationwide protests against racial injustice, seven thoughtful news leaders weighed in on evolving interpretations of journalistic “authenticity” and objectivity.

Can a Reporter be ‘Authentic’ and Objective at the Same Time?

Have a great Independence Day weekend — we’ll see you next week at the Lab!

Andrew Heyward

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the best in many people — and the worst in a few. It has also given local TV newsrooms the opportunity to connect with their communities in innovative ways and to re-think the roles of their most prominent personalities.

For the past year or so, KGO-TV weekend anchor Dion Lim has been reporting regularly on hate crimes against Asian-Americans in the Bay Area. When the coronavirus — dubbed the ‘Chinese virus’ by some, including President Trump — invaded the United States, she saw ugly stories of bigotry and harassment start to spike on social media. “When coronavirus hit, it brought in the xenophobia factor. And it really reached this fever pitch,” Lim says. “And that’s when I said something has got to be done.”

Lim went to her boss, Tom Cibrowski, GM of the ABC-owned station, and asked permission to write an op-ed about the issue for The San Francisco Chronicle. “And he said, ‘Absolutely. This is an important issue that needs to be highlighted. Send it to me when you’re done.’”

Lim’s powerful essay, entitled How the Coronavirus Gave Me Purpose, is a passionate departure from the reserved tone typical of TV anchors. “With each story I reported,” she wrote, “the fire burning in my gut to do more grew stronger. When the coronavirus outbreak began, the flames exploded into anger.” Lim wrote that her voice was one of many from the Asian-American community finally speaking up about hate crimes and bigotry.

It didn’t stop there. After the essay came out on March 20, Lim and her colleague, weekday anchor Kristen Sze, helped convince Cibrowski to try something new. “They have voices in the newsroom, and they’re not afraid to use them,” Cibrowski said of the two journalists. “They’re very much in touch with their own communities. But they’re also in touch with the rest of the Bay Area. They both said ‘Let’s do a town hall. We said, ‘Absolutely.’”

It was an ambitious undertaking, especially given the challenges of just covering the COVID-19 story day to day. But on April 2, KGO turned its Thursday 4 p.m. newscast into an hour-long live special, Race and Coronavirus: A Bay Area Conversation. The producers created clear and useful explainer videos to set up a candid discussion about racism and the coronavirus with thirteen experts, all of them appearing via Zoom: an ethnic smorgasbord of academics, medical professionals, civil rights leaders, social media influencers, the district attorney of Santa Clara County, and artists including the prolific actor Tzi Ma, who’s in the new live-action version of Mulan — synergy, thy name is Disney!

KGO anchors Dan Ashley and Kristen Sze handled the questioning, while Lim reported from the newsroom on real-time audience interactions via social media. “We were really worried about the technology, but honestly, it all played out very well,” Cibrowski says.

Cibrowski says the pandemic has pushed stations to innovate, dropping the everyday business-as-usual “playbook” when confronted with a new set of challenges and responsibilities. “In three weeks time, we were forced by a terrible, terrible crisis to throw out that playbook in almost every newsroom,” he says. “Conversations around race may not be what every newsroom wants to do. But the way local television and local news is developing throughout this crisis, it’s become a community gathering place. There’s obviously all the breaking news, but we have to reach beyond the breaking news to try to plant our flag on helping the community, helping the conversation.” (In the days following our interview, “conversations around race” exploded nationally amidst alarming statistics about COVID-19’s alarmingly disproportionate impact on black and Hispanic communities.)

Dion Lim’s emerging role in the Bay Area conversation as an advocate for her own community on social media and on television is new territory for most anchors. Lim says she was trained to strive for “gravitas” by “being the most badass reporter and anchor who could do everything under the sun, knew my stuff left and right, backwards and forwards.” Now, on top of that worthy aspiration, “I’ve discovered in my own way that if people can share and realize that I’m just like them, and I have the same concerns and the same empathy that they do, I think it makes you better at your job.”

Tom Cibrowki agrees. “We want to see and hear [our journalists’] feelings at times. In a modern world of multiple platforms, authenticity is what matters most,” he says. But Lim heard from another Asian-American anchor in a top-five market — a woman she’d never talked to before — who wondered why she couldn’t have the kind of freedom that Lim was given to write her op-ed or participate in the town meeting.

“I’ve had to defend it to friends and to other journalists as well. But nowadays, if you want to be a talking head, yeah, that’s fine,” Lim says. “But if people can have that sense of connection, I think that’s the gravitas.”

I suspect an evolving definition of the role of anchors and reporters is just one of the many issues broadcast journalists and newsroom leaders will be dealing with as a “new normal” begins to take shape in the wake of COVID-19. “I don’t think anybody thinks we’re ever going to go back to the status quo,” says Cibrowski. “God forbid an earthquake hits: the damage happens, and there’s rebuilding, and at some point you get back to normal. You just do. This is not that case. It’s something much bigger. And I think everybody in the news business knows that.”

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It was the final Friday in January, and the Valley of the Sun was delivering on its promise. But in one classroom on the campus of Arizona State University, the mood was far from sunny. Journalists representing most of the Phoenix print, TV and radio outlets had gathered in a classroom at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism for a day of training from First Draft, which helps newsrooms combat misinformation. The journalists had formed teams and were deep into an Election Day simulation, trying to fend off disinformation campaigns. They were faced with tweets suggesting threats and possible violence at polling places in certain neighborhoods; a photo posted to social media that looked as though the National Guard had been called out; a Reddit thread reassuring folks concerned for their safety that they need not vote in person and could instead simply cast their vote via text. In teams, the journalists were debating: How do we verify? What do we report? What wording do we use?

One thing became clear: “We are SO not ready for this,” as one participant put it.

Claire Wardle agrees. “I don’t think newsrooms think that it impacts them,” says Wardle, U.S. Director of First Draft and leader of the Arizona media training session. “There’s an understanding of disinformation certainly, but I think there’s that sense of well, that’s Russian trolls creating memes and sharing them on Facebook. I don’t think there’s an understanding that newsrooms themselves are being targeted.”

The threat is not only a barrage of misinformation — false reports, images, and videos — directly aimed at journalists. Even more alarming, today’s organized misinformation campaigns use journalism’s own strengths, like fact-checking and community reputation, and turn them against the news media.

Asked to give an average grade for local newsroom readiness, Wardle replies: “D.”

That’s where First Draft hopes to help. It’s a global non-profit that supports journalists, academics and technologists working to address challenges relating to trust and truth in the digital age.

To prepare for today’s misinformation campaigns, newsrooms need to first understand four important ways in which the traditions of journalism are being weaponized against the media.

“Fact-Checking Exposes False Reports and Rumors”

The practice of fact-checking and of debunking falsehoods seems foundational to what reporters do. But “the whole way that journalism works – which is the paradigm of ‘more sunlight is a disinfectant’ —
has been weaponized against the news media in the hopes that there will be more oxygen given to rumors,” says Wardle, who observes that newsrooms haven’t adapted their practices to account for the problem that “simply reporting on a (falsehood) to debunk it can make people take something more seriously.”

For example, a rumor may be debunked within the body of a web or broadcast story, but how is the story headlined, or teased on broadcast? Even debunked rumors get amplified this way.

“Media manipulation is now a key tactic of people who are trying to sow division in this country,” notes Wardle. “And so that means that they are trying to get newsrooms to give oxygen to rumors.”

“If Someone Big Says It, It’s News”

By definition, what ‘Newsmakers’ say is ‘news.’ At least, that’s another standard practice in journalism. Again, says Wardle, these institutional habits need to be reconsidered in light of coordinated misinformation campaigns.

“What do you do when a politician is repeating a conspiracy theory, which is more complex, and (reporting on) it requires giving more oxygen to the rumor?”

