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I'm seated in a folding chair, pretending to be part of a press pool. In groups of twos and threes, the community activists approach the podium. They deliver long, elaborate press releases they worked all morning to craft.

It's an exercise. These activists want to more effectively present their messages to the media. I'm volunteering to listen, to ask them questions as if this were a real press conference.

Unfortunately, their presentations deconstruct into a gyration of language; most are too muddled to be written into a story.

I'm struck by how hard they have worked, spending half of a sunny Saturday to thoughtfully shape press releases on issues they care deeply about -- politics, the environment, social services.

So much effort to reach us, the media.

I begin to wonder: How much thought do most reporters give to how issues are presented back to them, the readers?

Oh sure, I know the easy answer. Reams of paper and endless hours have been spent on reader focus groups, surveys, and a myriad of other ways to assess what readers want to hear and listen to from media.

Most reporters can honestly say they spend hours researching and then rechecking facts. And some writers know why the word "painstaking" begins with hurt.

But how much thought do we give to shaping stories? What is the very skeleton we choose to hang our facts upon? What anecdotes do we use for the lead? Do we simply choose an anecdotal style because editors like these little vignettes?

What if you knew the anecdote you'd chosen would turn off a good portion of readers? Do we use language that causes some readers to stop after the first paragraph?

Some will think this sounds a little too gerrymandering. And yet, if the reporter's goal is to be informative, why would we continuously choose methods that simply turn people off?

The people I met with that morning and afternoon had been studying George Lakoff's book, "Don't Think of an Elephant!" The book is an interesting look at how people frame arguments.

Much of it is based on the idea that people tend to think in metaphors without even realizing it, and triggering a frame is all that is needed to get people stuck in a certain way.

Take an example given in December by Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., director of the Center for Communications and Community at UCLA. Gilliam presented at The Poynter Institute for a group discussing effective ways to report on broad social issues.

In one exercise, Gilliam showed a film clip of a person who slowly transformed from a Latino gang member to a well-educated man.

The clip was intended for use in a talk about a program that helped the man make the shift. But Gilliam's research showed that by starting with the Latino as a gang member, the rest of the message was lost. People got "stuck" on the first image because it was a familiar one.

The presentation made me wonder about the over-use of anecdotes in stories. Are we reinforcing an accurate image for the rest of the story?

Columnists don't have to dance around quite so much. I can approach a column knowing that I want to convince the reader and knowing full well who I want to reach.

In the news pages, this is more of a slippery slope.

Just the facts, ma'am. Many journalists believe if they simply gather the most significant facts, get comments from both sides of the debate, they've done their job.

I don't think so.

Especially with emotional subjects like race, abortion, stem cell research, gay rights -- issues a lot of us are being asked to write about.

Take race.

As race and ethnicity reporter for The Kansas City Star, I used to always ask two questions before beginning a piece. Is this story being written so a minority group can see itself reflected in the paper Or, am I writing so the larger, white community can better understand an experience that is not theirs?

Some pieces did both. Some clearly leaned more one way than the other.

Racial profiling is a good example. Years before the term racial profiling had become kitchen-table common, I wanted to look at the topic.

I also thought that many white people simply did not believe this ever happened. And that black people believed it happened more often than even black and Latino police believed it actually did.

So, I began to search for ways to show the attitudes.

For weeks, I asked white people "What black people in town do you respect the most?" Three names began surfacing over and over -- all black businessmen, apparently highly respected across racial lines.

So I called them. I asked them if they believed they had ever been racially profiled. They had. Each had no trouble telling a story, if not several instances.

Their tales became a sidebar to the main story.

I was told by some white readers that they hadn't understood what the fuss was about until they read about experiences of the men they respected.

It was clear that, before, they discounted complaints from poorer, less affluent black people as race-based whining.

Efforts to show how black/Latino police officers viewed the topic were less successful; they were less open about being quoted, perhaps a telling factor in itself.

Reporters like to think that we simply put the facts out there and readers will make their own judgments. But are we reaching people with new information. Or simply reinforcing what people already believe, perhaps inaccurately?

And does it matter?

I believe it does, or should.