Let’s face it. Most journalists take a pretty dim view of viewers, readers and online users.
Most news professionals have at least a degree of scorn toward news consumers, and frequently that degree is quite large. And why not? We don’t often get exposed to the best and brightest of what the public has to offer.
In broadcasting, we find that viewers seldom call us to tell us what a wonderful job we’re doing. Quite the opposite. Ninety-five percent of those who call us want to complain about something. Ninety percent of those calls deal with program changes or interruptions of various types, only some of which have to do with news.
When the news department is responsible for a program interruption, viewers don’t want an explanation –- which, by the way, is usually quite obvious. “Yes, we did interrupt your favorite soap opera, ‘As The Stomach Turns,’ to let you know about a tornado warning. It seemed urgent at the time –- any second, trailers, cars, and cows could have been hurtling through the air. Yes, we realize that ultimately that didn’t happen. If only we’d known. But, silly us, we have this dumb notion in our heads that public safety issues might be more urgent and important than two soap opera stars playing a game of ‘Roll Me Over in the Clover.’ We regret the inconvenience.”
The callers don’t care and don’t want to hear it. They just want to find someone to yell at then hang up on. Few of them are nice, and a lot of them ain’t too damned bright, either. My all-time favorite call came from a woman who was exercised over the fact that our network had interrupted “General Hospital” for an update on the impeachment of the president. “Get that crap off my TV!” she screamed. “Bring me back my soap!”
This is the type of viewer those in local TV news encounter most often, because when such calls come, they tend to arrive in a flood and overflow from the assignment desk into the newsroom, where everyone has to help handle them.
The rest of the calls deal with the way we do our jobs. Viewers love to accuse us of being biased, unfair and unbalanced. Usually, what’s really going on is that our story was fairly well accurate, objective and unbiased –- it just wasn’t biased in favor of that particular viewer’s personal prejudices, religious beliefs and political viewpoints.
Most news professionals have at least a degree of scorn toward news consumers.This highlights an interesting phenomenon, by the way, one that some bright student ought to write a paper on: these callers are so opinionated and passionate about their views that there’s no chance they’ll ever be swayed by messages presented in the news, but they’re terrified everyone else will be, and they’re desperate to control those messages.
A similar process takes place in print and online newsrooms.
Viewers also like to accuse us of poor judgment, poor taste or insensitivity. How dare we show a woman wearing a thong bikini in public in a story about women wearing thong bikinis in public? How dare we show pictures of that tasteless gay rights parade? How dare we interview that poor woman whose son was just killed in a drive-by shooting? Etc. Most of these conversations begin with words like, “Please tell me why,” but again no explanation is wanted. The viewer just wants to yell. Most news people just want to hang up. These calls and e-mails are useless and only serve to distract us from our deadline-sensitive jobs, right?
Wrong.
There are four compelling reasons why we must not only listen and respond to viewers, readers and online users, but we must also do a much better job of it than we have been.
Reason #1: Customer Service
Doggone those annoying viewers and readers. We need them to survive. We’re there for them. Without them we have no reason for being. I can’t prove it works, but I am a big believer in the old TV truism that we build ratings one viewer at a time. The same is true of newspaper circulation and website page views. This process starts with proper customer service. A good first step in creating a positive customer service environment is to teach employees to greet callers by some method other than that of picking up the receiver and barking the word “news.” Train them to handle irate callers without letting those calls cause the production line to grind to a halt.
Reason #2: Ethics
The RTNDA and SPJ codes of ethics both call upon journalists to hold themselves accountable to the public. Bob Steele and his colleagues at The Poynter Institute teach a multi-step process for ethical decision-making, one of the goals of which is to produce a decision the organization can explain and defend to the public. By implication, organizations that do not publicly explain their actions cannot claim to be ethical. If only 1 percent of those irritating calls from the public challenge the newsroom on an ethical issue, then the calls are worth the aggravation. A newsroom that regularly explains its actions to the public will tend to act more ethically. It will have to. Wise newsrooms will create formal mechanisms for soliciting and responding to public feedback about their journalism. Journalists who know they might have to explain their actions in public will step more carefully.
Reason #3: Community Bonding & Brand Building
Unlike newspapers, which tend to be owned by companies that were founded to make money through journalism, television stations tend to be owned by companies founded to make money through entertainment. Journalism for them is a sideline. I’m fortunate to be working for an above-average TV owner. For the most part in our industry, trying to convince the typical station owner to make a programming or tactical change simply because it’s good journalism is a tough argument to win. What TV owners do more easily understand, though, is the concept of obtaining a competitive advantage through branding.
Branding is a common concept in local TV news, but less common in the print industry, though certainly not unheard of. The idea is to create a positive image of the organization in the mind of the consumer. TV stations, websites, and newspapers have a personality. Branding emphasizes and reinforces the positive aspects of that personality through the showcasing, style, and promotion of content. Consumer feedback can fit into this strategy very well, especially if the TV station, newspaper, or website has a formal mechanism for publicly responding to that feedback.
Here’s a quick example. The TV station for which I work, WFLA-TV in Tampa-St. Petersburg, covers a wide arrange of topics, as you’d expect for a mainstream news organization. But what we want to be known for is journalism that asks tough questions, holds the powerful accountable, and helps insure the responsiveness of government, thereby giving the public a voice in setting policy.
One month, we aired a series of stories questioning how a local judge was handling certain DUI cases. Prosecutors felt they couldn’t get a conviction in his court. We examined several cases he had dismissed under questionable circumstances. When he wouldn’t answer our phone calls, we approached him in the courthouse parking lot. Our reporter was respectful, but the judge clearly was uncomfortable and refused to talk. At the end of story, we pointed out that the judge was an elected official, and that if he wouldn’t talk to us, perhaps he’d talk to voters. We ran his phone number.
