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There will be no useful information for like 12 hours today, so here’s a fun thing Vox Video has been up to! (thread)
In July @lizscheltens and I attended a program led by @BridgetThoreson on what @jayrosen_nyu calls the "Citizens Agenda" model of election coverage: Basically, ask your audience what issues are important to them, and cover those. We tried it out. (2/8)
Our most asked-for issue by far was climate change. But "Biden vs Trump on climate" isn't super useful, since only one candidate really had policies. So that freed us up to do a better story: What would phasing out fossil fuels actually look like? (3/8)
Making this voting rights video was sort of similar: If you start from a place of "the right to vote is good," as opposed to "this is a neutral issue with no real stakeholders," it’s a lot easier to more clearly say what’s going on / who’s doing it. (4/8)
"Why US public transit sucks" was the most popular of the whole series and I genuinely don't think we would have done it had we not asked viewers to tell us what to cover. (5/8)
We made 9 videos in total, worked on by basically our whole team. They are all really good! I genuinely think you will like them and what else are you doing today! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ8cMiYb3G5eKjlXtsOo6SDi2ZvcHQ69q (6/8)
In general the audience was super into the whole project. At times though, some commenters were confused about why it didn’t feel more “even-handed” in terms of treating the views of Biden and Trump as equally valid. (7/8)
So it’s definitely interesting that if you evaluate policy on behalf of your audience's honest concerns, instead of as a sort of tactical "which side has the better strategy" story, you don't always end up sounding the way many people feel the news is supposed to! (8/8)
