If the election has taught us one thing, it’s that there is a clear disconnect between much of our news infrastructure and rural/working class Americans.
If you live in a community like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you’ve known this for a while. But that doesn’t make the question of where rural folks who are skeptical of mainstream media get their local news any easier to answer.
As part of TSI’s ecosystem mapping and listening efforts with Press Forward Central PA, we are deeply interested in listening to rural communities throughout the region about not only where they get their local news and information, but going farther to learn what they like (or don’t like) about it, and why they see certain sources as trustworthy or not.
We’ve held individual conversations, facilitated group listening sessions, and conducted any number of audience surveys over the years. But if you a Pennsylvanian, you know there is only one place to go if you want to talk to a lot of folks from rural communities all at once: The PA Farm Show.
An unrivaled community hub
For those unfamiliar, the PA Farm Show is the largest indoor agricultural event held in the United States, taking place in a massive indoor complex 24 acres spread throughout eleven halls, including three arenas where more than 10,000 competitive events take place. On top of all of that, the Farm Show is free to the public, and as such attracts over half a million visitors every year over its week-long run.
In short: there may be no better way to engage a high volume of rural Pennsylvanians. The bigger question is whether they would be interested in answering questions that have very little to do with why they came there in the first place.
The answer was our first insight of the day: people had a lot to say and were very eager to share, especially once they realized we weren’t selling them anything (and had candy).
News you can use
Armed with a bowl of candy (Hershey brands of course!) and some “Grow Local News” buttons as giveaways as well as two big double-sided homemade chalkboard displays for folks to write on reminiscent of the monolith from 2001, we hit the Farmshow expo floor in the “So You Wanna Be a Farmer” zone courtesy of the PA Department of Agriculture.
We asked anyone who would stop for us two key questions:
Where they get their local news and information
and What they like (or want) from their local news?
For the first question, local TV news continues to reign supreme amongst Farmshow goers, with stations like WGAL8 (NBC), ABC27 getting far and away the most consistent attention. While print/online was also mentioned, social media sources were the more frequent second option, specifically neighborhood Facebook pages and groups. Interestingly, despite being in Harrisburg, it took us 6 hours for someone to mention PennLive (the local publication) as their go-to newsource.
No bias, personal connection, and good news
The first question–though useful–was just the warm-up. When we asked those same people questions about what they like about the news source they just mentioned, things got harder to answer, but richer in insights.
When we asked folks who watch their local news on TV, the primary reason was that they felt they had a personal connection with the anchors at the desk, the reporters in the field, and even–especially–the meteorologists who help them plan their days.
It wasn’t uncommon during our time at the Farmshow for someone to say something like “I don’t remember what channel it is but it’s the one with Alicia/Brian/Jasmine”. People may not remember the network or the channel they watch, but they remember the people who tell them the news, and trust them for it.
On the other hand, another overwhelming chorus we heard from respondents was that they are tired of bias, perceived or real, in their news, and desire just the facts, without spin.
“They don’t tell the whole story,” a Farmshow goer said to me, perhaps the 15th time I’d heard that same phrase in different conversations, “they talk about issues and I can tell they’re spinning it the way they want”. When pressing them to talk about local specific coverage and whether they still see it as biased, it got harder for them to name, yet the feeling remained. Folks who expressed skepticism of “mainstream media” at the outset were more likely to be inherently distrustful of local affiliates, and gravitate towards the network NBC/WGAL 8, Fox News/FOX43, that better reflected their worldview in national politics.
Finally, and perhaps not surprisingly, Farmshow respondents are tired of bad news. “Exhausted”, “depressed”, “over it”, and any number of other signifiers of the general malaise about the world, even at local levels, populated people’s responses when asked what they thought about the process of reading the news. They often spoke of wanting community highlights, positive stories, and less sensationalism to promote the feeling that they are not just being manipulated for clicks, views, or anger.
Growing Local News
From our short time at the Farmshow we developed several theses and “How Might We” (HMW) questions for expanding our learning.
Questions like:
“HMW replicate the personal connection of newscasters for other trustworthy newsources?”
“HMW alleviate concerns about bias in news sources?”
“HMW feature first-person stories and grassroots reporting to better reflect the voices and perspectives of the community?”
These may not be the right questions– and indeed the questions raise some additional ones for us. Things like how to grapple with the content creator vs. journalist tensions that is actively playing out in media spaces, whether pursuing “good news” hides the truth of the matter in some cases, or whether satisfying the standards of “telling the whole story” of an issue in the eyes of some, would result in spin in itself: an example that was cited to me as “mentioning the fact that Trump is a felon, but not also telling the whole story about the Biden family’s crimes.”
But it also begs the question of whether there are avoidable pitfalls in coverage that won’t make vast sections of our community shut down and dismiss coverage as biased, depressing, or impersonal. Not self censoring, but code switching, with the goal of keeping communities informed above all else.
Regardless, the sources of news and information that do exist have a tremendous opportunity to engage with rural populations that are hungry for news, and eager to share their opinion, and they have an obligation to listen to them rather than take them for granted or worse, write them off.
When I asked one gentleman where he got his local news he said “WGAL, but of course I don’t believe a single word they say”. He slapped me on the back and kept walking.
I shouted after him, “Then why do you watch it?!”
He turned and yelled “It’s wintertime and they’re all there is, what else am I gonna do?”