“That (practice) in many ways has been used against the news media, which is if somebody with a loud enough voice said it, then you’ve got no choice but to cover that.”

“Journalists are the Gatekeepers”

Another foundational principle of the profession is that journalists are the gatekeepers for their communities. “It used to be that the audience was reliant on the gatekeepers,” says Wardle. “But the audience itself is now networked.”

The consequence is that stories, false as well as true, can be spread and amplified more quickly and before journalists can apply their traditional gatekeeper filtering role. Newsrooms can find themselves perpetually playing ‘catch-up’ to social, viral reports in a world where socially connected audiences rely more on those in their own ‘network’ than on traditional media sources.

“Local News is the Most Trusted”

Journalists working in local media are justly proud of the consistent findings by Pew Research and others that local news outlets are the most trusted news sources. But rather than insulate local newsrooms from the effects of media mistrust, that makes them a target.

“It’s a very effective mechanism to create sites that look like professional news sites,” says Wardle.
Columbia Journalism Review published a report in December documenting the rise of false, ‘look-a-like’ sites intended to appear to be reputable local online news sources that were in fact fronts for pushing politically slanted content.

Wardle also notes that an NYU review of Facebook posts by the Internet Research Agency found that Russian trolls shared five times more links to actual local news sites than to faked sites. “They would take existing, real local news headlines and amplify them to sow division.” One of the goals of misinformation campaigns, notes Wardle, is to undermine trust in media. So being alert to the ways your content is being shared – and your news brand is being depicted — now has to be part of a newsroom’s work.

Worried yet? Wardle hopes so. The first step in responding effectively to efforts at information manipulation is facing up to those threats. So what can a newsroom do? Wardle urges newsrooms to report in ways that “inoculate people to not only what these threats might be, but why people might be pushing them.”

Here are six practical recommendations from First Draft — actions newsrooms can take to better prepare themselves and their communities to detect and defeat misinformation.

1. Practice Worst-Case Scenarios

Newsrooms do election planning meetings anyway. Wardle suggests newsrooms host brown-bag sessions right away and invite staff to brainstorm the worst that could happen. “Pretend that you’re a troll,” says Wardle. “With a whiteboard, come up with all the ways that you might discredit or undermine the Census, or the election.”

Wardle says newsrooms are usually quite good at imagining the wide range of possible manipulations, from faked images and videos, to coordinated false reports of voting issues or threats and other voter suppression and intimidation tactics. But she also points to subtler tactics, like someone posing a question at a press conference based on an unsubstantiated rumor, to ‘force’ the mainstream media to report on and therefore amplify the rumor. The purpose of this exercise is to help the entire newsroom realize the magnitude of the threats.

2. Choose a Champion

Content verification and combating misinformation requires a team effort, and everyone in the newsroom should get trained in the basics of content verification. First Draft recommends sharing a checklist like this that all newsroom employees can use.

But Wardle says it’s crucial to have a designated owner at the manager level who can be both a category expert and a go-to resource for others in the newsroom. This subject-matter expert would ideally get deeper training now in order to be ready to be a resource to the news teams as they continue to cover stories like the Census and election run-up.

3. Audit Your Security and Tools

Consider how reliant the typical newsroom is on its internal communication systems. Whether it’s Slack or direct messages, closed Facebook groups or even email, now is the time to assess: How secure are those systems from being hacked?

On the verification side, how many newsroom employees have pre-installed or bookmarked the minimum ‘toolkit’ of verification sites and software? From reverse image search to the “Wayback Machine” (to save web pages that may be changed later) to bot-checkers, there are a core set of verification capabilities that all newsroom employees should have and know how to use. Better to install them now than in the midst of a breaking news event. For ideas on what belongs in your toolkit check out First Draft’s recommended 10 Verification Tools for Newsrooms on a Budget.

4. Update Ethics Practices to Deny Oxygen to Rumors

Journalists are well trained in ethical treatment of subjects, handling sensitive information and sourcing. “I think we haven’t necessarily had the same ethical conversations about covering some of these fringe and conspiracy spaces,” observes Wardle, “and what it means to add legitimacy to those rumors.”

It’s worth reviewing newsroom practices for both on-air and online when it comes to fact-checking and reporting on false narratives. Wardle suggests that even the traditionally lauded “fact-check” story can do surprising harm if the headline or tease merely repeats the rumor, counting on the audience to go ‘beyond the headline’ to find out the answer to whether the fact-check was true or false. “Yes, you might be debunking,” warns Wardle, “but actually if we repeat the rumor within the headline we are causing more harm.”

Another example: Repeating misleading phrases within story headlines can boost their profile as “key words” on search, which Wardle says is one of the new tactics of those intentionally trying to sow division. A third example is repeating (amplifying) statements by “Newsmakers” when those statements have already been demonstrated to be false.

5. Inoculate Against Misinformation Methods

Inoculation isn’t just good for your physical health. “In the context of information disorder, if you get people to think about the tactics and techniques that they might expect to see, when they see it, they are more likely to say, hang on, there’s something about this that resonates. I remember this,” says Wardle.

Newsrooms can build reporting around helping audiences understand what are the methods used by disinformation actors, what their motives might be, and how they might benefit. Wardle notes that research how this exposure to the tactics and methods in advance can help ‘inoculate’ both journalists and everyday news consumers to recognize manipulation efforts more easily.

6. Build an Election Misinformation Plan (that includes collaboration with other newsrooms)

In addition to the usual election planning, newsrooms need to have procedures (including a staffing plan) in place for the kinds of worst-case scenarios described here. One other key, says Wardle: Collaboration with other newsrooms. Newsrooms can gain strength in numbers, coordinate on verification and support each other in case of active efforts targeting news outlets.

Newsrooms are very good at doing the ‘debrief’ of what went wrong after a big breaking news story. Wardle says that’s not good enough when it comes to what’s at stake this year in terms of the potential for information disorder: “One of the threats in 2020 is to undermine the institution of the media itself.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Non-profit First Draft offers a range of free online training tools, can arrange newsroom trainings by appointment, and has Live Simulation training sessions (with space available at press time) in several cities including Austin (Feb 22), Miami (Feb 24), Ohio (March 2) Athens GA (March 4), Tallahassee (March 6), with future trainings TBD in Harrisburg PA and Baltimore. Event details: https://firstdraftnews.org/project/live-simulations/

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“How can I be better than a weather app?” Rob Carlmark, meteorologist at KXTV in Sacramento, told me a few years ago that he asked himself this question each day as he prepared his forecast. Carlmark was prescient. Now that the current temperatures, highs and lows, and five-day forecast are always just one smartphone finger-tap away, local meteorologists and their news managers must earnestly ask: What is the future of local weather on local news?

I got the chance to hear the current best thinking on that question at the 100th annual conference of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), including an all-day track dedicated to the present and future of broadcast meteorology. The key takeaways are relevant not only for TV forecasters but also for broadcast news leaders charged with forecasting the future of their weather coverage. Spoiler alert: the future of local weather is inseparable from climate coverage. Here’s why.

The Local Forecast is No Longer Enough

The data doesn’t lie. As local TV news viewership has slowly but steadily declined, the local weather segment has endured as the most ‘must-see’ aspect of many local newscasts. Research by media consultants and by Pew Research shows that local weather is the most valued topic covered by local newscasts.

It might be tempting to stop right there. Thanks for watching, goodnight. But it would be perilous to take this narrow view. Zooming out reveals that audiences are increasingly able to meet their local forecast needs via always-on digital devices, without waiting for the 5 p.m. news. For example, weather and news searches now consistently rank among the top three uses of voice assistants like Alexa; and a Pew study found that weather was the top use of local news apps as far back as 2011. The same 2018 Pew study that put weather as the top reason to tune in to local TV news also revealed that consumers said weather was the easiest type of local information for them to find. Audiences have many more choices now for what has become commoditized forecast information.

