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Congratulations to Face the Facts USA

Tom Glaisyer

April 1, 2013

One of our grantees Face the Facts USA has just wrapped up its daily facts. Check out the infographic below to get a sense for what they have accomplished so far.

In just eight months, the Face the Facts team found creative ways to educate the public about 204 facts that are at the center of political discussion. They covered everything from our nation’s debt to the state of our infrastructure and education system. Face the Facts also hosted a wide array of different types of forums to give people a chance to engage with the information more deeply, including Google Hang Outs, interactive cable television events, and one-on-one discussions. The facts were disseminated on 70 radio stations, 75 news web sites and cable channels, and in over 400 McClatchy Tribune publications. The Face the Facts team talks about what they hope they have accomplished so far on this brief video. Congratulations to everyone involved!

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Our Approach to supporting an Informed Electorate

Tom Glaisyer

March 22, 2013

Previously in this space, Joe introduced our grantees working on making the political system more responsive and fostering bipartisan problem solving. In this post I’d like to talk about some of the initial grants we have made towards creating a more informed electorate, a number of which also support our other objectives. Government “by the people” depends on voters having the information and skills needed to govern. Media must combat misinformation, expose voters to different points of view, and inform the public debate. New technology must provide the public with better access to information and better filters for making sense of the news. Our education system must equip citizens with the skills required to decipher the messages they hear from political leaders and through the media. In order to begin to develop our approach in this area, the Democracy Fund has supported research along with a small number of other projects to create a more informed electorate. The research we have supported through the New America Foundation has focused on how the media can correct misinformation and hold political leaders accountable for what they say. Additionally, the New America Foundation research has experimented with how media can expose people to alternative points of view and increase the civility of public engagement online. Parallel to this research, we have supported the following projects:

Blogginghead.tv’s Good Fight project, cultivates respectful dialogue across ideological divides by inviting prominent journalists and intellectuals to take part in civil dialogues and places the videos of these dialogues on the websites of partisan media outlets. The objective of the Good Fight is to break people out of ‘echo chambers’ and to model civil discourse. We have just passed the mid-way point in this grant and are learning a lot about the different ways audiences respond to such dialogues.
CJR’s United States Project (formerly the Swing States Project) helps local reporters do a better job covering politics and policy. During the 2012 campaign, CJR placed media critics in key states across the country to encourage local media to improve their coverage of the campaigns. Now that the election is over, they have added national correspondents to the team. This work has been well received by the community of political journalists and editors across the country and the external assessment we have commissioned indicates that it has encouraged journalists to improve how they cover issues.
Face the Facts, a collaboration between GW University and America Speaks, has sought to insert exhaustively researched and vetted facts into the national conversation through partnerships with online media outlets, radio, and television stations. This has been supported by a set of public engagement tools (quizzes and dialogue tools) to engage the audience more deeply. While the integration of public engagement practices, online technology, and broadcast television is at a relatively early stage we expect to learn a lot from this project about how to incorporate such innovations into our future work.
Flackcheck, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, has sought to identify deceptive and misleading advertising, while supporting television stations and others to counter these deceptions. Among other things, Flackcheck has produced parody videos to raise public awareness about the types of deceptions that are taking place. It has also worked directly with local stations to encourage them to reject deceptive 3rd party ads. In parallel, Flackcheck has provided guidance to stations to support news reporting that educates viewers about deceptions within ads that are being broadcast.
The Healthy Democracy Fund has developed an innovative reform to ensure that voters can make more informed choices about ballot measures. The Citizens Initiative Review convenes random groups of citizens to deliberate about ballot measures and share their assessments with voters via the official state voter guide. To learn more, you can read a recent blog post by Professor John Gastil that describes his evaluation of the Citizens Initiative Review.

We expect to extend the number of people and organizations with which we work to address opportunities to increase the diversity of viewpoints to which the public is exposed as well as foster more sustainable and effective journalistic institutions. Additionally, the Democracy Fund will continue to seek out new innovations in technology and media.

