People-Powered Elections Coverage

Date: 

March 31, 2022

Whose Notebook:

Annelise Pierce, Editor and Community Reporter. (You can learn more about Annelise here.)

Current Focus:

People-Powered Elections Coverage

What is this about? 

This new series will focus on flipping the narrative around Shasta County election coverage to give the community a greater voice and more power to influence campaigns and their outcomes.

I’ll start by finding ways to reach out to and engage our community to help me answer the central question: “What do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for your votes?” I’ll then synthesize the responses and reach out to the community again, to rank those responses. What I find from that preliminary engagement will drive the campaign coverage I provide the community, and, I hope, will stimulate new conversations among candidates and community members.

In traditional elections reporting, journalists provide a gateway for information by sharing messaging that’s coming from the (often powerful) people running for office. Journalists often spend campaigns chasing the candidates, trying to get their attention and highlighting what they’re saying.

People-Powered Elections Coverage will allow me to do the opposite. I’ll work to amplify the community’s voice on what issues and topics matter most to them and provide that in a format that candidates and other community members can access and learn from. 

What’s my goal?

I’m excited to give our local community new insight into how to think about making their candidates work for them, even before they’re elected.  My goal is to help the community be more informed and empowered to choose the candidates that will best represent them and their interests.

Why this topic? 

Local elections are obviously a hot button issue in Shasta County – we’ve recently made national and international headlines for the recall of a local supervisor.  As we approach another election, our community needs often-polarized candidates to hear what we, the people, have to say about what our community wants and needs. We also need them to let us know how they’ll respond to our concerns. 

After learning what you most want candidates to be talking about, I plan to approach those candidates to ask your questions and bring up your concerns, and report what they say back to you. (This is, of course, entirely dependent on the candidate’s willingness to engage with me but I’ll also report on that.)

What does story development look like? 

This story series will be somewhat unique in that it will be focused on finding ways to  engage the local community.  I’ll spend more of my time finding ways to pull in community voices to guide my story development, rather than using my own research or known sources to guide it. 

So this story will flip my journalistic process as well, which is something I’m excited about. 🙂

What was my inspiration? 

Traditional elections coverage is deadening to me.  Attempting to remain objective and neutral in reporting the facts, especially when faced with sometimes extreme views or outright falsehoods promulgated by local candidates, makes me not want to cover elections at all. 

When my research led me to find the People-Powered Coverage model, supported by journalism scholar Jay Rosen and the organization Hearken, I immediately got excited about covering local elections again. 

Most importantly, by re-centering the campaign conversation around what our community sees as central rather than a few hot button topics, I’m working to create more health in our local political ecosystem. I live here too and these conversations matter to me and my family’s ability to thrive. 

What do I bring to this story?

I don’t define myself by any traditional political labels. I find much of the American political process to be broken, dominated by binary narratives that don’t capture the true spirit and concerns of the diverse people who call our county and country, home. 

I’m sympathetic to a variety of Shasta County’s political perspectives because of my own unique journey.  I was raised in a deeply conservative family with a high value for our American founders and the founding documents. I’ve also spent several years living in rural East Africa where my community lived on less than a dollar day, in the kind of severe poverty that represents one of the ongoing damaging effects of the destructive western colonization of much of Africa. I’m also a parent to two immigrant children whose struggle to learn to survive in a local school system and culture that often doesn’t understand or appreciate their first language or their diverse experiences, impact our family everyday.  These factors, and many others I haven’t shared here, shape how I see social, cultural and political situations today in complex ways.

What’s influencing my work on this series? 

I’ve spent significant time over the last six months learning about polarization, community conflict, and ways that journalists can support their communities to depolarize and reduce the kinds of dangerous high-stakes conflicts that can result in violence.  This elections coverage series is an outflow of that learning and an experiment in how Scout can best support our polarized community to seek positive and peaceful progress that represents community interests. 

Some of my favorite resources in this learning journey so far have included articles by journalists Amanda Ripley,  Monica Guzman and Noelle Malvar and work by organizations like Spaceship Media, More in Common, First Draft, Braver Angels, and The National Institute for Civil Discourse. 

Many of these journalists and organizations also have a focus on prioritizing the work of community engagement – collaborating with the community – as central to the work of journalism – something I deeply embrace and am integrating into this series.

Foundational questions I’m asking as I enter this story series: 

• How can I draw the community into engaging with me on this work?
• What organizations can I partner with to share this concept and increase its usefulness?
• How can I convince candidates to engage with the process?
• How can I synthesize and prioritize the feedback I’m receiving from the community into a campaign coverage list that guides my continued campaign reporting?

Key resources: 

See above, what’s inspiring me . . .

How you can help:

Fill out the google form! 

This will be quick (less than 5 minutes.)

You can also contact me at annelisepierce@annelisepierce

We use our Open Notebooks updates to invite you in by sharing some of our internal processing: what’s fascinating us, what we’re learning, what’s motivating our work, and what’s concerning us. We’re also asking you to share your ideas for where we can find more information or alternate perspectives and listening when you have criticism for our assumptions. We believe this kind of collaboration between reporters and readers leads to stronger journalism and a stronger democracy. Thanks for being here and for collaborating with us! Read more about our Open Notebooks project here.