Think about how traffic apps have carved away the audience that formerly watched local TV traffic reports. The better, always-on, personalized and portable solution is carving away this local TV franchise. For those attending the all-day broadcast track at AMS100, the message was clear: Daily weather forecasting remains necessary. But it is no longer sufficient as the sole basis for owning the local weather brand. The corollary: don’t be confused by the enduring popularity of live breaking weather coverage’; it’s local breaking news… about weather.

Rob Carlmark was right. The disruptors are coming. We have to offer more than an app. At AMS 100, the consensus was that the future of local broadcast weather is intertwined with owning the local story of climate change. Here are seven lessons from AMS 100 about how to make that happen.

Maybe it was the school of fish swimming in the flooded garage, or maybe it was the octopus. It was November of 2016 and a king tide was again inundating Jeff Berardelli’s neighborhood in South Florida.

The long-time local TV meteorologist described the experience to his peers at AMS100 as a kind of tipping point moment for him. He committed to reinvent himself to focus on climate, even if it meant leaving his comfortable forecasting job. He went back to school to increase his expertise and volunteered to do extra reporting focused exclusively on climate.

The gamble paid off. Less than three years later, he was hired at CBS News in New York, where he is now both a meteorologist and the network’s first titled Climate Specialist. Berardelli is the prototype of the future of broadcast meteorology. He did it, as he put it, by taking on “the beat of the future.”

In some newsrooms there’s been a historic perception that climate stories were “ratings killers.” As recently as 2019, an Axios article repeated the trope, citing MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes as its source.

Data scientists at Chartbeat put those assumptions to the test, measuring the amount of climate content published and the time audiences spent with that content in the first quarter of each year from 2017 to 2019. In their research and in collaboration with Columbia Journalism Review, they came to a clear conclusion: Climate coverage has increased dramatically in the past two years, and audience engagement has grown even more.

Specifically, Chartbeat data scientist Su Hang reported that the “number of articles written on climate change have increased 56% over the past year…however, we’re seeing that audiences are paying 80% more attention to climate change content this year.” Hang concludes: “There’s an appetite for this content – the demand is outweighing the supply.”

At the meteorology conference, several forecasters voiced concerns about the politics of climate and their fears about tackling the topic in markets with more conservative viewers.

Who better than “South Carolina’s weatherman” to turn to for the answer? Jim Gandy may have retired in 2019 from WLTX, but the longtime meteorologist is rightly recognized (including in this profile in the New York Times back in 2014) as a pioneer in incorporating climate reporting into local weather. In fact, he was the first local forecaster to partner with Climate Matters, the educational arm of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Climate Central, which now collaborates with more than 800 meteorologists on climate reporting.

Gandy’s advice is simple: “Talk about where they live.” Gandy ticked off the topics that mattered to his viewers in the Carolinas — sweltering heat, allergies, poison ivy intolerance — and how each is connected to climate change. One topic transcended all others: How climate change impacts gardening. Gandy noted that TV research consistently showed gardening was the number two topic of interest for his viewers.

Gandy said his viewers “do care about how it (climate) affects them in their community,” adding: “Focus on the science and everything else will take care of itself.”

Here’s a great example of telling the story of climate through the direct experiences of local viewers, created by WBZ Boston Meteorologist Eric Fisher.

ICYMI: A look at our ‘biological markers’ piece from last night. Had to re-track a line…so those who asked if they could show in their classrooms, etc…please use this version! #wbz pic.twitter.com/Zt1o3EEcH8

— Eric Fisher (@ericfisher) January 21, 2020

When a community experiences a big weather event, it’s newsworthy. But not all extreme weather events are due to climate change. Unfortunately, fact and fiction spread with equal ease in crowded social media feeds. Meteorologists can help audiences tell the difference. Georgia climatologist J. Marshall Shepherd suggested this analogy: extreme events are like a cookie recipe!

Lots of variables determine what kind of ‘cookies’ (weather events) result! Shepherd urged local meteorologists at the AMS conference to combine their position of audience trust with their knowledge of science to be the grownup in the room: to draw attention to the difference between “weather” and climate”; to distinguish between trends we can confirm — fewer cold spells, more hot spells — and variations in weather (like “more tornadoes”) that are not validated yet in the science as climate-based.

“There are only five things Americans need to know about climate change,” Ed Maibach told the meteorologists gathered at AMS100, adding that each can be expressed in just two words.

Maibach, a professor at George Mason University whose specialty is strategic communication on the topic of climate science, urged meteorologists to use that unique trust relationship with the audience to counter myths and amplify accurate reporting.

Maibach underlined what he identified as the biggest gap between public opinion and the actual science: Only 55% of Americans think “scientists agree” climate change is real, whereas Maibach notes that the actual consensus is 97-99%.

Here’s an example of focusing on the data to tell the story of local climate change in Boston from WBZ’s Eric Fisher.

Part III of our series looking back at the 2010s and how they fit in with the local climate picture.

This one features the numbers at our own @bhobservatory

Cliff notes: The 2010s featured our warmest spring, summer, fall, winter, year, month, etc. #wbz pic.twitter.com/hqJQfNsaEH

— Eric Fisher (@ericfisher) January 22, 2020

A planet-sized story is bigger than just hits in a newscast. Mike Nelson at KMGH in Denver has set the example for taking local climate coverage beyond the boundaries of the 5 p.m. News, finding diverse ways to engage with the community. Nelson has organized a local symposium with climate experts (and – gasp – meteorologists from other local TV stations); he makes visits to schools to talk about climate; he regularly uses Facebook Live to do extended interviews with experts that allow the audience to engage and ask questions. The station has even created a full event experience tied to Earth Day.

Watch: Mike Nelson Facebook Live interview with Climate Scientist

Climate coverage is increasingly moving beyond just the weather team. Cronkite News Lab previously profiled the station-wide climate campaign by WRC (NBC – Washington, DC), led by News Director Mike Goldrick. The campaign wasn’t just good journalism but also drove sponsorships, according to Goldrick.

NBC owned and operated stations are leaning in. At AMS100, hosted in Boston, NBC10 meteorologist Chris Gloninger showcased reporting from “Adjusting to Climate Change,” a series the station hopes will be a destination for “all things climate change” in New England.

Tonight on #AdjustingtoClimateChange at 7PM – once a house floods chronically, its value drops and will never recover. This will eventually have a huge impact on coastal communities whose tax base will suffer. @UCSUSA developed this program to help visualize the losses. 1/ pic.twitter.com/X5lH4WhoB4

— Chris Gloninger NBC10 Boston (@ChrisGNBCBoston) January 30, 2020

Bernadette Placky-Woods of Climate Central shared another example of how reporting on climate can also be good business for broadcasters: Adding a solar forecast, sponsored the same way stations have long had a sponsored pollen forecast.

Localizing the story of climate is easier than ever, in part because of the evidence of increased local impacts. Meteorologists interested in incorporating climate in their weather coverage have a range of free, trustworthy, validated sources they can use.

Audience opinion data from the Yale Climate Opinion Maps can be used to identify and craft hyperlocal story angles based on local sentiment about climate. Chartbeat data provides meteorologists with the evidence to make the case to editorial managers for this kind of reporting. And Climate Central is a nonprofit and nonpartisan online resource for “Climate Matters” that includes free localizable graphic visualizations, an archive of past local climate reporting examples, and a range of story ideas tailored to specific regions.

Here’s an example using Climate Matters resources to localize climate change from meteorologist Jordan Evans here at Cronkite News in Phoenix.

Phoenix on average now experiences 11 fewer winter days that are below normal, compared to 50 years ago. via @ClimateCentral #azwx pic.twitter.com/ztdLK7TPI2

— Jordan Evans (@jordanevanswx) January 22, 2020

“Climate change is a global issue,” notes Bernadette Placky Woods of Climate Matters. “But we see and experience it locally.”

