Trust Tip 55: Use a survey to solicit questions and feedback

Published on March 3, 2020 by Mollie Muchna | Reading Time: < 1 minute

Do you know what questions your audience has about your news organization? We bet if you looked at your comments, listened to user voicemails, or read through emails, you’d see a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about how you do what you do. Even if your audience is made up of super savvy news consumers, chances are they don’t always understand why you talked to one source and not another, why you follow up on some stories but not others, and even more basic … if you care about things like fairness and accuracy. We as journalists often forget that our processes are invisible to our audience unless we make them public. We say this often at Trusting News, but in the absence of explanations, our audiences typically make negative assumptions about our motives and processes. We saw this after a Trusting News partner organization recently conducted an audience survey. While the survey responses (from thousands of readers) revealed public misunderstandings and frustrations with the paper, they also shed light on how readers were genuinely curious about how the newsroom functions. More from this edition can be found here and to receive the tips in your inbox each week click here.

Mollie Muchna

mollie@trustingnews.org | + posts

Project manager Mollie Muchna (she/her) has spent the last 10 years working in audience and engagement journalism in local newsrooms across the Southwest. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is also an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism. She can be reached at mollie@trustingnews.org and on Twitter @molliemuchna.