Make a sport of election coverage

In the spirit of true confessions, I'll admit to reading a Chicago Bears game story before reading most of the newspaper campaign coverage served up during election years. I am not a political junkie. Nor am I a sports fan, but I'd still pick sports if I had to choose between the two.

I am, however, an editor, so I know no newspaper would dump either sports or election and campaign coverage. One commands a passionate following and its own section every day; the other is what the First Amendment, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were all about.

But, for heaven's sake, does election and campaign coverage have to be so deadly dull?

Now before you send a legion of political editors after me, hear me out. Our readers are bored with traditional campaign coverage. They care deeply about their governments and how the people elected to run them do their jobs. They care about taxes, jobs, Social Security and education.

They just don't care for the ways we cover campaigns. We bore them. We ignore them. We write for the politicians. And, we fail dismally to fulfill one of our most important missions: connect the people to their communities, and connect the people to the people who run their communities.

Readers have told us this for at least four decades. We're just deaf. Or arrogant. Or both. More likely, we are afraid. We're afraid to break the old, tested models that worked well when television, the Internet, cable and satellites were simply the stuff of a Flash Gordon cartoon or Star Trek episode.

At this point, you're either with me or "against me. " The "against me " can go back to the who-beat, horserace coverage filled with mind-numbing polling numbers, political strategies, insider pundits, and thumb-sucking political analysis and narratives.

The "with me " folks might want to consider how we get out of this broken-down model. For that, I offer up the sports department. Yes, repeat that: The sports department.

The best sports sections follow a six-step program that works for both sports addicts and casual readers. I'm guessing most sports departments don't even know they have a six-step program: Uh, six-step program? Isn't that for drunks or ballroom dancing?

What works for sports will work for campaign coverage, whether we're covering a presidential campaign or the race for neighborhood dog catcher.

Here goes: The best sports departments clearly identify the sports most important to their readers and cover them like Dixie dew. If the sport doesn't tickle the fancies of a ton of readers, sports departments give it short shrift. Sports departments know how to set priorities, put resources against them and adjust on the fly.

So, consider "readers' favorite sports " synonymous with "readers' critical issues. " That's step one.

Now, cover those critical campaign issues the same way sports covers its key sports. These are steps two thru six. Five kinds of coverage drive successful sports sections: features, enterprise, game stories, notes packages, and agate and box scores.

The feature approach to sports coverage drives readership. (The Readership Institute has the statistics to back up that statement.)

In sports, and in campaign coverage, a feature approach means capturing the human dimension, the emotions, the sense of place and state of community. It means capturing the people who make decisions and the people affected by those decisions.

It means stories about the people surrounding and supporting the key players. It means stories about trends and the behind-the-scenes people who affect what happens. We all know what a feature story is; we needn't make this harder than it should be.

Successful sports coverage then layers in strong enterprise. These are the big trends stories, the analysis, the business of the sport, the investigative First Amendment projects that uncover important things like cheating and buying off players, gambling and coaches run amok.

Successful campaign coverage will use its enterprise to explore in depth the critical issues that matter to readers: things like jobs, safety, the economy, education, healthcare. Our mainbars should be the issues and the people inside those issues. The sidebars are what the candidates say they will do about them – and we should track the candidates' promises and expose their fault lines.

Step four is the tried-and-true game story. That's the traditional who-beat coverage. What happened at the game, who won, who lost, how come, what's next.

Ditto in campaign and election coverage. Our traditional model works splendidly for the "game story. " See? I didn't drop the horserace coverage. There remains plenty of room to wrap ourselves – and our readers – in this old security blanket.

Step five is the wonderful notes package. Any sports reporter worth his or her salt writes notes packages with just about every story. Those useful tidbits of information, not important enough for a whole story but still interesting, are captured under the ubiquitous "notes " heading. And, I suspect, notes packages are among the best read things in any sports section.

Not a reason in the world not to adopt the notes package for campaign coverage. Use them for campaign capsules, who endorsed whom, who is to appear where, and all the other nondescript but useful information that floods through campaigns and into our newsrooms.

Finally, there's all that agate. Columns and columns of stats, personnel changes, box scores and calendar info for the hardcore sports fan. Only the true believers wade through that tiny type, but that's the information true believers want, and sports gives it to them.

Campaigns and elections have just as much "agate. " Unfortunately, traditional coverage turns the tiny type into 15-inch stories with headlines that bore most readers. The most courageous, risk-taking newspaper will be the one that creates an ongoing campaign agate page – and resists the temptation to turn tiny type into unwarranted page one stories.

There you have it. A six-step plan for covering campaigns and elections. With that multi-layered approach, learned from sports, we might just reconnect our readers to their elected officials. Not a bad thing at all for a democratic society.

This article originally appeared in API's ROI newsletter.