Speed, with care: Finding agency and hope in the news
Looking for light means keeping humanity in focus while unflinchingly covering the news. The pace at which news happens, and the noisiness that follows, calls for a special approach. Our managing editor explains.
What does it mean for a news outlet to be daily, but also different?
At the Monitor, it’s about fairness and a search for deeper meaning – the “why” of every story.
“You can find out very quickly, including from us, what happened,” says Amelia Newcomb, the Monitor’s managing editor. “But you also want to be able to talk about it. ... And if you don’t have that sense of ‘What’s behind this?’ or ‘Why?’ the conversation might be kind of short.”
Practically speaking, that means thinking deeply about how to respond to events, Amelia says on the Monitor’s “Why We Wrote This” podcast.
After the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, for example, that meant dispatching a writer to report firsthand on the courage and resilience of those affected. After that, it meant delivering an array of deeper stories.
“We had all these angles that we hope will give readers agency of their own to think about the story, but also to think about: ‘What can I do?’ And that’s what we hope will bring more light than heat to the subject.”
Approaching a story from the point of view of agency, or the values that are driving people, Amelia says, is a core service to readers. “No matter where you are in the world, you can connect with that.”
Episode transcript
Clay Collins: The Christian Science Monitor was founded as a daily newspaper, a broadsheet, in 1908. Dailiness was part of our founder’s charge, and daily delivery of news has continued to this day in different formats. Real time coverage of world news has of course become the work of a great and growing number of media organizations. And increasingly, the Monitor has worked to establish a niche that serves both the object of the Monitor – “To injure no man, but to bless all mankind” – and that also fulfills subscribers’ needs as a valuable supplement to – sometimes even a balm for – the torrent of information that’s on offer.
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Collins: Welcome to Why We Wrote This. I’m Clay Collins.
Amelia Newcomb, the Monitor’s managing editor, joins us this week to talk about the balance required to stay current and newsy, and also take a defined and distinctive approach, one that universalizes news by focusing on what stories are really about: the values that undergird them.
Welcome Amelia!
Amelia Newcomb: Hi. It’s nice to be here.
Collins: So the Monitor has a long history of taking a kind of second-day-analysis approach, in part dating back to when delivery by mail from a small number of printing plants made it hard to serve a national audience quickly. But also because that kind of responsive, not reactive, slow news approach is generally just a fit for us, right?
Newcomb: Yeah. It’s a really good way to look at the news. Because, especially in this saturated market that we have, you have headlines coming at you all the time. You can find out very quickly, including from us, about what happened. But you also want to be able to talk about it with your colleagues or your neighbor or your family. And if you don’t have that sense of “what’s behind this?” or “why?” the conversation might be kind of short, or else it leaves you in a place where you’re just, in the case, say, of a tragic event or a violent event, you’re just lamenting the headlines, and you can’t go beyond that very much.
Collins: Our main daily product has late-day deadlines on the U.S. East Coast, and then it can go right out to inboxes. But we’re small, and we’re not really resourced to cover the waterfront. When news breaks – a natural disaster, an invasion, a major political event – when does that mean ceding the ground initially to wire services and to others who are purpose-built to handle that sort of thing?
Newcomb: So we will look for a wire service, say, from the Associated Press or from Reuters. We look for one that gives you the facts, but often does it in a way that maybe is a little bit more Monitor-like, [so] that it’s not scaring you unnecessarily or being so graphic that you want to turn away. We will put that up very quickly. But at the same time, we are starting in on our own story that might be for the next day, and we’re mobilizing our writers to get to the scene if that’s called for.
Collins: We don’t like to wade into a story until we feel we can add to the conversation, and that means having certain kinds of in-house conversations to find angles. Can you talk us through an example or two of those?
Newcomb: Yeah. The name of this podcast [hints at] where we really start, which is: “Why are we writing this?” We’re writing it to try to bring light. If it’s a violent situation or a dangerous one, like an earthquake or a school shooting, there’s obviously a lot of devastation and so forth. But then there are those people who immediately are asking: “What can I do? How can I help? How can I comfort you?” So those are the things we start to focus on.
And those conversations really focus on humanity. So, for example, if you think back last year to the Uvalde shooting tragedy in Texas, where a gunman attacked a school…. Immediately our Texas-based correspondent was on the way. His first story, which was the next day, was about looking for courage. And I think we all know how much courage is needed by the parents, by the other children, law enforcement, at all levels. So we want to get to our own story right away.
But then we had another discussion. We have a daily subscription package with five stories in it. We decided we should throw the entire package over to looking at Uvalde. By Friday, we had a package that looked at a variety of angles. They included the history of these kinds of things. Then we looked at red-flag laws, which are a form of modest gun control. We looked at the Sandy Hook Promise, which is very much in our wheelhouse, in the sense that they say that school shootings don’t have to be inevitable. Our headline for our last story was: “Who’s responsible for preventing school shootings? ‘We’re all on duty.’”
Collins: Hmm.
Newcomb: We had all these angles that we hope will give readers agency of their own to think about the story, but also to think about: “What can I do?” And that’s what we hope will bring more light than heat to the subject.
Collins: Also, when we were talking off mic, you mentioned an international example of this kind of response.
Newcomb: Yeah. Our coverage of the massive demonstrations in Israel at the moment, over judicial reform, which many Israelis see as anti-democratic. That’s been a story that’s been building over time, and we have covered it. But then there’s a point where the passion and participation of people moved up a significant notch. And that was the moment to check in with readers and say, you may have been hearing the stories going on, but you really need to pay attention now, because people are engaging in a deeper, more fundamental way that goes to the character of their democratic society. And that played out in a very effective story by Danna Harman.
Collins: Our audience research has shown that we have readers in two general groups: We have readers who kind of want the news pretty quickly and with enough context to let them decide what to think. And we have readers who really want to connect to the people in stories. They want to read about efforts to heal divisions and find solutions. How hard is it to serve both kinds of readers and serve them well?
Newcomb: I think you can serve both readers well. Again, if you have this combination, say, of wire stories first, so people who are really wanting to jump right on the news have access to that. But then we also really do want to connect people to other people. When you approach a story from that point of view of agency or the values that are driving people to run into danger, to volunteer their services. No matter where you are in the world, you can connect with that. So I think a combination is really important. We don’t wanna lean too much to one side or too much to the other.
Collins: Can you say a little more about how Monitor distinction comes into play as these stories play out?
Newcomb: A priority of ours is really to keep coming back. We like to show up even after the story has left the headlines. I have a few examples of this that I think have meant a lot to me and to other people as well. Our reporter Sarah Miller Llana covered hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas. The hurricane took place in August 2019, and Sarah went three months later. And as she said, our reporter and our photographer were the only reporters there. But people are still living with this. They’re still having to rebuild. And we went back to see how they’re doing.
Another example is the massive earthquake that happened in Turkey early in February. We did have local writers who covered it in the immediate aftermath, and we also had people writing from a distance. But our reporters are also planning to go back. It’s often the case that the world’s headlines turn toward something else, and we want to stay on the story as I’m sure others do too. But this is a priority for us. How are people coping day-to-day in the aftermath? Who’s still helping? The long throw of these stories often teaches us important lessons. And that can inform rapid response for future events. And it is really important to remind the world that progress has been made. And that’s what we do.
Collins: Well, thank you Amelia, for explaining how you approach news coverage, and for doing the thinking that it requires.
Newcomb: You’re welcome. Fun to talk about it.
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Collins: Thanks for listening. You can find more including our show notes, with links to the stories discussed here at csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Jeff Turton and Alyssa Britton were our engineers. Our original music is by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.