Some viewers thought we were pretty hard on the judge and wrote to tell us so. We featured some of that feedback on our weekly Citizens’ Voice segment, and explained how our philosophy of holding the powerful accountable and asking tough questions had guided our actions. The following week, viewers wrote in to applaud us. We had formed a bond with them. Through Citizens’ Voice, viewers who want the style of journalism we provide had learned where to turn.
In my view, this type of branding and viewer bonding is more powerful than any on-air promo campaign because it’s so obviously sincere and demonstrable. It takes very little extra work or resources to make this connection happen. And that’s a concept even the most profit-minded, bottom-line oriented, ratings- or circulation-grubbing media owner ought to be able to embrace.
Reason #4: Holding the Public Accountable
I recently had the pleasure of meeting legendary journalist Gene Patterson. As a columnist for the Atlanta Constitution in the ’60s, Patterson took his fellow white Southerners to task on the issue of civil rights -– and they him. He endured years of hostile reaction from readers and even family members. I asked him what that had taught him. He told me that he still believes that the public must hold journalists accountable. But he also believes journalists must hold the public accountable.
Mechanisms for regularly dealing with public feedback give journalists the ability to do that.
Television in particular is not known for dealing very well with public challenges to the way we do our jobs. The print industry handles feedback somewhat better, but not by much -– only about 40 of 1,500 daily circulation newspapers respond to public challenges through reader ombudsmen services or something like it.
When I first proposed an on-air segment similar to Citizens’ Voice at another TV station a few years ago, most of my industry colleagues objected to it simply on the grounds that it would be “bad TV.” But some feared it might lead television -– already ethically suspect in the eyes of many -– to pander to the public even more than it already does. I replied nonchalantly, without providing specifics, that in my case I simply wouldn’t let that happen. Now that I have nearly five years of experience with handling public feedback in this manner behind me, I’m more convinced than ever that when done correctly, it provides an opportunity to do what Patterson suggests: not only to be held accountable by the public, but when appropriate to hold the public accountable as well.
A good example of the latter came recently. Our feedback over coverage of the war in Iraq fell along two broad lines: those complaining that our coverage was pro-war and that we weren’t giving voice to the anti-war movement, and those complaining of just the opposite. The pro-war viewers outnumbered those against by a margin of about 4-1, and they were demanding that we stop covering opposition voices. This was disturbing. But more disturbing were reports I was seeing in the trades that TV executives were beginning to respond inappropriately to this nationwide phenomenon.
The Frank Magid company, one of the country’s largest and most influential consultants for local news, reportedly sent a letter to client stations warning them that viewers don’t want to hear about protests, and advising them to give careful consideration to the placement of such stories and the time devoted to them.
Now it’s getting serious: intolerance for dissent is beginning to affect our industry’s willingness to include those voices in our coverage. We dealt with the subject several times in our weekly Citizens’ Voice segment. Our co-owned media partner, the Tampa Tribune, then invited me to write a column about it, which provided an opportunity to cover the subject in greater detail. (WFLA-TV cooperates with the Trib in a process usually referred to as “convergence.” One of the key advantages of convergence is that it allows us to bring the unique strengths of each platform to bear in covering the issues).
The Chicago Tribune picked it up and reprinted it. The column laid out the journalistic and democratic values at stake. I told viewers to quit asking us not to cover the news, and to have faith in the American way of life. I’m pleased to say that although a few fascists now have my name engraved on their hate lists, reaction was very positive overall, and we featured some of it on Citizens’ Voice the following week.
Final Note
Obviously, no one in any newsroom has time to give every viewer, reader or online user the individual time, attention and service they demand. If you’re going to get anything else done, then you have to ration the time you spend dealing with public feedback. That’s why I find an on-air segment or weekly column to be a much more useful device than the tactic of trying to deal with each viewer individually. In our market of 3.7 million news viewers, the latter is simply impossible to accomplish.
But nor do I blow off all individual viewers. I spend no time at all with some of them –- I’m really not interested in personally responding to Ethel Icetea’s complaint about the new hairdo one of our anchors is sporting.
I don’t answer letters from racists or homophobes or extremists at either end of the political spectrum -– except maybe to tell them off on occasion. I do frequently answer viewers who challenge us on significant issues. Many times I agree with them. Sometimes. those exchanges lead to public apologies or corrective action. If I disagree, I’ll say so –- and engage the viewer.
Preserve the relationship. Firm it up. Build on it. Learn what viewers, readers, and online users want from us. Let them know honestly what to expect.Most newsroom employees, unless they are taught otherwise, are deathly afraid of disagreeing with a caller, thereby getting into an argument and perhaps winding up as the subject of a complaint to the news director or general manager. But dismissing a caller with the words, “Yeah, yeah, thanks for calling” is usually the wrong thing to do. Viewers know a kiss-off when they hear one. They don’t often or even usually expect us to agree with them. When they challenge us on the issues, they want us to show them enough respect to be willing to engage them. I have found that when I do so, I usually firm up a relationship, not destroy it.
Letters often begin with words to the effect of, “I’ll never watch your TV station again because…” In the huge majority of cases, if I take time to engage the writer, the last e-mail in the exchange will contain a promise from the viewer to keep watching, and a “thank you” for taking the time to chat –- even if we still disagree on the issue. Citizens’ Voice and services like it accomplish much the same purpose.
And that is, of course, the entire point. Preserve the relationship. Firm it up. Build on it. Learn what viewers, readers, and online users want from us. Let them know honestly what to expect. Both the producers and the consumers of journalism will be better off in the bargain.
Forrest Carr is news director at WFLA-TV in Tampa, Fla., and a 2002 Poynter Ethics Fellow.
