One month after attending the American Press Institute's City and Metro Editors seminar, Drew Edwards, city editor for the Guelph Mercury in Ontario, Canada, put into practice an idea he picked up the seminar room. Instead of reporting on the annual Ontario budget in the usual way--looking at how the budget will affect education, healthcare and municipal governments--Edwards decided to look at how the budget would affect readers in five age groups: 0-17; 18-25; 26-40; 41-65; and 66-plus.
"The result was a set of stories far more human than the typical institutional coverage," Edwards said. "Our stories were about people, not about the budget."
In the past, coverage of the budget has been broken down by beats. "It's an easy way to do it," Edwards admitted. "It's how the newsroom is broken down and everyone has sources and background information but you end up with the same 12 people in the story" each year, he said.
How They Did It
The day before the budget was released, Edwards met with the 10-person newsroom and discussed the possibility of covering the budget by demographics. The newsroom embraced the idea.
"Most reporters on staff are young and ambitious so selling it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be," Edwards said.
When the budget was released, the newsroom went through the 17-page synopsis that lists the government's funding initiatives. Edwards and his staff selected two or three topics to focus on within each age group. In the 0-17 age group, the paper focused on the $424 million earmarked for more for schools; in the 18-25 age group, they focused on the budget's plans to double student aid by 2009-10; in the 26-40 age group, they highlighted the fact that there would be no personal tax cuts this year; in the 41-65 age group, they covered plans for increased funding for breast cancer screening programs; and in the 66-plus category, they reported on the budget's enhancement of the comfort allowance by two percent. The comfort allowance is the remaining income that low-income residents are allowed to keep after contributing toward the cost of their care.
"The priorities that we talked about were the ones we set, not the ones the government set," said Edwards. "We didn't just rely on the government spin. We set the agenda on what we wanted to cover."
The newsroom also didn't spend all day waiting for government officials to return phone calls. Instead they went out in the field and talked to real people. "Reporters had to do a little extra legwork on these stories," Edwards admitted.
For the most part, said Edwards, the stories were assigned based on who would know the most about each age group, and who would have the easiest time finding sources. For instance, Tony Saxon, the reporter who wrote the piece on the 0-17 age group, has four children, he said.
In addition to the age-specific stories, the paper ran a story on the front page that gave a broad, sweeping overview of the budget.
The Results
While the paper didn't get a lot of feedback from readers, it also didn't get any complaints. "We didn't get letters or phones calls from people asking what happened or why we did the story that way," said Edwards.
Executives at Torstar Corp., the paper's owners, were pleased with the coverage. They said it was the type of out-of-the-box thinking they wanted their newsrooms to do, said Edwards.
The newsroom plans to try this approach again and is even toying with idea of reshuffling beats a bit, perhaps to create a "family beat" and a "seniors beat," said Edwards.
"I think a newspaper that tries to be all things to all people doesn't do anything well," Edwards said. The new beats would allow the paper to give readers basic information, and more in-depth information for those at are interested, he said.
