How to cover 2024

We don't need new standards--but to meet the standards we have.

Someone this week asked me if Donald Trump’s candidacy calls for new rules of journalism. I said I would phrase the challenge differently.

This is not a new question; it’s been posed since Trump’s first run in 2016. But hearing the question anew helped me to clarify my thoughts, which I then wrote for some NPR colleagues. These thoughts are not NPR’s but my own.

A presidential campaign calls on us to meet the highest standards that we already have. To report independently and accurately. To reflect on what’s relevant and what’s not. To question all assumptions, including our own. To investigate. To apply perspective. To prove what we say; to challenge others to prove what they say; and to note when they fall short. To use language that people of differing views will find hard to deny. (Some will deny it anyway, but we can make it hard.) To be prepared to weather criticism that is inevitable, whatever we say.

We need to cover people you like and dislike. We need to keep them all in perspective. We need to choose our own language. People across the political spectrum will demand that we use their words, describing issues only in their terms. Sometimes they will have a point; other times they are trying to win an argument by default. Journalists need to make our own decisions.

People on the left have demanded that the media must be pro-democracy, as if they weren’t already. (People on the right have copied this language and said they are pro-democracy.)

I would phrase that differently, too. The media are participants in democracy. We are free citizens who inform our fellow citizens, so they can participate too.

That's some of what I feel I've learned from covering seven previous campaigns, and various democratic and undemocratic states around the world.

In 2024 journalists will face new challenges, or rather new versions of an old one: how to stay solvent in a constantly changing business. Cable TV is reinventing itself to survive. Newspapers keep struggling, with the exception of only a few. Public media recently went through contractions, though it’s normal for its audience to grow in election years. Network TV endures but is one fragment of the audience. Podcasts and social media are, at best, turbulent. Artificial intelligence can scrape the words from existing news stories and publish new stories that compete with them.

In the early Trump years, stories about Trump drew vast numbers of clicks and viewers. The more lurid, the better. To some extent this is still true. But a recent book by Ben Smith reveals an intriguing shift.

Smith was the editor of BuzzFeed, which published a lot of impressive journalism (and also published the famous “dossier” of unfounded allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia). Smith clearly loved the ride at BuzzFeed. But all the clicks did not add up to a long-term business. BuzzFeed News is now gone, and Smith has moved on to a new venture, Semafor. He told me last year his goal was no longer viral stories and clicks but “a sustainable business.”

A sustainable news business requires building a steady relationship with a particular audience. There are many ways to approach that relationship. One of them is to respect the audience by giving them reliable information, in a form that fits their lives, and in a language they can understand.

I’d argue that NPR’s Up First podcast meets many of these standards. It’s digital; it’s brief; it’s conversational. It provides a variety of news stories from around the world. It’s reported, by actual reporters! And it’s edited, with old-school standards. It reaches a very large younger audience (the audience demographics are not far from the population as a whole) and also an elite audience (who listen on their smart speakers). Unlike with many podcasts, people who press play on Up First nearly always hear it to the end. You could critique various aspects of that model. People inside NPR do so every day! But it has inspired many imitators.

We could find other examples of things that work, and also a lot of flameouts and failures. But it’s plausible that the current news market includes space for the kind of coverage that keeps our fellow citizens informed.