Editor’s Note: Frank Mungeam also spoke at the broadcast track of AMS 100, describing how local meteorologists could apply the “STOP List” (previously published here on Cronkite News Lab) to the weather forecasting workflow to create time for enterprise climate coverage.

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Words matter. Journalists, of all people, appreciate the power of the reporter’s pen and voice. Yet in newsrooms across the country, we continue to use language that squashes innovation and holds us back from transforming our newsrooms at the pace needed to match the digital disruption around us.

So here’s a New Year’s wish and a challenge to news leaders and storytellers: five culture-killing phrases to stop saying, or at least actively challenge, in the new year.

This response to ideas sends the message that there are rules, and those rules are not to be questioned but are simply to be obeyed. Or, as a colleague concisely put it to me recently, the takeaway is: “Be quiet. Your ideas don’t matter.”

If our audiences were growing, news revenues were robust and sustainable, and trust in media was high, I’d be more sympathetic to simply following the old rules. But none of that is true. The core principles of journalism (like accuracy and fairness) do endure; but we should be relentless in re-examining our practices — how we do what we do.

After decades working in local TV newsrooms, I now get to see this issue from the other side. Here at the ASU Cronkite School and at other fine journalism schools across the country, we are graduating a cohort of mission-driven, motivated, multiskilled journalists. Bonus: They happen to be mobile-first digital natives, members of the next generation of information consumers. Who better to help us reimagine and reinvent our local newsrooms? Forcing them into our ‘system’ without actively soliciting their input is a huge missed opportunity.

I often advise graduating student journalists to “learn the rules, then break them” at the newsrooms they join; the same advice applies in reverse to newsroom managers: Invite and welcome questions and challenges to “how we do things here.” A manager can always decide to keep specific legacy practices, but we can only benefit from fresh eyes and thoughtful review.

This dismissal contains a thinking error common in legacy newsrooms: We’ve historically relied either on our ‘gut’ or (unreliable) overnight ratings to make snap judgments, and we lack the discipline found in digital media companies around metrics, measurement, and post-mortem review. (After a tour of Silicon Valley platform companies, I shared seven lessons relevant to newsrooms.)

When I hear “we tried that before, and it didn’t work,” a few things cross my mind. The first is that it immediately shuts down the person who made the suggestion, and sends that same message to anyone who witnessed the exchange. This can’t possibly be in the best long-term interests of fostering a newsroom culture of innovation.

The second thing I wonder when I hear “we tried that before and it didn’t work” is: How do you know? Often, the answer turns out to be based on either weak data (“It didn’t do well in the ratings”) or just personal opinion (“It wasn’t good TV”). Each has flaws that merit at least further experiments. Nielsen ratings are themselves highly variable and unreliable; sample sizes are smaller than ever, amplifying errors; and unmeasured factors can commingle to blur actionable conclusions: What aired on other channels? Was the weather good or bad for TV viewing?

Legacy newsrooms would benefit by adopting the rigor around intentional experimentation commonly used at platform and technology companies:

1. Define the experiment in advance (what are we trying to test?)
2. Define success metrics in advance (how will we know success?)
3. Measure the results and hold a post-mortem review afterwards, to compare the hypothesis to the results (what did we learn, and how should we adjust?)

As the adage goes, the only true failure is the failure to learn (If we knew how to evolve our legacy news practices for the digital age, we’d just do it.) So a culture that encourages purposeful experimentation, with rigor around measurement and lessons learned, means that we are never done when it comes to trying things.

In Buddhism, there is a concept called “beginner’s mind.” It’s about being open to possibilities and not being fixed in ways of seeing. Legacy newsrooms could prosper by adopting this beginner’s mind.

This well-intended question has been problematic for some time. Historically, it was asked in an editorial meeting filled with a non-diverse group of decision-makers who did not reflect the community they were charged to serve (alert: this is still true in too many newsrooms).

Understanding those limitations, many newsrooms have worked to incorporate more data into their editorial process. Today, the way we answer “What’s everyone talking about?” is often via what’s trending on social, as indicated by social listening tools like CrowdTangle or by Twitter’s trending list.
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News leaders need to understand that this ‘answer’ has its own, potentially severe limitations. The short list would include: What’s trending isn’t the same as what’s important; a very small percent of the audience drives most social activity, so ‘trending’ doesn’t truly represent the audience; and it’s been well documented that bad actors can manipulate social discourse in ways that create trends that aren’t real. Perhaps worst of all, a focus on what’s trending distracts too many local newsrooms to chase engagement metrics, rather than direct engaging with their community.

In 2020, journalists can ask smarter questions than “What’s everyone talking about?” Here are a few:

• What does our community need to know more about?
• What issue or problem could we help explain and add context to?
• What are the important false narratives on social that we could fact-check and correct?
• What stories are being underreported due to trending ‘noise’?
• And yes, we should continue to strive to understand what are the conversations happening in our community, with or without us. So we might ask: How could we as journalists add value to what people in our community are talking about?

There’s also a lesson here about diversity of voices. Diversity today isn’t just a responsibility, it’s a smart audience strategy. We need diverse voices in our newsrooms to better serve the diverse needs and interests of our communities. It’s necessary but not sufficient to have those voices ‘in the room.’ Those voices also need to be heard, and need to be empowered to make key editorial decisions.

This statement contains the now-questionable assumption that there are ‘TV people’ who are somehow different people than web users. Sure, maybe that argument worked 15 years ago when TV remained the dominant source for news and the internet was still an upstart. Today’s audiences move from screen to screen. In fact, they are far more integrated in their use of screens than the legacy broadcasters who seek to serve them, and they follow what interests them from one device to another.

Research by SmithGeiger has tracked screen use by time of day and captured the fluid and seamless ways audiences are flowing between platforms. According to Seth Geiger, the ubiquity of mobile is driving this phenomenon, with active usage of mobile and live linear TV in the morning, to apps and the web during the day, back to mobile and a mix of streaming, mobile, and linear TV throughout the evening and into bedtime.

That’s true even for the oldest Americans. A study by Pew Research showed that, for the first time in 2019, Americans age 65 and older preferred mobile phones as their first digital screen for news.

It is now more accurate to say people are information consumers who move from screen to screen. TV does some things better (and some worse) than digital, and vice versa. Social media has its own strengths and weaknesses. Audio treatments of stories are becoming more relevant as podcasts and voice assistants gain in popularity.

Since our audiences access news in many ways, and each platform has particular strengths and constraints, a more productive way to lead a conversation might be: “How could we most effectively present this story for: the TV audience? the digital audience (and, mobile versus desktop)? the social audience? and, the audio audience (both on demand via podcast, and voice-activated)? These are harder but more relevant questions that can lead us to smarter, platform-specific storytelling.

There is perhaps no oft-spoken newsroom phrase that more clearly displays the disconnect between legacy news organizations and their audiences than the put-down “We already did that story.” Perhaps the only worse catch-phrase is its corollary: “The competition already did that story.”

The embedded harm is two-fold. First, this dismissal errs by treating stories as static objects, one and done. Good stories and important stories evolve and unfold; like an onion they can be peeled to reveal deeper layers; they can be advanced and explored. Second, this declaration projects an arrogance of reach that is no longer true, if it ever was. The (inaccurate) assumption contained in “we did that” is: “the audience saw it.” When the top-ranked newscast in a market gets, say, a 3.0 rating in Nielsen, by definition that means that 97% of households with TV’s in that viewing area did not see the station’s report. The throw-away of “we did that” presumes wrongly that message sent is the same as message received.

“The competition already did that” is an extension of this same flawed logic. Again, given the actual viewership numbers of a competing local TV station’s newscasts, we’d be better served by arguing that ‘Netflix already did that’, because today’s true competitors for our audience’s time and attention are more likely to be a streaming service or social platform than that TV station across the street.

