You already know what you’re going to get from the news media in 2024. If you’re a radio talk host or a reporter or (heaven forbid) a cable news pundit, you know — pretty much — what you’re going to be doing, even if the details aren’t quite formed yet.
You will, despite endless entreaties from people like me, treat the entire year as a horse race, analyzing polls, and each twist and turn of the news with “What does this mean for (insert name of candidate here)?”
You will do this, no matter how you feel about it, and you will be criticized for it, and nothing I say here will change that. It’s unavoidable, and since we’ve trained generations to expect it and to treat election years like the Super Bowl and root for their team, you really have to do it to some extent.
But you don’t have to do it the same way everyone else does it, and if you’re a local talker, reporter, or columnist, you have a great option. It’s a variant of the old “All politics is local” trope: just explain to your audience what, in every election story, it will mean to them, on a local, individual basis. Bring everything down to how it affects the listener, viewer, or reader, and make it specific to your own area.
Doing this will make the big issues less abstract, less theoretical, less doesn’t-matter-to-me to the people you’re trying to reach. You can boil economy stories down to pocketbook level, job stories to whether your local area is benefiting, democracy issues – hard to believe we’re debating whether to preserve democracy, but here we are – to whether, and how, your state is interfering with voting rights.
You can talk about whether your representatives have been successful in bringing jobs and grants to your districts, or whether they’ve gotten mired in the performative aspects of Congress. People glaze over when you report on the economy until you talk about what it means at the grocery store and gas pump, or the rent, or their taxes, and those vary by state, county, and even city. (Example: Gas prices have plummeted, but whereas it’s no longer an issue in places where the price is low, it’s still higher than comfortable in, say, California, so the discussion is different depending on where you are.)
There are myriad ways of taking pretty much any political issue and focusing on aspects that are germane to your audience’s everyday lives. Candidates go to primary states to make a show of caring about what Iowans and New Hampshire voters need, and then forget it the moment the primaries are over. You, on the other hand, aren’t moving on to the next state. You’re still there, in the community. You can keep the focus on what matters to your audience. You can leave the national perspective to the national media.
That, after all, is your strategic advantage in competing with the national press, your ability to focus on the local angle. Besides, whenever the national reporters deign to look at anything local, they end up just interviewing randos at diners, and you can do a lot better than that. (If you do talk radio, your callers are randos, but at least they’re your randos.)
If you are indeed a local news person, let that be your 2024 resolution. Aspire to do better than reporting the horse race. And if you’re in the national news business, try to do the same. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
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On a personal note, looking back at 2023, I’m just happy to have made it to the end of the year. (Assuming, that is, that I make it through the next few days. Can’t be certain about anything these days.) I’m grateful to Jason Barrett for giving me a great platform to continue this column, and I’m looking forward to annoying everyone every week in 2024 and pursuing new creative opportunities, whatever they may be.
If there are topics about which you’d like me to bloviate, or projects for which I might be a good fit, you can reach me at perrysimon@gmail.com.
Oh, yeah. Happy New Year. This one oughta be interesting.
Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
