Where was the coverage?

Last month, Primary Day came and went here in New York. There were a series of consequential races across the state. But, as the dust settled, I heard a familiar refrain: “Where was the coverage?”

For years, when I was an editor covering races, talking with elected officials and candidates alike, doing the work people used to call journalism, I heard the same question. It was fascinating. No matter how much was done, it was never enough. But this isn’t a column about people being ungrateful for the coverage that existed. It’s about the political and media environment we have created, locally and nationally. It also reminded me of what ultimately led to my exit from day-to-day coverage and reporting at FingerLakes1.com.

During the 2021 local election cycle, and in the year that followed, I was able to work on reporting projects of my own choosing. I was not tied to the daily grind of beat reporting in the same way because others had taken on that task. As that election cycle came to an end, I remember thinking, “I can’t wait until 2023. I’m going to cover these elections like nothing else.” I already knew many of the county boards we covered were going to see significant turnover in 2023 because of how terms lined up.

So, I spent a lot of 2022 doing the groundwork. I wrote about the people who were emerging as candidates, the issues that were likely to shape elections the following year, and the communities that would ultimately be making those choices. I’ll be the first to admit that my writing style, past and present, is a little deadpan. When I was a young reporter, my influences were largely old-school reporters who just delivered facts. Did that make for the most exciting writing? Probably not, but that meant there was literally no room for editorializing — which readers told me in droves back then was a positive.

By the 2022-23 timeframe, my voice was established, appreciated and well-read across Upstate New York. For me, the articles were performing well. They were about town hall disputes, roads and sidewalks, local zoning rules, development fights and, of course, the occasional landfill article. They were thorough. They involved multiple perspectives. Readers sent countless emails saying they enjoyed them. The traffic showed that, compared with other political coverage we were producing at the time, the work was being received well. It was outperforming other stories about local government meetings.

There were two big caveats, though.

The first was time. These stories took much longer to produce. They involved hours, if not days, of interviews, follow-up questions and back-and-forth. Comparing them to a meeting story, where a person could show up, take notes and put together an all-encompassing piece, is difficult.

The second caveat was overall performance. These articles were outperforming similar government coverage, but they were still getting dwarfed by public safety stories.

And I’m not talking about coverage of complex court cases. I’m talking about run-of-the-mill police reports. There was nothing special about them, either. If anything, the in-depth political and government stories were often given more exposure on our homepage than police reports, traffic accidents or structure fires. Those election and government stories would routinely get shared to social media two or three times per run, at peak times, and sit on our homepage, which turns over multiple times per day, for two or three days at a time.

Meanwhile, a police report would get posted once, sometimes at an unusual time, and still draw tens of thousands more views.

It wasn’t really deflating because I was undertaking the effort out of personal interest. I wanted to write those stories. I wanted to talk to the people making decisions, running for office and shaping communities.

Fast forward to the following year, which I have affectionately referred to as my last hurrah.

It was election year, and I had spent a year — literally — building coverage to that point. Then I decided it was time to make it interactive.

In addition to filing dozens of stories, many of them more than 1,500 words, I launched a candidate series on a public affairs program I used to host. In a span of about 40 days, I interviewed 52 candidates for local office, giving each of them at least 30 minutes to talk about the issues, answer real questions and give the public an opportunity to learn about the races. It was in-depth. It was useful. And it was an undertaking.

When all of that concluded, I was drained. Between the reporting and on-camera work, I had to take a break. For a couple of weeks after the election, I caught up on the other work I had somewhat neglected in pursuit of that goal.

What happened in the days that followed was one of the bleaker things I have encountered in my career: Hundreds of emails, comments and social media messages asking, “Where was FingerLakes1’s coverage?”

The answer was: Literally everywhere.

People were reading the stories. People were watching and listening to the interviews. Plenty of people engaged with the work for me to feel satisfied about its reach. But remember what I said about comparing it with public safety coverage? Most people were not engaging with it. Thousands might engage with individual stories and interviews, but that was still a fraction of what the public consistently showed it wanted from local media.

All of that taught me two lessons that have fueled my work in community and media ever since. First, a lot of people do not care until it is over and the outcome is something they do not like. Our coverage was free and easy to read. Interviews had transcripts. Long stories had shorter versions. If there was a platform where the content could go, it was there.

Second, none of it was financially smart. We were not greeted by droves of local advertisers who suddenly wanted to support the thing they often say is part of the public good. Our longtime advertisers — God bless them — remained part of the stable. The new advertisers we picked up in the months that followed often did not even know the election coverage existed. There was not an outpouring of financial support from all the people I routinely see on social media talking about how important “real journalism” is.

A month later, when I was doing our year-end analysis and looking at the content we published and the dollars generated by it, the reality was simple: Over a two-year span, that work generated around 350,000 page views. The total revenue was a few thousand dollars. In fact, we carried far more financial risk than upside because political coverage alienates people. Some readers think it’s unfair. Some candidates think it’s imbalanced. Some officials think asking basic questions is an act of hostility. And heck, sometimes people who lose elections just don’t feel so great afterward — and have a negative connotation to the things associated with that period of their life.

So why tell this story? Because I think it is important context when people ask that familiar question of any newsroom: “Where is the coverage of __________?”

The answer is usually pretty simple. It’s exactly where readers, viewers and listeners have shown it lands with them personally — near the bottom of the list. Because it doesn’t matter the topic — primary elections are just a recent example. If you don’t see it — there probably isn’t the audience to justify it.

That’s not a moral judgment, either. It’s a market reality. People say they want local election coverage. Some of them really do. But broadly speaking, audiences don’t consume it with the same urgency or consistency as they consume crime, weather, accidents, controversy or outrage.

And no one is really incentivized to solve that problem. Not the politicians who benefit from a tuned-out electorate. Not the media companies that get grief for making the decisions they have to make to stay in business. And not even news consumers, who, in their defense, should not be bad-mouthed for declining to subject themselves to something they do not enjoy.

But we should at least be honest about what’s happening.

The coverage people say they want is often the coverage they ignore until it is too late. Then, when the result surprises, frustrates or offends them, the question comes back around: “Where was the coverage?”

Most of the time, it was right there. The harder truth is that almost nobody wanted it badly enough when it could still matter.

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