On important stories and those that hold audience interest, we should ask better questions:

• How can we advance this story?
• What doesn’t the audience understand?
• What more could we find out?
• What other questions could we answer?
• What misconceptions could we correct?
• What other perspectives could we offer?

These are great questions for a news director to pose. Smart reporters will frame their follow-up story pitches through this lens.

There is a third level of sin in the “we did that” dig, one that perhaps exposes the most existential threat latent in legacy newsrooms. We have historically emphasized “recency over relevance,” as my Cronkite News Lab colleague Andrew Heyward puts it. Saying “We did that already” reveals our focus is on our daily newscast schedule as opposed to on our audience. In a way, “we did that” is an extension of meeting the daily newspaper deadline, the idea of “yesterday’s news.” Once the story is “published,” the internal newsroom experience for reporters is “I’m done with my story.” The impulse is to move on, to find the next story. Culturally, we even sometimes frown on reporters who pitch follow-ups to the story they did the day before, as though that’s lazy. We may even say: “Do you have any new story ideas?”

This is inside-out thinking. The focus is on our schedule, our work product. If we indeed work for the audience, we need to think outside-in. What does the audience need to know from us? In fact, the “end” of our day – broadcast or publication – is the beginning of the audience’s experience with the story. Listening to their responses and reactions, made easier by social media, creates the exciting possibility of true dialogue about the news. We can learn from our audience as they respond to our reporting, to find follow-ups, fresh angles and sources, and new questions to answer.

If we are truly to put our audience first, rather than our own daily production workflow, we will embrace the update, the story advance, the iteration and the elaboration because good stories are more like journeys than destinations.

Language matters. News leaders set the tone with the language they use, and can crush or cultivate a spirit of innovation with just a few words. So here’s to zealously defending the core principles of journalism, while welcoming thoughtful examination of our practices and assumptions. Here’s to asking smarter questions, using rather being used by data, and truly putting the information needs of our audience first.

Got a phrase you’d like to see banished from newsrooms in 2020? Join the conversation by sharing it on Twitter and tagging @cronkitenewslab.

Working on my latest for @CronkiteNewsLab — on culture-killing language used in newsrooms. What’s an expression you’d most like to see banished? (I’ll start: “We did that story already.”)

— Frank Mungeam (@frankwords) January 8, 2020

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If you want to see how immersive media can be, just watch someone who’s playing a video game. The outside world fades away. The gamer is often oblivious to the passage of time. Hours pass like minutes. As broadcasters, we’ve been forced to accept that TV is often only on in the background, relegated to the ‘second screen.’ Wouldn’t it be nice to regain the kind of immersed attention achieved in interactive games?

At Cronkite News, we wondered how we might apply some of the principles of gaming in service of the goals of journalism to inform our audience on issues that matter. That’s what led us to experiment with the News Quiz. We decided to implement the quiz as part of a special report we produced called “Recycling Reductions” as an in-depth look at how changes in the politics and economics of recycling since 2017 have caused significant cost increases and service reductions for recycling programs in our broadcast area in Arizona.

WHAT WE DID: THE NEWS QUIZ

We wanted to test the idea that audiences on-air and online would stay longer and be more engaged with our coverage if we gave them the chance to participate via a live news quiz testing their knowledge of recycling while we reported on the problem. For easy scoring, we opted to go with 10 questions incorporated during the first 15 minutes of our newscast dedicated to recycling coverage. Reporters from our Sustainability team researched possible quiz questions, and we ultimately chose five practical ‘recycle or not’ questions and five broader questions tied to the larger issue of recycling.

To enable live quiz voting, we partnered with MegaphoneTV and used the same technology stack that powered our earlier ‘Choose Your News’ experiment (which we profiled on Cronkite News Lab, and was recognized at the Rocky Mountain Emmy Awards for Best College Newscast.)

The multi-platforrm News Quiz show was broadcast live on KAET Arizona PBS at 5 p.m. and streamed live on our Cronkite News Facebook page, giving us two ways to reach audiences and two ways to measure engagement. Spoiler alert: This show dramatically overperformed our average for audience engagement (details in results below.)

HOW IT WORKED

Our anchors introduced and explained the News Quiz, including a mobile-friendly URL shortcut at the top of the program. Our content plan, what we’ve come to call a “Super Block” here at Cronkite News (as described in this Cronkite News Lab feature), included four story elements:

• An explainer on what’s behind the current crisis in recycling
• A deep dive into one community where that crisis in in full effect
• A demonstration of the do’s and don’ts of recycling to show the problem of contamination
• A forward-looking profile of a scientist pioneering a solution to the plastics problem in recycling

Our show producer sequenced the ten questions in our quiz to pair them with relevant content. Half the questions were general knowledge, the other half were specific to what items can be recycled. For example, during our introductory explainer we tested whether our audience realized that China until recently took 70% of our state’s recycling.

During the segment where we demonstrated what can and can’t be recycled in Phoenix, our quiz questions focused on other recycling “Do’s & Don’ts.” Using MegaphoneTV’s voting technology, this voting functioned as a second stream of complementary content to the broadcast, with the question on-screen for an intentionally limited amount of time to drive immersion.

After each question expired, the on-screen display updated to show both the correct answer and how the audience overall voted on the question. As a content team, we also came up with a plan for an end-of-program scorecard, with four grades based on how participants performed on the quiz, from 8-10 for Recycling Hero to 0-3 for Recycling Novice (confession: In timing out the live show in real-time, we sadly had to drop this important element, a lesson for next time.)

RESULTS AND REFLECTIONS

Any innovation project needs to begin with a premise — What is the hypothesis or idea we’re trying to test? — and methods of measuring success. Our hope was that the News Quiz would more deeply engage our audience, and we used three measures to assess: Nielsen TV ratings, Facebook Live video engagement analytics, and Megaphone’s voting insights. As any News Director knows, Nielsen overnights are nearly impossible to rely on as a decider of one-time success. For our student newscast, that’s even more true due to the small sample size of our audience. For this broadcast our overnight rating was slightly below our average but well within the range of normal.

Our Facebook video insights, by contrast, were definitive: This program generated 12 times the engagement of our typical video! The engagement over-indexed across every metric, from Watch Time (4x) to Comments (16x) to Engagement to Shares (8x) to Reach/Distribution (11x) and Starts (3x). Insights from MegaphoneTV confirmed this with hundreds of votes cast by phone during the broadcast.

We also wound up with another data source, an unofficial focus group. Our broadcast production booth normally has several of the faculty advisors watching the students’ efforts from behind the scenes. For this live broadcast, our booth was standing room only. I observed that every single person not directly tied to producing the show was not only participating in the voting, but these folks were immersed! There were exclamations as answers were revealed, followed by eager anticipation for the next question. At the end, there was immediate comparing and bragging after final results, which each participant receives on their own phone. In general, I observed a level of engagement wildly more immersive than the passive, barely focused viewing that we all know is often associated with a traditional newscast. My favorite ‘metric’: One student’s mom texted her while the show was still live to brag about her score on the News Quiz.

Debriefs are crucial to learning from experiments. In our post-show review, we identified many learnings and ways we could improve and add to this first experiment. A few key lessons included:

• Leave questions on-screen longer (20 seconds minimum, versus our choice of 13-15 seconds) to insure viewers can ‘process’ the question and vote
• Script more precisely the timing of where/when questions are inserted, to insure the questions complement rather than compete with the content
• The News Quiz format is optimized for the live online or on-air viewer; watching the recording of the show later, on demand (e.g. the YouTube link below) may actually be mildly frustrating to those forced to passively view others’ voting, while being unable to participate themselves. Stations might pair the VOD with an online version of the quiz for those who watch on demand later.
• All voting participants did receive their personal score by phone via Megaphone, but we’d add a ranked final scoreboard on-air of all participants, to enhance the gamification
• We did not aggressively promote this first News Quiz (who knew if it would even work!) Now that we have built the capability and workflow, we’d double-down on a multiplatform strategy to get the word out, which could lead to a lift in broadcast ratings similar to the real-time lift we saw in digital streaming engagement

We were thrilled with all these valuable process learnings, and with the overall outcome. The data showed that adding a purposeful gaming element made traditional live linear news coverage much more engaging for the audience.

