This week I’m winding up my role as public editor. I’m looking forward to my new role supervising watchdog and investigative coverage, but I have really enjoyed learning from you, our readers.
Many of you have a longstanding relationship with the newspaper and you are not shy about letting us know your high expectations for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. As we have talked in the newsroom about what to do with the public editor role, leaders here are very committed to continuing that conversation.
We’ve decided that in a reader-focused newsroom like ours, every newsroom leader needs to be engaged with our readers. So I will not be replaced with a new public editor. Instead, we’re asking our entire newsroom leadership team to take on some of the public editor duties of listening to readers and responding to their concerns.
In coming months, you will see some changes in this column. Top editor Kevin Riley will continue to write every other week, but he will rotate with others from the newsroom, who will write about newsroom operations and decisions.
What won’t change is our commitment to readers.
In many ways, we are more reader focused than we have ever been.
We have more avenues for feedback, including social media like Facebook and Twitter. We respond to hundreds of emails each week and we still accept the old standbys, telephone calls and snail-mail letters. Riley, our new editor, has been learning about the community through visits with key institutions and speeches to local civic clubs.
We’ve also beefed up reader research considerably, running regular tracking studies and other surveys. For those of you in consumer-based businesses, market research is probably a no-brainer. But reader research has not been a routine practice of most American newspapers, and it was certainly not routine at the AJC in the past.
Now that it’s become part of the way we work, we like to think we know more about what our readers want than most newspapers. Readers are responding positively to changes we have made, which makes sense, because they are driving the changes.
Among the many things we’ve learned:
● Readers value highly our watchdog and investigative journalism. They support the newspaper’s traditional role of holding public officials accountable for effective, efficient and honest government. I have a real passion for, and experience with, this important work that I’ll bring to my new role as deputy managing editor for watchdog reporting.
● Our readers are sophisticated and they want important news on their front page. We ask readers about headlines and topics and what they believe belongs on the front. Jobs and the economy, health care policy and politics rate very high. Sports and feature stories, our readers tell us, rarely if ever belong on the front.
● Readers expect national and international news on our pages. For many readers, the AJC is their main source of information, not only about goings-on in Metro Atlanta, but about world events. They understand we are not going to be able to give them as much world and national news as a national paper, but they absolutely want the important news reflected in their AJC.
● Readers want Washington news brought home to them on their terms. Among the stories that our readers consider most important are public policy issues emanating from Congress and the White House — and they want to know how it affects them here in Georgia. They want the news, as much as possible, to be projected through a Georgia lens.
● Readers are serious about balance on the opinion pages. With the rise of talk shows, blogs and other opinion content that comes from one side of the political spectrum or the other, readers value a newspaper opinion page that clearly and consistently presents a balanced mix of views.
● Readers want us to edit carefully and keep journalists’ opinions out of the news. Readers are especially alert to this issue in national political stories, and we edit wire copy with an eye toward those concerns.
Reader research and feedback will continue to shape our coverage going forward. That’s because the most important thing we have learned is that we have our best success by listening to readers.
So please, keep that feedback coming.
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