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Trust Tips: Help people zoom out during hectic news weeks
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News of TikTok going offline, and then online again filled a lot of breaking news headlines last week.
As did news about Trump’s inauguration, executive orders, presidential pardons, lawsuits, LA fires, a ceasefire deal … a lot is happening in the world. People are, of course, overwhelmed.
This past week I’ve had multiple friends and family members reach out asking how to stay caught up with the news without feeling like they constantly have to be tuned in. Unfortunately, news coverage often doesn’t make it feel easy for people to get caught up on complex issues or understand the larger implications of what’s happening.
With a new administration and lots of what feels like *super important* and *super urgent* updates happening, we want to continually be asking ourselves how our coverage can help people feel more grounded and less overwhelmed.
Below we’re sharing a few suggestions from our team of how journalists can help their audience zoom out . Is your newsroom thinking or working on this? We’d love to hear more about what you’re doing. Let us know by replying to this email.
1. Give context for what’s happening
Journalists play an important role in helping their audience unpack complex issues, connect the dots, and present a comprehensive view of what’s happening. But often this context can get missed or is buried in stories. Think about how you can help your audience zoom out and understand the larger picture.
Here’s one example: Occasionally, The New York Times creates a helpful roundup of data points and charts that give a general sense of how the economy is doing. We’d love to see something like this be updated more regularly to help people understand the larger context. For local journalists, this might look like creating an FAQ about complex topics you cover often or helping add a local lens to big national news that’s happening.
2. Don’t overuse superlative language
There were a lot of headlines last week using words like historic, all-time, once-in-a-lifetime. These descriptors weren’t necessarily inaccurate — some things Trump did were, indeed, historic. And recently there have been once-in-a-lifetime weather events or natural disasters. But even when these labels are technically accurate, this superlative language can get tiring and makes everything feel urgent, lessening the impact. Instead, can we get more specific and helpful? Can we provide context to explain what’s normal, what’s abnormal, and share the gravity of news happening without spiking people’s anxiety?
With the help help of partner journalists, we gathered feedback from different audiences and created a list of potentially polarizing words and phrases journalists be cautious with or altogether avoid, especially when covering politics or elections. Check out the list here.
3. Provide quick highlights or summaries
Know your audience — overall and for different platforms or products. Do they want to know every small decision about a city council debate or local school board lawsuit? Sure, some people will. But a lot of people just want a quick overview of what’s happening. The TikTok saga is a great example of that. Some people were closely following the dramatic updates while lots of folks were vaguely aware of what was happening and didn’t care about the play-by-play or the analysis and context. They just wanted to know why their app wasn’t working.
Providing quick summaries can be a helpful way to do this. That can look like sharing bullet point summaries on social media, at the top of articles, or sharing a quick social video catching people up. (This is a strength of creator journalism.) Some other great examples we’ve shared before — the Christian Science Monitor offers a “quick-read” and “deep-read” option, and Le Temps has summary boxes that run alongside stories that help give users quick context.
4. Make it easy to understand why certain news matters
When we worked with journalists to interview news avoiders, people reported that they filtered news based on the topics they found valuable and relevant to their lives. They were willing to (and said that they did) engage with news that resonated with them and impacted their daily lives.
With so much news happening, we need to make it easy for people to connect the dots and understand how news impacts their daily life, whether that’s explaining how a national law might affect their fundamental rights, or how a new road tax will impact their commute. Whatever it may be, make the connection obvious so people can understand why they should care.
One last note: Remind people it’s OK to take news breaks
As Sarah Alveraz, founder of Detroit’s Outlier Media, said last week in an interview with Dick Toful for his Second Draft newsletter: “We have a terrible habit as journalists and as the press of still trying to do agenda-setting when what we should be doing is responding to people’s information needs.”
As journalists, our job isn’t to just provide information, it’s to meet our communities’ information needs. And these two things can be different at times. Yes, sometimes meeting the need means digging into complex reporting, but sometimes it means helping audiences prioritize content and not get overwhelmed.
When the pace of news feels exhausting, let’s remember to extend some empathy to our audience. Let’s remind them that it’s OK (and healthy!) to take breaks from the news and even fully step away at times. And then, if you can, offer them easy ways to plug back in and get caught up on coverage when they’re ready.
We shared a few ideas for how journalists can do that on our LinkedIn page last week. Check it out, and find even more resources in our News Literacy Trust Kit.
While we’re at it, we’d like to remind YOU, dear journalist, that you also can take breaks from the news. You can unplug and step away. We hope you’ll find that the benefits of doing so outweigh any drawbacks.
At Trusting News, we learn how people decide what news to trust and turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We train and empower journalists to take responsibility for demonstrating credibility and actively earning trust through transparency and engagement. Learn more about our work, vision and team. Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter. Follow us on Twitter, BlueSky and LinkedIn.
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.