Our News Quiz was the result of the collaboration of a team of reporters, producers and studio production that featured storytellers Jordan Evans, Jordan Elder and Melanie Porter, led by Sadie Babits, Director of the Sustainability team at the Cronkite News; and producer Jordan Taylor, led by Director of Producers Christy Bricks, and the studio crew led by Director Jim Jacoby.

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At some point between ages three and four, my son discovered the word “why.” Delighted by the power of this novel interrogatory, he unleashed a torrent of “why’s.” He had the stamina of a marathon runner, and I struggled to keep pace. When he finally outgrew this phase, I breathed a fatherly sigh of relief. Now, focused on newsroom innovation, I’ve had a change of heart. Rather than accepting how things are, and how we do them, we adults might be better served to emulate that youthful curiosity and ask “why” more often.

Why are newscasts 30 minutes long? Why does the flagship evening newscast start at 5 p.m. and not at another time? Why do we have people who ‘anchor’ the newscast? Do the reasons for these institutional practices still apply? There are many unwritten rules in a newsroom. But how many of them are truly ‘rules’ and how many are just ‘how we’ve always done it’?

Part of the mission of the Knight-Cronkite News Lab is to question traditional practices through testing. So, in December, students and faculty at Cronkite News teamed up to reimagine the traditional 5 p.m. show. We decided to do a newscast, but without anchors.

There are a host of reasons, if you’ll pardon the pun, for exploring alternatives. Some are very practical. Every news director has struggled with anchor staffing, whether it’s scheduling over the holidays, when folks are sick, on weekends, or just in general in smaller markets.

There are also business realities. Newsrooms continue to be challenged to find ways to reduce the costs of creating their content, and anchor value measured in salary has been trending downward as TV ratings have eroded.

“The trend in the markets I am familiar with has been (salary) reductions of approximately 25% from 2008,” according to John Misner. “Some more; some less.” Misner, now a Professor of Practice at the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism, has served in broadcast management roles in Atlanta, Fresno and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Most recently he was President and General Manager of the NBC-TV affiliate in Phoenix, Arizona from 2002 to 2016.

Misner notes that, in today’s digitally disrupted news ecosystem, the value of anchors is relative to the strength of a station’s community brand and the degree to which it offers differentiated content. “Given that most stations are still producing commodity content, the anchor is one way to differentiate a newscast (and the station’s overall brand) from competitors,” says Misner. The bottom-line question: In 2019, is your anchor still a strong reason to watch?

These are good reactive reasons to experiment with the traditional newscast structure. But there’s also a big proactive reason: As linear viewing shifts from live to on-demand, consumers will increasingly choose when they watch, what they watch and how/where they watch. In that future media landscape (that is already here for some), the key “unit” of news may well be the story, rather than the show.

That’s what led us to produce a special “Storytellers” edition of our 5 p.m. Cronkite News. The outcome was a newscast without anchors. Our method? Put the focus on our stories, and our storytellers. Here’s how we did it.

WHAT ANCHORS DO

It might seem obvious. But when was the last time we thought about what is it, specifically, that anchors do to add value to a newscast? To create a newscast without them, we had to answer that question first. The answers gave us our “problems to be solved.” The list of valuable contributions included things like being a trusted and recognizable source, a reason to watch (affinity), an extra editor to review and fact-check news content, someone skilled at presentation, and the glue that connects unrelated news reports into a show flow. From our inventory, we saw that anchors contribute to shows in three broad ways – some journalistic, some practical, and some performance-related.

STORYTELLERS EDITION: HOW WE DID IT

Producers and studio production crew at Cronkite collaborated on strategies for how to reimagine the practical anchor functions, like “how do we open the show without anchors?” and “how do we get from one story to the next?” Since our focus was on our storytellers, our solution for how to open the show was to feature the storytellers themselves, previewing their stories. Problem solved!

For transitions between stories, we wound up challenging the notion that the TV doctrine of weaving unconnected stories, so traditional as the producer-written, anchor-delivered transition, was not necessary to viewers. If the stories are related, the reporters can make those connections. For our stories that were not connected, we decided less was more: We used our standard animated stinger (with the audio ‘swoosh’ for audience cueing) as a simple, low-lift way to advance from story to story. We built one additional “map” graphic that we could use as an alternate transition for reporters who recorded look-live intros and tags from a remote location related to their story.

One unintended yet arguably positive effect of our anchorless format was that it eliminated the entire category of very short, often “voiceover” and “over the shoulder” stories because there was no one to deliver them. Instead, our show consisted of eight robust reporter packages, each produced to be self-contained, with intro and tag by the reporter. We didn’t mind dispensing with those disposable VO’s, but we did want to be sure we could get some key news-of-the-day updates. Our solution was to place one reporter in the newsroom, who did a “happening now” reader of three short need-to-know local news items. This is as close as we came to any role in the show resembling an anchor.

Other transitions were handled without fanfare. For breaks, reporters did their own deep teases of upcoming stories. Our weather forecaster delivered that report standalone. When it came time to figure out how to end the show, our production team had a rather hilarious conversation about how to end a newscast without “anchor banter.” What followed may or may not have included comments about how often anchor banter is cringe-worthy. Ultimately, we followed a guiding rule to prioritize simplicity for the ending, as with other parts of the broadcast. We simply had the last of our reporters tag out of the final story by thanking viewers for watching our special “storytellers” edition of Cronkite News, and then voicing over a full screen push to our website.

RESULTS AND REFLECTIONS

The immediate takeaway from our storytellers newscast was how smoothly it went. “That was easier to produce than a normal newscast,” observed Christy Bricks, the director in charge of our student show producers, and an eight-time regional Emmy-winning producer herself.

The second big takeaway was about the feel and flow of the newscast. If we could somehow forget that newscasts have always had anchors, and simply experienced this storytellers’ version, it seemed completely natural to have the storytellers present their stories. The question that hung in the air afterwards was: What if no one even noticed?

In our debrief, a crucial part of experimentation to capture lessons while fresh, the team identified a few highlights: We liked the show open featuring the storytellers teasing their stories; the show seemed to flow smoothly, despite the absence of traditional anchor bridges; our simple animated effect (with sound, which helped) seemed to be a more than sufficient transition from story to story; we liked the use of a reporter in the newsroom as a means of incorporating “happening now” headlines. Frankly, eliminating VO’s and readers and instead having an entire show of enterprise stories felt more substantive than a typical newscast: more depth, less filler. Overall, the biggest win was that the producers and studio production team felt that our lean producing style made the format highly flexible and repeatable, whether for hiatus or holiday shows, or even potentially as a way to create a show built around a series of reports on a single theme or topic.

Along with what worked, we always try to capture what we’d change, improve or try next. It was an experiment so we did not create “Storyteller” branding or a special graphics package, and we didn’t market the show in advance. Having figured out how to do the format, we’d add those elements next time. Although we created a map background for field reports, in practice our student reporters ran out of time to shoot field look-live intro’s and tags; we’d definitely add that to visually enrich a second effort at this format. Finally, we realized that without anchor chat, banter and VO’s, there’s little flexibility in timing an anchorless newscast; so we talked about leveraging the “happening now” headlines block as the adjustable section to aid producers in show timing.