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Guest Post: The Engaging News Project

Talia Stroud

February 11, 2013

It is relatively easy to paint a depressing portrait of citizens’ news media use. Fed up with politics and tempted by the lure of more entertaining media, some tune out of politics and public affairs altogether. Others, driven by partisan proclivities, look to news sources that present agreeable views of the world. And facing more intense competition, news organizations struggle to advance both their journalistic and business missions. With these challenges, however, come opportunities. Are there more compelling ways to present news that might attract unengaged citizens? Are there ways to bridge partisan divides when presenting the news? Even more, can the news help people to approach other views with the same charity that they display when approaching views with which they agree? And can all this be done while advancing the bottom line? Answering these questions is the aim of my current research, the Engaging News Project. The goal of the Engaging News Project is to provide practical, research-based techniques for engaging online audiences in commercially-viable and democratically-beneficial ways. To this end, the project tests web-based strategies for informing audiences, promoting civil discourse, and helping citizens to understand diverse views. Systematic testing provides valuable information about what works, as well as what doesn’t. And by advancing both journalistic and business goals, the techniques are designed with contemporary newsrooms in mind. The Engaging News Project exists thanks to a grant from the Democracy Fund through our partners at the New America Foundation. The approach is not a complete overhaul of the news. Many contemporary practices have great merit. Today’s online newsrooms already engage in practices that assist citizens with finding relevant news content, such as providing hyperlinks to accompany news articles. Furthermore, there are numerous opportunities for citizens to interact on news sites, such as by participating in online polls or sharing news content via social media. Site visitors also are offered a forum to visit with others in comment sections. By building on these existing practices, the Engaging News Project represents a practical, research-based way to re-envision how news is presented. Here are four ways in which our project is working to advance these goals.

Links. Hyperlinks are standard fare on news websites. By connecting people to more information, hyperlinks can help news site visitors to find more information and to learn more about important issues facing their communities. And from a business perspective, hyperlinks can improve site stickiness. What affects whether a person clicks on a link? Certainly the topic matters, as does the placement of a link on a page. But the prompts and headers that introduce people to hyperlinks also can have an effect. Labeling a set of links as “Most Popular,” for instance, can encourage people to click on the links to see what others are viewing. In our project, we analyze the effects of different prompts appearing before a set of hyperlinks. Drawing from popular theories about news seeking, we are testing whether a host of different prompts such as “Thanks for keeping up with the news. Be proud of protecting your democracy” affect citizens’ appetite for hard news content and news about different viewpoints.

Buttons. “Like.” Not only is it an indelible component of casual sentence structure, the term also governs how we respond to everything from news articles to comments from our closest friends on Facebook. The term structures responses to online content. A heartwarming story about a local hero? “Like!” But “Like” doesn’t always seem appropriate. An article on a tragic event? It’s hard to hit “Like” in response. A fair-minded, but counter-attitudinal, post in a comment section? It’s challenging to press “Like.” What if news stations used other buttons? What if, instead of “Like,” one could click “Respect”? We are analyzing how different buttons affect citizens’ responses to comments from an online comment section. We want to know whether some buttons – and the concepts they convey – allow commenters to express their appreciation for counter-attitudinal postings more than others.

Polls and Quizzes. Check out the local news websites in your area. Chances are that at least one of them will have a poll on their site. Chances also are good that the poll will not enrich your understanding of the world. It may ask you about entertainment (who wore the best dress at the Golden Globes?). Even if the poll is about an important issue (e.g. do you favor or oppose increased gun control?), the results offer no more insight than surveying a few friends about their thoughts on the issue. Online polls are interesting, and possibly entertaining, but rarely are they helpful for learning about your community. We test whether polls can be presented as quizzes that both engage and inform citizens. How many people do you think believe that gun control should be strengthened in the country? What percentage of the federal budget is dedicated to social security? These questions have answers. The first is based on public opinion data gathered using rigorous methodologies and the second comes from the Congressional Budget Office. We analyze whether different poll formats containing substantive news content can promote poll participation and learning.

Online Discourse. I asked my undergraduate students in “Communication and Public Opinion” what they expected to find in the comment sections below news articles. Their answers? Some were optimistic: diverse views, responses to the news content, and deeper thinking about the topic. But others had quite pessimistic reactions: argument, incivility, discussion dominated by a few voices. Who is right? Our project analyzes the content of online comment sections. Are there some topics that inspire more engagement? What about more civility? As part of the Engaging News Project, we ask whether we can improve the quality of comment sections. If citizens are given a question to answer in the comment section, are they more likely to get involved? And if a reporter engages in the comment section, does this change the substance of the conversation? The analysis will allow us to provide insights about how citizens engage in news comment sections.

These four research projects are designed to advance our understanding of how to create news environments that support substantive engagement with political information and with other citizens. They aim to help news outlets excel at both their journalistic goals and their business endeavors. As we finalize the results in the coming months, we look forward to sharing our findings. We hope that they will provide valuable information to newsrooms and that they will spark more research and innovation in how news can be presented in new, and engaging, formats.