Explain the relevance of national issues (and invite people’s input)

Published on July 1, 2025July 1, 2025 by Joy Mayer | Reading Time: 3 minutes

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The bombardment of news updates from DC is exhausting for most of us — journalists included. Our team at Trusting News talks a lot about what the public really needs from journalists in this chaotic environment, across a wide range of people’s news appetites, demographics and interests.

Today, we’ll share a few ideas we hope you’ll copy and build on.

1. Ask your audience what they need

A few months ago, we wrote about ways to find out what your audience most wants from you when it comes to making national news more relevant. We invited you to use a survey we created (even to make a copy of it) to ask them directly for their input.

Huge thanks to Erica Smith of the Times Union and Allison Shirk of WEHCO Media, both representatives on our newsroom advisory committee, who shared their results with us! (Note: We ALWAYS appreciate knowing what you’re hearing from your communities, and we never share internal info publicly without permission.)

We were not surprised that for the basic question of how these two local newsrooms could be most useful, both audiences selected as the top choice: Explaining how the local community could be impacted.

We were ALSO not surprised, however, that the answers diverged after that. One community requested more solutions and actions people could take, and the other’s #2 and #3 were fact-checking and providing historical context. That reinforces the importance of getting to know YOUR audience rather than relying on generalizations and assumptions.

2. Make relevance and impact easy to understand

Most people do not know the details of the Big Beautiful Bill that’s before Congress this week. Heck, plenty of people couldn’t describe it in general terms and are definitely not following day by day (or minute by minute!) updates about the deliberations. But people will care how it affects them personally.

I love offerings like this one from The Washington Post, inviting readers to enter their own info and see if their financial picture would come out ahead or behind if the version of the bill that the House approved passes. Here’s how it was shared on Instagram, walking through some example situations. 

A second effort from the Post this week walked through how and why changes in the national debt affect average consumers. Here’s Jacob Bogage’s Instagram video, and here’s the story (with a menu on the right so people can click to the questions they care about). 

I’d love to see aggregated analytics data for headlines like “How X affects you” or “How X affects our community.” I’m guessing they’re universally popular. (Let me know if that’s true for your work!)

3. Share what you’re working on and invite input

ProPublica has a long history of deep crowdsourcing, and they routinely demonstrate the kind of nuanced reporting that is possible through responsible engagement and inviting input.

They have an invitation featured prominently on their home page these days. Under the headline “What We’re Watching,” they describe reporters’ beats and invite readers to get in touch. The reporters are featured in a carousel, and the last option is joining the federal worker source network.

This is so much better than the generic “contact us” form on so many sites, and it’s also a step above merely listing contact information in staff bios or taglines. You know what would be even better (but obviously more work)? If each reporter listed specific upcoming stories or topics they’d love to hear from folks on. 

What are you seeing from journalism that feels especially useful and relevant these days? And what are you trying in your own work? Let us know by replying to this email.