Importantly, we also looked at our available metrics. Our on-air ratings were within the range of normal but fully 20% below our daily average. We also stream our newscasts on Facebook Live, which gives us access to engagement metrics as well as anecdotal feedback via comments. As with Nielsen ratings, our audience size is small, so it’s hazardous to overinterpret small numbers. However, as with our ratings, both our watch time and our audience engagement (likes, comments and shares) were 20-30% lower than our typical newscast. Notwithstanding the production successes noted above, these metrics indicated that, at least for our traditional audience, the absence of anchors mattered. These findings also reinforced our debrief that, to earn the audience for this format innovation, we’d need to better market and showcase its viewer benefit.

We did not set out to eliminate anchors. We wanted to test our assumptions about what a newscast must be. In the process, we discovered that some of what seems essential in a traditional newscast format…isn’t. We also got some quantitative measures that reinforced that our traditional audiences do value the roles of the anchors. That’s a useful learning. Overall, we now have another option for how to program that ever-present 30-minute news hole. It’s a format that gives news stations another option for solving staffing or budget challenges. Time for the next “why?” question!

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“English, or Spanish?” For newsrooms seeking to serve increasingly diverse audiences, the best answer might be: “Why not both?” A pair of experiments at the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism by the bilingual Cronkite Noticias reporting team tested a new way to deliver the news to these viewers. The results? ¡Muy buenos!

The idea to report bilingually emerged organically within the Noticias news team. “Our conversations happen organically in between both languages — English and Spanish,” explained Valeria Fernandez, Director of the Cronkite Noticias team. “The students ‘code switch’ (alternating between languages), and I code switch with them as their professor, so it felt like a natural evolution to attempt to do something that reflected their identities more.”

The ideal subject for the first storytelling experiment emerged organically. Cronkite Noticias reporter Karina Espinoza was preparing a report for Hispanic Heritage Month by profiling artists in the Phoenix area. As she was interviewing artists about how they expressed their heritage through their work, she found both that “Hispanic” encompassed many different countries of origin, and that several of her subjects’ primary language…was English. And at least one interviewee alternated between Spanish and English. After discussing how best to tell the story, the team decided the most accurate way was to preserve each subject’s natural language choice, and deliver a truly bilingual story, subtitling the Spanish responses for English-only viewers, and the English responses for Spanish-only viewers, while giving bilingual audiences an authentic and unfiltered story. For subtitling, the team used the same method used by many local broadcasters when they create text over video for ‘social videos.’

“This approach benefits three different audiences and brings them together,” noted Fernandez. “There is no ‘other.’ When we report for a particular audience we may report about the “other.” This approach offers new possibilities to experiment with inclusion, dialogue between cultures and understanding by finding common ground.”

Bilingual reporting isn’t just a more inclusive way to tell certain stories. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that, in many states, it more accurately represents and serves an increasingly diverse population.

There are seven U.S. states where 30% or more of the households speak a language at home other than English, according to the census. That includes population centers like California, Texas, Florida and New York/New Jersey. There are twelve states where at least one in five households speak a second language at home. In the majority of those cases, that second language is Spanish.

US CENSUS CHART

The data is clear. While local news organizations have traditionally offered an either/or choice — English or Spanish — language is no longer a binary choice in many U.S. homes. Those traditional distinctions are blurred in families where parents may have only spoken Spanish but now their children primarily speak English outside of the household. For media companies, there’s an opportunity to better serve this multilingual household that is, in a number of states, a significant subset of the overall audience. It’s not only more inclusive. It’s also a good business strategy.

“A bilingual or multilingual person often acts as a bridge between people, and a sort of cultural broker,” noted Fernandez.

Buoyed by the positive response to their bilingual Hispanic Heritage Month report, the Cronkite Noticias team decided to take their weekly all-Spanish newscast for Facebook Live and instead deliver it bilingually. The three Noticias hosts interacted bilingually, and naturally, in both English and Spanish.

“From the minute we went on the air it was clear how comfortable the student journalists felt with communicating in two languages,” said Fernandez. “They started improvising, interacting with each other more than they’ve done in the past in Spanish and English.”

The real-time response from the live stream on Facebook was overwhelmingly positive.

“We got a lot of great responses from bilingual people in our social media channel who felt recognized,” said Fernandez.

The responses came bilingually as well, with viewers posting praise and appreciation in both Spanish and in English.

“That’s what we did in the show, we virtually invited segments of the audience to sit together at the same table,” said Fernandez. “So those who are bilingual see themselves represented in the show, and monolingual audiences are invited to step a little outside their comfort zone while being offered a window into a new language. Rather than being left out, they are invited into the conversation.”

In many newsrooms, there are now multiple reporters on staff who reflect this diversity and are bilingual. News leaders looking to better serve their increasingly diverse local audience might think about ways to invite the bilingual news viewer “into the conversation.”

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“People are tired of reporting that lacks any hope or humanity,” says Jeff Harris, news director at CBS’s Chicago station WBBM-TV. Hard to disagree with that sentiment — we’ve all heard the complaints ourselves. But WBBM and a small group of other stations are part of a new experiment that addresses the problem in a very specific way that does not involve feel-good features or viral videos. Where it succeeds, supporters say it can enhance a station’s journalism, reputation, audience engagement and even productivity.

The approach is called “solutions journalism.” The idea sounds simple enough: report just as rigorously on solutions as you do on problems. But it turns out that’s not as easy as it sounds. “Solutions journalism is not a light switch that you flip,” says Harris. Rather, solutions journalism applies the techniques used to investigate problems to investigate potential answers, with the same skeptical reporting eye. “The distinction here is that we’re not pushing for a specific solution or resolution,” says Harris. “We’re reporting on other communities and other folks who may have a solution to the problem that we’re investigating.”

The process begins with a formal newsroom training program created by the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit whose impact has grown steadily in the print and digital world since its founding six years ago but which has only recently entered local TV newsrooms.

After a successful pilot at WEWS-TV, the Scripps ABC affiliate in Cleveland where Harris was news director before moving to Chicago, the Solutions Journalism Network hired Deborah Potter, veteran broadcast journalist turned teacher, textbook author and trainer, to recruit 10 stations interested in the concept. “Why would a competitive television station want to try it? To be different,” says Potter. “One of the complaints about local TV is it’s all the same. And so one of the conversations we had was: ‘This is a way potentially to distinguish what you do, what this station does, from what everybody else is doing.’”

Potter crushed it: she got 15 stations in 14 markets (there’s one duopoly) to buy the pitch. It helped that she picked stations she thought would be receptive — “work with the willing” — and it really helped that the training program was free, underwritten by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which also helped fund some of the stations’ resulting projects.

Next, Solution Journalism Network’s Carolyn Robinson and her colleagues visited each of the stations earlier this year to conduct a workshop for the entire newsroom, replete with techniques and examples. “Everybody has to be involved,” says Robinson, “because the idea is that this seeps throughout the newsroom. Everybody starts asking each other, ‘Is there a solutions angle here?’” She also held brainstorming sessions with key editorial leaders to identify a solutions-oriented project and even met with station promotion teams to help sell the idea.

“We talked about investigating solutions,” Robinson says. “Same skill set [as exposing problems], same exact kind of approach to a story, but we’re looking at what’s working, how well is it working, for how long, and for whom? And one of the things that people started realizing is there’s really a hunger for that kind of reporting. If you stop right at the problem, people are like, ‘Well, thanks a lot. Here’s another problem in my lap. How do we move forward as a society or as a community to start addressing these issues?’”

