The journalism element WHO-TV focused on:  Making Important News Interesting.

[1]

WHO-TV reporter Dave Price was involved prominently in the station's participation in the New Media Enduring Values (NMEV) project.

Dave Price

Making Important News Interesting: WHO-TV [2], Des Moines, Iowa This innovative television station worked to enrich its coverage of the important Iowa presidential caucuses with creative Web features that bring new participants into the political process.

What WHO did:

WHO-TV developed a Web presence outside of its current station Web site at IowaVotes2008.com [3]. The launch of a new Web address and demand for greater functionality required using a new content-management system – an open-source product known as Joomla [4]. The key to this project’s success was creating a system that integrated with the station’s current video-to-Web processes while remaining simple enough that anyone in the newsroom could post content. The result: Users accessed more than 60,000 page views of its home page since the March launch.

The site used many Web-specific features to make the significant interesting and relevant. The station developed “Making the Grade [5],” integrating traditional broadcast stories with deeper Web content. Six undecided voters – from a variety of backgrounds and political affiliations – served as a focus group to grade answers to a specific question on Iraq, without revealing which candidate had made the statement. It proved to be one of the site’s most popular features.

WHO-TV’s Dream Team [6] feature, in which users pick their ideal ticket combinations, puts the online-poll concept on steroids. The poll is dynamic, changing as users not satisfied with the existing choices add their own tickets to the mix. Though some tickets are obviously tongue-in-cheek, the poll introduces visitors to lesser-known candidates whose information is available on the site. And people are connecting: Among the top 10 most viewed pages on the site, the Dream Team had the longest time spent on the page.

One WHO-TV reporter put it this way: “It’s making people have fun while they eat their broccoli.”

CCJ's Bill Kovach on Making Important Stories Interesting:

There is considerable evidence that we humans don't like to think. Brain patterns of a person who was thinking hard duplicate those of subjects asked to thrust their hands in buckets of ice water; suggesting that to your brain thinking hard is the same as considering physical pain.

The first journalists seem to have intuited this for they early adapted the element of engagement to overcome the reluctance to think hard about civic matters.

In 1732 the highly political Gentleman’s Quarterly engaged the public imagination of London with strange stories of something called, “vampyres,” bats that fed on human blood and terrorized villages in Eastern Europe. The shocking nature of stories of the “vampyre plague” captured public attention with a metaphor---“vampyre”---that allowed the editors to challenge government indirectly and avoid censorship while organizing a political opposition that could challenge the established order.

Modern scholars have concluded that this new press “…for the first time established as a genuinely critical organ of a public engaged in critical political debate: as the fourth estate.”

[top] [7]