How journalism can help rebuild civic society in the US

In the lead-up to the US election, I have been reading Robert Putnam’s The Upswing. He charts major social and political trends from the Gilded Age, a period of inequality and extreme partisanship in the US. People have drawn a lot of parallels between the current period in the US and the years leading up to the Civil War. Putnam draws another parallel, the last years of the 19th Century and 20th Century. It was a period of extreme inequality, racial repression and violence. “The tide of strikes, violence and eventually anarchist terrorism that had been across the industrializing North in the 1870s would not recede until the 1920s.” Institutionalised Jim Crow segregation began during this period, and the Supreme Court upheld those laws in its 1896 ruling Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the great injustices in US history. It would allow "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races”. Putnam says a “wave of black lynchings surged in the 1880s, reaching the appalling rate of an atrocity every other day in 1892”.

Putnam says American politics across the country was “violently riven as it had not been for nearly half a century” during the Civil War. In the Gilded Age, the age of the robber barons in the US:

This sounds and feels very familiar. The Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, and presidents from Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Eisenhower, LBJ and even Nixon ruled as reformers. A progressive coalition of Republicans and Democrats identified and addressed major new problems. Education, income equality and longevity all increased during this period. His thesis is that the US pivoted from an “I” society during the Gilded Age to a “We” society during the long progressive era in the first two-thirds of the 20th Century. But then it swung back quickly to an “I” society.

By several measures, the US is now in the same situation as the Gilded Age, with declines in educational attainment, a rise in inequality and even a decline in life expectancy, driven by “deaths of despair”. Putnam outlines how the US can return to a “We” society and the kind of positive problem-solving and better outcomes. I’m not to that part of the book yet. But this is all to say: The US has been here before, and journalism played a role in the progressive era with the famous muckrakers’ reporting supporting antitrust, health and safety and labour reforms and helped to raise awareness about housing conditions and the violence of lynching.

What journalists can do to help restore civic society

I can’t wait to get to the part of The Upswing where Putnam talks about how we can restore civic society. Even before getting to that part of the book, I know that journalism could play a role in helping with this necessary work.

I heard from many friends immediately after the election that they were shifting their focus from national politics to their communities, and local journalism can support their communities to identify and solve their problems.

Audience engagement leader and innovator Ariel Zirulnick outlined several tactics to achieve. First and foremost, she called on journalists to see “people as voters beyond the elections”. Ultimately, I think she is calling on journalists to understand people’s concerns about their communities and how the government can address those concerns, and their concerns do not follow election cycles. (She makes a distinction between issues and concerns.)

She gave examples of this in action, such as Atlanta Civic Circle’s 10,000-person regional panel, Atlanta POV. It is like the editorial board common at local newspapers but at a scale made possible with modern survey tools. They hope in the future that this can become a neighbourhood-level story engine. News outlets can also capture highly engaged people they contacted during elections as a source for a panel like this and remain engaged with them, a process outlined by AmyJo Brown in a guide to “using voting districts to structure listening tours”. And lastly, the Milwaukee Journal has decided to continue its Main Street Agenda project past the elections.

She has a lot of great ideas in her piece, and one of my favourites is building an engagement loop around the election and using this to develop new products. If publishers were to create a segment of audiences highly engaged during the elections, they could create newsletters, events and special coverage to continue to serve these readers.

Dan Kennedy recommends people find a local news outlet to support. Research has shown the decline in local news has led “to fewer people running for local office, lower voter turnout, measurable increases in polarization”, Dan Kennedy says. “Rebuilding civic life is a way of lowering temperatures and encouraging cooperation. When people learn they can work with their neighbors to solve local problems even if they hold different views about national politics, that enables them to see those neighbors as fully rounded human beings rather than as partisan Republicans or Democrats.,” he added.

And now onto links for this week.

In the newsletter I write I Pugpig, I looked at how my friend Janne Rygh refocused analytics at two Amedia properties so that they could better target young audiences. It’s a great case study on why changing platforms and formats will only get you so far in terms of engaging youth audiences. You’ll have to have reconsider your content strategy.

And on that note, Amalie Nash outlines how to create a content strategy. Her point about creating KPIs is directly related to the experiment that Janne carried out. She realised that their KPIs were leading them to create content for their core audiences, which skewed older.

Facebook has de-emphasised news in its feed, and Elon Musk has banned journalists from X who have criticised him. LinkedIn is heading in the opposite direction. The key to engaging LinkedIn audiences is to understand the audience (which is always the case). How will this news impact someone’s business or career?

I recently co-led a session for the News Product Alliance Summit about audience development in the post-platform era. Many publishing professionals during the session said that Google Discover had become a key, but erratic traffic driver for them. I even heard recently from a publishing leader that Google had told them not even to try to understand how Discover works.

I’m a Discover user. It’s highly sensitive to what I read. If I click on a link, it will start adding that topic into my Discover feed. In Chrome on my iPad, I can also add sites to follow. I am surprised that more publishers aren’t encouraging audiences to do this.

Experience in my day job is that Discover can drive traffic and, more importantly, subscriptions.

A fascinating project funded by the Knight Foundation to answer reporters’ questions in real-time during the election. “ The nearly 100 election experts on hand to answer voting-related questions include election administrators, nonprofit leaders, cybersecurity experts, public historians, attorneys specializing in election law, nonpartisan voter access advocates, misinformation researchers, public policy professors, and more. “