After the workshop, KXAN-TV, Nexstar’s NBC affiliate in Austin, went all in. The station created a project called Save Our Students, prompted by school shootings in Texas but focused on solutions for improving mental health in schools. (Check out the project’s landing page for an idea of the scope.) Josh Hinkle, who heads up investigations and innovation at KXAN, used the Chan Zuckerberg funds to send teams to California and Ohio to investigate potential solutions there. He says that the newsroom produced about 40 on-air stories, multiple digital features, and several live events with policy-makers and regular viewers, including two town halls — an essential part of the formula. “I didn’t connect the dots and understand fully how important engagement would be,” says KXAN news director Chad Cross. “But that did turn out to be the way that we were able to get in front of the people who have power to consider these ideas and possibly implement them.”

But first, Hinkle and Cross had to convince colleagues that solutions journalism is not advocacy journalism and then keep the pressure on their reporters for a hard-nosed analysis of what’s working and what isn’t. “Understanding the effectiveness of this solution is what’s going to make this reporting unique,” says Cross. “And not just a profile of an idea. And so that’s where it gets to be more challenging than you might think.”

Hinkle hopes that solutions journalism becomes part of the station’s daily routine, even without external funds to help fuel a special project. “That’s a big challenge for a newsroom: to think beyond this big initiative. How can we make it more of something we do on a regular basis?”

Morgan Loew, chief investigative reporter at KPHO-TV, Meredith’s CBS affiliate in Phoenix, is also an enthusiastic booster of the solutions approach. “Okay, we’re going to show you some problems, but we’d better come up with some ways that these problems can be solved, and not just in a tag.” Loew used the outside money to pay for data-journalism training for a series called State of Our Schools — an ambitious project that yielded unique insights about which Arizona schools were succeeding (or struggling) and why.

For a month and a half, the station aired two big stories per week in its evening newscasts along with additional solutions-oriented quicker hits in the mornings. “I think that this model of adding a solutions angle is something that we are going to be applying to future projects, not only because I think it’s good journalism, but our managers seem to like it,” says Loew. “At the end of the day, if I can tell my bosses ‘Give me a small team and we can do 12 stories on this issue,’ they’re going to like that.”

However, it turns out the experiment in solutions journalism for local TV newsrooms has not been an across-the-board success. Hat tip to Solutions Journalism Network for gulping its own Kool-Aid: it’s as tough on its own program as it teaches journalists to be when they investigate solutions. “We try things out like this,” says Robinson. “And we want to iterate from that, and improve and change it: what did work, what isn’t working?”

So, with support from the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Potter returned to all the stations this summer to assess the results of the program — not just the projects, but changes in the newsrooms themselves. Potter estimates that half the stations have embraced the project. “The other ones are still struggling, and there are a few that just aren’t going to do it.”

She and Robinson say factors like the station’s news culture, its size, and the presence of a strong champion on the leadership team can make the difference. WBBM’s Jeff Harris agrees that the program is not for everyone. “There are places where it is a match, and there are places where it’s not.”

Aside from this project, the Solutions Journalism Network is working with journalism collaborations that include local TV newsrooms, like NBC’s WCAU-TV and Broke in Philly (which we reported on earlier this year) and TEGNA’s NBC affiliate WCNC-TV and the Charlotte Journalism Cooperative, created in partnership with our underwriter, the Knight Foundation.

Potter, who’s still gathering ratings data and digital metrics from the stations, is writing a playbook for how to implement solutions journalism in a television newsroom. And Carolyn Robinson is back on the road, looking for half a dozen stations that want to try the program next year. She’d love to hear from you if you’re interested.

“I really think journalists can be inspired by the idea that this can reinvigorate not only us in our newsroom, but also our audience,” says KXAN’s Chad Cross. “This may bring some of them back to us, when they see that we’re not just reporting on all the negativity, but we’re also exploring some of the positive things that are happening in a really meaningful way.”

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Climate change is “planet-size.” But local audiences are increasingly hungry for coverage that connects those global trends to what’s happening in their own backyard. Early successes by a few local innovators point to the opportunity for local news stations to be the go-to source for climate coverage in their communities.

The Data

Opinion data collected by Yale University tracks change in public sentiment regarding global warming. At September’s Excellence in Journalism conference in San Antonio, Ed Maibach of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication presented data showing a strong shift in the past five years toward increased concern – and less skepticism – about climate change and its effects. The interactive Climate Opinion Map is a tool that enables any local news organization to drill down to see climate survey results at a hyper-local level for its community, an insightful tool for planning coverage.

Audience Engagement

Research released in August 2019 by Chartbeat shows that news organizations are increasing their climate coverage, and climate stories are generating higher engagement from audiences. Comparing the first quarter of 2019 to similar periods in the past two years, the number of climate stories published was up 27% and 56% respectively from 2017 and 2018. Impressively, the time spent with those articles was up even more: up 52% from 2017 and up 80% from 2018. If it was ever true that climate stories were a ratings killer in the past, the data show the opposite now.

Local Meteorologists as Climate Storytellers

In January, I contributed to the Nieman Lab’s annual predictions for the ‘year in journalism’ by penning a piece advocating that this could – and should – be the year that local news stations use their best graphics, best scientist and most trusted personalities – their weather anchors – to localize the story of climate.

At EIJ, WRC-TV News Director Mike Goldrick cited that article as part of the inspiration for WRC’s station-wide, multi-month local initiative called “Changing Climate.” Goldrick noted the coverage wasn’t just important content, but it performed well with the audience on all the key metrics.

Impressive Case Study from ⁦@gatormikenews⁩ on how WRC-TV tackled climate change as a local news story – and the strong Audience Engagement that resulted. #climatematters #EIJ19 pic.twitter.com/0TXNJUMDtT

— Frank Mungeam (@frankwords) September 5, 2019

Local climate stories by NBC4 include a report on rising local temperatures; the reasons why east coast hurricanes are becoming more intense; and a report explaining why leaves are turning brown sooner in the fall in Virginia.

WRC is not alone. Two local forecasters, Amber Sullins at ABC15 in Phoenix and Mike Nelson at the DenverChannel in Denver, earned shout-outs recently via The Takeaway podcast for regularly incorporating climate change information as part of their weather reporting. We profiled Sullins’ climate coverage in our Cronkite News Lab Social Media Spotlight.

No less than the UK Guardian published an article in mid-September headlined: How TV Weathercasters Became the Unsung Heroes of the Climate Crisis, highlighting the reporting of meteorologists at various local TV stations in the U.S.

Here at the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism, we’ve also been experimenting with ways to localize the climate change story and for ways to incorporate more compelling augmented reality visualizations. Here’s Cronkite News lead weather anchor Jordan Evans’ story showing how global warming trends apply to Arizona’s most populous urban areas and most popular national parks.

ICYMI: Yesterday, I talked how climate change is affecting us right here in Arizona. Major cities are not the only ones feeling the effects of warming, but so are national parks. Thanks again, @ClimateCentral for this data! @cronkitenews #azwx pic.twitter.com/Dx6XY8S1k6

— Jordan Evans (@jordanevanswx) September 19, 2019

For stations looking to increase and improve their local coverage of climate, Climate Central is a robust resource. The nonprofit and nonpartisan organization employs its own meteorologists and uses NOAA weather data to create relevant local visualizations that are free to use for local newsrooms. Some of the most popular visualizations created by Climate Central were shared at the EIJ conference. No shock, the top two were about beer and football.

Bernadette Woods Placky of Climate Central offers these best practices for newsrooms:

• Focus on the science
• Localize wherever possible
• Make it simple and compelling
• Tie in to the news cycle of what’s happening

Climate Central also maintains a robust web site that includes resources on potential story localizations as well as an ongoing archive of best practices from other local newsrooms.

You know the tide is turning on climate reporting when Variety magazine weighs in. A September article touted that even the major TV news networks are investing in more climate coverage. But local broadcasters are uniquely qualified and positioned to be the authority in the communities they serve for informing and empowering their audiences about climate change.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Denver meteorologist Mike Nelson.

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