How to tell if you have an information or accountability problem
Happy Election Day! A thank you to all the local reporters working to make sure residents feel equipped to vote for their values and preferences. If I never see another headline about the New Jersey governor's race, especially because I don't live in New Jersey, it will be too soon.
Election info myth busting
News organizations looking to equip voters with facts before elections have an increasingly difficult job. Northwestern researchers tracked the smart phone use of a few thousand people in the two months before the 2024 presidential election. They counted how often keywords related to voting or elections appeared across all applications—including email, messaging, social media, news, music and video, and browser apps, and for how long. The results were, “Only about one in five participants viewed election content for over a minute daily.” Researchers believe user preference drove this effect more than how apps structured information feeds. Traditional voter guides are not going to cut it! Influencers, quizzes and entertainment crossovers are likely to continue to be key to getting information to voters.
But get ready for resistance. A recent Stanford study found partisan bias may be hardening across the political spectrum, educational levels, and levels of news consumption. “We were a bit surprised to see how widespread this tendency was,” the researchers said. “People were engaging in a lot of resistance to inconvenient truths.” Even highly educated frequent news consumers were likely to believe false information if it confirmed their political beliefs.
Where we are
Back to the theory. What are the theortical underpinnings our election reporting, investigations and community updates lack and suffer from? Is there some kind of hueristic sinkhole detouring even well-intentioned reporting away from meaning and impact? I continue to feel more confident it is our assumptions about purpose and impact that no longer serve our communities. We can begin to fix this with:
- a functional and broadly applicable definition of the public interest (a collaborative project currently cooking away)
- A set of essential functions of news to replace outdated and self-serving “news values”
Essential functions: accountability
If you have objections or thoughts about record creation, record correction, and addressing information needs, I want to hear them at sarah@understated.blog.
I've come clean about believing the most essential news function is filling information needs, but that is not my favorite work to do. I love accountability reporting. Reporting that creates accountability is as essential as reporting that fills information gaps, but harder to engineer. It is also expensive and time-intensive.
My preference for info needs work is tactical. It's a decision I wish more newsrooms made when resources are scarce or needs are great. Info needs work will never be enough, though. A newsroom that can't use its work to create accountability might as well be a government department. Or a newsletter.
But essential functions work is hard! Accountability reporting that doesn't change conditions is not accountability reporting. It's slow and costly record creation.
I have been there. It hurts.
Most of my reporting on utilities, in retrospect, was resource-intensive record creation. It did not help change conditions.
Creating impact with accountability reporting will always be improbable, even with solid skills, planning, and theory. This kind of reporting should attempt to meet a true need and reduce real harm. That is a tall order for a collection of verified information, testimony and narrative.
I have a lot more clarity on how I made the success of some of my most ambitious reporting projects on the cost of utilities less likely now that I've left the newsroom. My conclusions are reflected here in the questions I've come up with to increase the chances of accountability reporting becoming more essential. Overall, I failed to assess whether I was uncovering new information problems or new accountability problems as I went through the reporting process.
I'm alternating examples of some reporting missteps with the questions I now believe would have helped me distinguish information problems from accountability gaps. If you use different guiding questions, please share them with me (for attribution).
Distinguishing information gaps from accountability gaps
Here's what I knew several years ago at the beginning of this particular reporting challenge: Detroiters looked for assistance in avoiding electric service shut-off in numbers second only to those needing more affordable housing. It was common for Detroiters monthly utility bills to cost upward of $300 a month during particularly hot or cold months. DTE Energy has monopoly control of the Detroit utility market. Every year, government and charitable assistance for paying electric bills was available but never came close to meeting the need before running out.
Is your community confronting a challenge that filling information gaps around the issue, even at scale, cannot change?
I knew to ask myself this question. I asked myself if there was information I could text to Detroiters that might allow them to change the price of electricity or the amount of assistance and came up empty. Overall, this was not an information problem, so I worked with ProPublica on an investigative accountability project.
Several great reporters from ProPublica and I confirmed the high cost of electricity and shut-offs cause significant harm and hardship for tens of thousands of Detroiters every single year.
Is the target problem causing harm in the community, according to a harm matrix or other decision-making tool that takes need and severity into account?
At that point I didn't have a formal harm matrix, but I did this kind of assessment. Where I went wrong was using the harm assessment to determine only whether the reporting should go forward but not to inform what kind of reporting might address the harm. This was a mistake. I kept reporting.
I spent months trying to understand how utility rate-making works. I learned DTE charges Detroiters some of the highest prices in the country for electricity.
Is there widespread awareness about the causes and effects of the harm and yet, conditions haven't changed?
The answer to this was no.
I had encountered an information discrepancy, not necessarily an accountability gap. I treated it like an accountability gap and kept reporting.
We learned DTE had more punitive policies around shut-offs for nonpayment than the state's second largest utility and that the number of shut-offs appeared to be higher than other utilities across the country, although comparison was difficult.
Could creating a journalistic record of the cause of the target problem or harm it causes activate the natural accountability mechanisms in the community?
I didn't even think to ask myself this question. A short, punchy story and text message strategy about the difference between DTE and other utility providers would have been appropriate at this point. I should have waited to see if that reporting would kickstart calls for accountability from residents or advocates. Instead I kept reporting.
I learned regulators have the power to require DTE to be more transparent about which communities are most impacted by shut-offs, but they don't use that power.
Does preliminary reporting suggest there are one, or more, powerful interests actively resisting change or an increase in accountability?
Asking myself this question here would have been helpful. I had learned about a very specific accountability gap, and perhaps a more approachable one. I could have clarified for Detroiters that a roadblock to them getting the information they need to judge DTE's behavior is a lack of action by state regulators. But I kept reporting.
I learned public officials can require DTE to take the affordability of their service into account when setting rates, but they don't.
Are officials or institutions responsible for responding to community needs being more responsive to powerful interests than to harm being caused?
Asking myself this question again might have led me to publish a specific story about the lack of action by state legislators on affordability. Instead I kept reporting and folded this finding (along with all these others!) into a very long and complicated story. The accountability gap was specific, but my reporting was broad.
During my reporting process, a reporter at the Detroit News reported on charitable and political donations by DTE. The reporting drew a connection between these donations and suppressed advocacy around the price of electricity.
Are there one or more possible and clear pathways or mechanisms to a change that could increase accountability?
I should have asked myself if this possible regulatory capture meant this pathway to accountability was unlikely and how I might have presented that information to Detroiters and a wider audience.
With these questions as guideposts I would have changed the sequencing of my reporting, reported out different questions with different levels of intensity, asked myself and my editor different questions and looked for additional partners. I hope this kind of interrogation might be useful and am eager to use it myself on whatever my next reporting project might be.
Take care of yourself until next time. I will miss next week because of some travel and family obligations. Send me your feedback and reading recommendations.