WESH News Director Ed Trauschke (left) shown meeting with anchors Jim Payne and Wendy Chioji.

Ed Trauschke, News Director, WESH

WESH is constantly looking for new ways to engage our viewers. Hearing from individual viewers directly is an important part of our mission. During our newscasts we regularly ask viewers to "Talk to 2". They can call us or participate in an e-mail discussion to give us their feedback and opinions on an important issue of the day.   

Clearly though, weblogs are not grassroots journalism. Journalism has highly regarded ethical standards. It's the only profession protected by the Constitution. The people who participate in Web discussions have no such responsibility to insure their information is accurate. How do we insure the bloggers are not causing harm? What if the information is libelous? Is it the News Manager's job to censor the weblogs?

Weblogs could be a method of generating story ideas. At WESH, we've implemented several others.  We have an African-American Advisory Board which meets quarterly to recommend story ideas and to evaluate our news coverage. We've partnered with the local Telemundo News Department to improve our coverage in the Hispanic community. We solicit viewer ideas and feedback at semi-annual Lifestyle Festivals. Several times each year we open phone banks to take viewer calls. We have also hosted town hall meetings in our studio. Our anchors and reporters regularly speak to community organizations.

There are countless ways to stay in touch with your community and the Web is just one tool available to help us better serve the public.