Since the day The Daily Tar Heel's Editor-in-Chief Laney Crawley chose me to be City & State editor, people have asked me about my election coverage plans. It seems like I've been told a million iterations of “If you can cover a general election as City & State editor, you can do anything!”
It's true, covering elections (general, midterm or municipal) is a big deal. And there's historically been pressure from both inside and outside the newsroom for the City & State editors to put together something more creative, more innovative than the year before.
But focusing on how to stand out from previous editors didn't feel right to me. I didn't become the City & State editor to prove something, but rather to serve two important groups: the writers on my desk and our audience. When I anchored my focus to how our coverage could best benefit those people, the pressure washed away and the ideas started to flow.
Focusing on our audience kept me grounded in making sure election coverage was accessible and helpful to readers. I know that finding and understanding the candidates, issues and voting regulations is time-consuming, so we focused on creating a product that takes the difficulty out of understanding how to cast your ballot and figuring out which candidate you support the most. In a year where the presidential election has garnered so much media attention, our coverage of state and down-ballot races becomes that much more important.
I also knew that I wanted our election coverage to reflect the efforts of our entire desk, not just the editors and a few senior writers. To me, The DTH shouldn't just be a place for already-impressive student journalists to showcase their talents, but rather stay grounded in its role as a teaching and learning newspaper. I knew I wanted every writer to have the chance to contribute to a project that will provide important coverage to the community they're reporting on.
So, here's what we've been up to.
Interactive quiz site
The head of DTH engineering, Leo Davidson, worked with his team to bring my idea of an interactive quiz site to life. The online site includes Buzzfeed-style quizzes that readers can take to find out which Democratic or Republican candidate they most strongly align with for every council of state race, as well as the North Carolina General Assembly and U.S. House of Representatives contests that appear on the Orange County ballots.
To create the quiz questions, we decided to assign candidate profiles to writers. For consistency, writers sourced the profiles, which you can find in this week's print edition and online, from applicable campaign materials and social media as well as any radio or TV appearances, rallies and debates. I made the editorial decision not to have writers conduct interviews with any candidate, because inevitably, some would've been interested and available to talk, while others wouldn't have.
