Get a strategic partner in another medium: this is an approach that was used to good effect by many in the news business. The NewsHour used it in the 1996 national election cycle, took advantage of the grim realities on the NBC side of the business, because they really wanted to get Must-See TV on the air very reliably during the convention week. They knew that all those wonky people who watch public television would be just as happy seeing lots of convention coverage there if they made a strategic partnership.

     Everyone got what they wanted. You got Seinfeld and Friends if you wanted that, and you got a speech by Orrin Hatch, if you wanted that.

     Many of us want to fulfill our news mission and be seen to be doing that. We dont want to spend just our own column inches or air time doing it all off our own bat, as they say in England. An alliance with the NewsHour allowed NBC News to go ahead with its plans to cover the conventions there still was the kind of convention coverage as there had been since the days of hand-drawn graphics and Chet and David at the desk except, interestingly, it didnt run on NBC.

     The tremendous brand name, and highly desirable demographic niche mined by public broadcasters give you something very worthwhile sitting in your pile of chips. We public broadcasters go into these negotiations thinking that we have no cards to play at all, and maybe if were nice theyll let us use their ball on their court. We come at these negotiations from a position of weakness, rather than seeing the great strengths we bring to the table in terms of local credibility, solid-gold name identification, access to other possibilities that sometimes commercial broadcasters dont have.

     Trade web links, use your staff on their air, or vice-versa. They are often already well-known names in your community. Newspapers and other broadcast properties in your coverage area are often owned by larger media entities in your community (well, always, these days) that might give you access to polling data, public opinion research, and things, frankly, that noncommercial broadcasters often dont have the wherewithal to buy on your own.

     One of the most frequently leveled accusations against news organizations in the coverage of campaigns and elections is that they just cover the horse race, and dont cover the issues. My answer is: guess what, people do like horse-race reporting. Its this sort of effete, holding-your-nose, contentless criticism to just say that they are two ends, mutually opposite poles on a continuum: you just do horse race, you dont do content; or you cover yourself in glory and say We dont do horse race we just do content. Youre both wrong. If youre saying either one of those things you totally wrong.

People like the frafferoo of elections and it makes great television too, incidentally. But we have to be clearer about what were doing and why, and understand that jalepeño peppers are a terrific food additive, but you wouldnt want to eat a plate of them. You have to understand that a little horse race will really jazz up a highly content-driven, issue-rich series of reports. Dont feel that youre giving away your credibility.

     One thing that strategic alliances make possible is create a broader base on which to send out the invitations for candidate forums. And please: do post-production on the candidate forums . Its no sin to do post on something that is visually as uninteresting and occasionally deadly as candidate forums can be.

     I know that there is a certain cachet about live broadcasting. Doing two hours a day for six-and-a-half years of live broadcasting, I understand what the pitfalls and the benefits are. If our mission is to help educate, inform, enlighten, and keep people in the tent, getting through those five-minute questions by local activists who are actually your local nut base, too, doesnt do anything very profitable for anybody. If you ran it two night later with some good post-production, and interstitial reporting on the issues talked about the candidates, dropped in there to break up the pacing, break up the long series of one-shots that a candidate forum can be: this is not bad. Often these reports can be content that youve already generated for your other programs, just repackaged and placed within the context. A nice tight, one-hour moving program does a lot more for solidifying that notion that political coverage is both worthwhile to do responsible, can generate an audience, and create links with these campaigns that help you over the long haul.

There are approaches that in most places in the country would simply be impossible for all races. Assigning an individual reporter to one particular candidate for the whole length of the campaign were just not in that business. We dont have endless armies of technicians or editorial staff. KCET in Los Angeles probably has part of some 20 congressional districts in its coverage area. The idea that its going to cover all 20 races, when 12 of them are a dead certainty that one side is going to win its just not reasonable. But there are races that you can target in your area that express, in a wider way, the development issues that face the entire metro.

     By contrast, Wyoming public television has one congressional district in its coverage area, where presumably its a lot easier to cover the race. The Tampa-St. Petersburg licensee has seven county boards to worry about, not just one or two. This leaves you with some challenges, granted.

     In the best of all possible campaign coverage worlds, it wouldnt be just the biggest countys race that would get the coverage to the exclusion of all others, it would be the race that crystallizes the issues that set the tone for your part of the country: development, conservation, public transport, highway construction, public schools. Instead of the biggest race in your area (after all, thats the one thats going to be the most heavily covered by all the news outlets in your region), you might want to think about ways to take the fastest-growing county, and its attendant growing pains, as a way to talk about the political climate in your area.

