IT’S A newspaper’s Holy Grail. And it’s not just about journalists’ desire to be liked. A paper can’t do its job without some understanding of who it’s working for.
As an editorial I read a few days ago said, “The Cavalier Daily serves the University community and can do that most effectively when we know what readers want.”
But wait. Aren’t the people who put The Cavalier Daily together members of the University community? Don’t they know what their community wants?
Well, maybe. But they’re apparently smart enough to question their omniscience, even when the “omni” refers only to Grounds.
”The fact of the matter is,” Andrew Baker, editor-in-chief, said on behalf of the paper’s Managing Board, “that becoming more heavily involved with The Cavalier Daily … leads to an incredibly atypical undergraduate experience at the University. … I’d say that working with the Cav. Daily for a long time is a significant handicap when it comes to getting a sense of what readers want.”
That’s probably true. Getting deeply involved in any activity or organization has the potential to cut a person off, at least a little bit, from the larger community. And, as counterintuitive as it may sound, a newspaper has more potential to cordon a person off than almost any other activity I can think of.
It’s to their credit that Baker and the rest of the Managing Board are trying to find new and better ways to communicate with readers. That means new avenues of communication moving from the Cavalier Daily to readers and from readers back to the paper.
I shouldn’t have said “back to the paper.” That implies that the paper speaks first and readers react. That’s certainly not the way things need to be. As in any healthy relationship, both sides need to speak up whenever there’s a need. And in this relationship, there’s always a need.
Baker said he and his staff hope their experiment with new channels for comment provide “an opportunity to get our bearings and try and figure out what methods of communication our readers respond best to.”
For that to work, of course, readers need to respond.
They’re not responding much now.
As the paper’s ombudsman, I should get a lot of questions and complaints. I don’t.
Baker tells me the paper gets a letter or two a day, usually commenting on an opinion piece of some sort. You are being invited to change that.
The new Managing Board has some interesting ideas, including, as Baker put it, ideas about “how to get an organization that’s worked solely in the realm of print media for 120 years to generate content on a plethora of new mediums.”
That’s a challenge a lot of papers are trying to work through.
There are a lot of technical challenges in that – software and hardware to choose and to master, a new set of creative skills, new ways of thinking about how to tell stories with new tools. But my theory is that there are some truths that run through all this. One of those truths, in my opinion anyway, is that what journalists are doing is essentially telling stories. And those stories can be told in a number of ways: with, long, in-depth, articles; with photographs; with video; through what some of my colleagues call alt story forms. Those can be graphics on newsprint, exploding graphics online, a series of bullet points, almost anything that can be developed into coherent collections of information in an engaging package.
When I ran newsrooms, I tried to produce a newspaper for two audiences: the one that would read the paper as soon as it came off the press and the one that might read it 50 or 100 years later to see what life was like in a particular place in a particular time. News is history in a very real sense. A good newspaper will reflect the community it serves in revealing ways. But a good newspaper will do more than that. It will also lead the community, engage it in discussions and arguments and remind the community of things the community might just as soon ignore. And, of course, a newspaper is supposed to be a watchdog, a check on power.
All that is difficult under the best of circumstances.
It’s much more difficult when the community isn’t involved.
So I’m asking you to do your part. Tell the Managing Board what you like and what you don’t; what you’d like to see and what you’ve seen quite enough of. And don’t forget – though I’ve talked about “newspapers” throughout this – that newspapers aren’t limited to newsprint.
Dream big. And then tell the editors about it.
Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily’s ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
Read More
Letters to the Editor: The resignation of University President Jim Ryan
YesterdayFollowing this resignation, The Cavalier Daily has received letters from the University community which provide various perspectives on what this moment means to them and to the University’s future.
EDITORIAL: U.Va.’s path forward begins in the shadows of administrative silence
By Editorial Board | 3 days agoAs it stands, students will be returning to Grounds with no concrete sense of who will be at the helm of this institution and little reason to trust the governing body, which has made no attempt to explain or justify its actions.
GARVIE: U.Va. Health is rapidly falling behind on its responsibility to patients
By Adeline Garvie | 5 days agoWhile gender-affirming care is one of the biggest ways U.Va. Health is falling short, it is not the only one.
