1/1/2023 0 Comments Christian science monityWhen Ingwerson spoke about the need to understand white working-class Trump voters in the center of the country, I asked him whether a mission to provide more “perspective” placed the burden of understanding on progressive readers while ignoring some of the racism and hatred that marked the election, or insisting on seeing bigotry in a “balanced” way. That’s okay those people may not be that interested in what we’re doing.” Those people are not so interested in seeing or understanding where the other side is coming from. “On the extremes, there are people who feel very clear about who the enemy is. “From either side of center, there’s an openness and desire” for a news product like this. Monitor readers are “all over the map politically,” according to Ingwerson. That goal is “not alien to our reporters.” Still, it takes a certain amount of practice to write stories that “show a clear shift in perspective - either the story shifts perspective, or it shows someone shifting perspective.” Over the past couple of years, Monitor management has stressed “the need to hear the voices of others and try to bridge divides” in all its stories, Ingwerson said. “Our content engine isn’t yet producing this core content as its primary output,” Collins said, and that shift takes buy-in, time, and training - first at the editor level, and editors must then transmit it to their writers. Such relentless consistency is difficult - both in the context of this beta and, more broadly, in the newsroom. “That purpose needs to be infused in every intro, every headline, every graphic.” “Clarity of purpose” for each story is essential, said Clayton Collins, the Monitor’s weekly edition editor. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITY FULLRespondents also said they liked the format of the project, which presents each story in capsule form, with an editor intro and a lede that can be expanded to get the full text. Respondents “got that we were trying to give them a different perspective on the news, with the ultimate goal that they understand other people better and might ultimately find common ground with them,” Ingwerson said. The Monitor started out by testing its new product with a focus group of eight people, then sent it to thousands on November 16, 17, and 18, along with a survey link. “We want to look at the news in a way that has fact-based integrity, but creates a legitimate sense of possibility,” he said, “so that, as much as possible, it’s an empowering and not a depressing experience to read the news.” It’s important, Ingwerson said, not to throw readers into a pit of despair. Ingwerson believes that the Monitor’s digital future is built around shifting perspectives on current events, with a voice that is “calm and fact-based and fundamentally constructive, and assumes that our readers are looking to have a fundamentally constructive approach to the news.” Planning for the new project began long before November 8, but feels especially pressing in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The Monitor could try to pull in a larger web audience with clickbait-y content, “but we felt like we were becoming less ‘us’ the further we went with that.” Instead, the publication decided to “shift to a strategy where we could be more ‘us,’ less like everybody else, and win that way.” The Monitor’s executive team concluded that a daily, digital, subscription product was the way to go - but that, of course, is “something not too many people have succeeded at.” “We realized that, even though we were aggressively growing our revenue, it would never pay for the newsgathering operation.” The print magazine’s circulation is down to around 40,000, from about 60,000 in 2012. Web revenue and traffic climbed through 2012 - “then started topping out,” Ingwerson told me. April 20, 2011It’s been almost eight years since the Christian Science Monitor shut down its daily print edition and went web-first, with a weekly print magazine.
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