Columbia Journalism Review has a new proposal for campaign coverage:
One antidote to help clear the air and possibly keep potential voters engaged is quite simple: Journalism that goes beyond just dumping the claims and counter-claims of two competing politicians into readers' laps and then walking away. But 16 weeks into this experiment that we call Campaign Desk, it's becoming increasingly clear that the newspapers that the rest of the profession look up to -- the handful of papers thought to be the class of their field -- too often don't practice that kind of journalism. Day after day, in fact, few of them go much beyond the he-said/she-said school of journalism that leaves readers neither satisfied nor informed....
Create a small team of fast, thorough reporters whose primary task is to supplement your paper's helter-skelter daily political coverage by providing the crucial detective work and synthesis that's been lacking.
Some people in the know have told me to consider the impact of newsroom chaos when examining the Argus Leader. Who knows what goes on there. I can't say. But I do know there are systemic problems with the end-product. Maybe the Argus could consider CJR's idea.
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