     Promote the hell out of it during other dayparts. You have to remember that different people with different interests and different uses of television watch you at different times of the day and dont think about the other times when they dont watch. They are your potential customers how come we just give them away? Whether its weepy mid-day domestic tragedies or PBS kids, theres a large audience thats not coming to you at news time, and we dont do enough to talk to those people about why they should come to us at news time.

     Zeroing in on less-covered races may also be an opportunity to do outreach to consistently under-covered parts of your service area, which is sending them a potent message on the evening news every night, too.

As little political coverage as many commercial outlets are doing these days, you can bet the areas like Loudon County here in the D.C. metro, Lake County, Illinois in the Chicago metro, Riverside County in the south L.A. area, are getting covered even less. Political coverage does not have to consist of running to speeches and rallies with a microphone, trying to ask a candidate an embarrassing question, and then running back to the station to put it on the air.

     There are overarching issues and questions that face metropolitan areas, and by covering them, you cover the latest races by implication. This is political coverage: we should be widening our notion of what political coverage is, what we mean when we say it, when we use that phrase. By covering those issues you can get the candidates to speak to voters in less contentious ways, away from the need to put down the other guy and build yourself up. In effect, give a different matrix in which a candidate can appear in order to talk about the things that are animating the race anyway.

     You cant cover politics in this area (Washington, D.C.) without covering transportation. Just the other day a study was released that showed Washington commuters spend an average of 76 hours a year stuck in choked traffic. You want to talk to local congressional candidates about transportation? You bet they have something to say about transportation. The story doesnt have to be done in the context of the race, but it is by function political coverage nonetheless.

     To tell you the truth, if you want to engage the public, as well as office-seekers and office-holders, in any of the other issues that animate political discourse, its better to do it in those issue-driven stories than in those campaign-driven stories.

     Do you ever notice how little regular people appear in campaign stories, except to cheer at a local high school or to be the hand that is shook at a commuter rail station by a candidate in the morning? People have a place to play in this coverage as well, and we should hear from them in the context of issue coverage, more than we do. It would help right the balance the whos speaking balance between people who are running campaigns and looking for what they call free media, and the public that were supposedly serving with our media.

Use TV to illustrate their lives as a way of illustrating what politics really means at ground zero. It is fully consistent with our mission and we can do it without being preachy. We can point to the fact that so few vote without suggesting that they themselves vote. Is it a story, that people dont vote? Absolutely. Is it part of our function to tell them to vote? I think not.

     You can illustrate that plenty is at stake in a coming race without suggesting what conclusions people might draw about it.

     When we try to do the right thing at election time, we face a conspiracy of right-thinking people, who believe that since we are public-spirited, we should be for what all right-thinking people are for: that we should be part of a campaign to raise turnout. Dont fall for that. Dont run Get Out The Vote rallies on your station. In effect, youd be insinuating yourself into the process in a way that should make us uncomfortable. Quite often, you may have a community outreach or public affairs director who thinks thats exactly the way to go. You want a firewall between that and your news coverage then.

     We are the providers of the raw material of citizenship, if citizens choose to act on it.

     Public journalism is lampooned by some of our colleagues as a less-than-rigorous exercise in feel-good news coverage that surrenders up the news business core editorial function and puts it in the hands of pollsters and good-government groups. They seem to be so afraid of letting the public in to the inner sanctum of agenda-setting that they cant help but dump on any attempt to open the door, even a crack.

     If your public journalism efforts consist in toto, of throwing open a community hall and talking with the people who show up about a focus-group generated list of local problems, maybe then the smirky critiques are deserved because youre not using public journalism to its fullest potential.

     We can make good television out of regular people. We can make good news coverage out of their concerns and their passions and their obsessions, to be honest. I cant help but believe that people will watch it if we do it.

After doing ten years of less and less foreign news coverage, if we go back to our audiences and say, hey, you care about Chechnya?, are we surprised when they say no? Of course not. Well, the same thing is operating right in your statehouse, right in your board of county commissioners, and right in your city hall. Were taking out some of the fiber and just adding empty calories, because the news hole is growing. The local news hole has not been static or stagnant, it has been growing and in many places they have successfully been doing all this new news with half the people. I know because when I left NBC we had 45 percent of the Chicago-based employees that we did when I got there, and we were doing twice as much news every day.

» »