Not just the news: Probing for what a story is really about
News demands responsive coverage. But what if you’re a brand that’s also purposely built to go deeper, to keep asking, “What’s this story really about?” That calls for framing stories through the lens of values. Up next: trust. The Monitor’s editor joins our podcast to explain.
Can covering world news be about something more than news?
For the Monitor, the answer has always been yes. A fundamental pursuit – the bettering, the “blessing” of humanity – dates to our 1908 founding. What changes over time: the delivery tools available for the work, and the shifting nature of audiences. Those call for refinements.
That has meant applying as a “lens” what could be called universal values – respect, resilience, and now trust. It’s not about prescriptive thinking or the imposition of values, says Mark Sappenfield, the Monitor’s editor, on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast.
It’s the recognition “that these values are hugely important to how we think about news, what we value in news, what we prioritize in society,” he says. It’s a way of saying that stories are about something far deeper than one might think.
Why trust, and why now?
“I think the more you look into almost anything that’s going on in the world today, trust is such a driver,” Mark says. “There is ample evidence worldwide that people are losing trust in core institutions.
“I do think there is a different narrative there to tell,” he adds. “And I do think that there is a way out of it that begins with changing how we see the world and how we think about others.”
Episode transcript
Mark Sappenfield: The more you look into almost anything that’s going on in the world today, trust is such a driver. We are confident that trust is such a major force behind the news that we will find our way there if we do our reporting fairly.
Clay Collins: That’s Mark Sappenfield, editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
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Collins: Monitor journalism has a founding mandate to think big – really big. The founder’s charge in 1908: “To injure no man, but to bless all mankind.”
Building that aim into the reporting of world news calls for holding fast to that mission outlook. But the work also calls for refinements that take into account emerging delivery technologies and new audience behaviors.
When Mark last joined this show in October 2022, it was to talk about a sharpening that we then were beginning to try at the Monitor. This idea that since news is really about the values we all share, we might more openly make that our lens. Today, we sort stories using 28 different values “tags.”
We focused very intentionally on a couple of those, respect and resilience. Now we’re beginning to lean in on trust.
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Collins: Welcome to “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Mark joins us again today. Hi, Mark.
Sappenfield: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Collins: In that 2022 episode, you said: “If you really focus on what matters in the news, you get to this idea that values are driving the news.” So my question now: How do you get from values, which might sound subjective, to universality, to the yearnings that really unite us all in the human experience?
Sappenfield: When you hear “values,” especially in the United States, that has a certain meaning. You think of values being imposed on someone, or [of] someone saying, “these are my values.” The job of the Monitor isn’t to tell you what values to [adopt]. It isn’t to tell you what to think. What it is … is to recognize that these values are hugely important to how we think about news, what we value in news, what we prioritize in society. It’s more as a welcome, to say: “Hey folks! You think the story is about this, but it’s really about this deeper thing that’s going on.”
And what we found is that if you can do that without imposing your own opinion, and we know that’s hard in today’s journalism, so that’s something we all have to work on, that actually creates more space for other people to come into the conversation, because then it’s not just about a policy and it’s either this way or that way or I won’t talk to you.
Collins: Right. And readers seemed receptive to the two concentrations so far: respect, resilience….
Sappenfield: Yes.
Collins: And in general, they seem to have embraced the values orientation. So now we go to “trust,” and you’ve written about trust being a counterforce to uncertainty. It also counters fear. What else makes it the right focus right now?
Sappenfield: Well, I think the more you look into almost anything that’s going on in the world today, trust is such a driver. There is ample evidence worldwide that people are losing trust in core institutions. People have talked about a democracy recession here in the United States. I see the same thing going on in Germany. You can see it in lots of different places. People losing faith in capitalism, in free-market societies. People losing faith in each other. That’s something that we see in politics on a more kind of grassroots level, is that it used to be that your opposition politically was someone with whom you disagreed. Now, increasingly, they’re your enemy. Not only do you think that they’re wrong about their policy, you think they are going to lead the country into ruin. That’s trust. “I don’t trust.” If you think about it, democracy is the ability to lose, and not blow things up because you trust the other person won’t do something that will destroy you, will hurt you.
When you lose that trust, the whole foundation of democracy shakes a little bit. And I think that’s what we’re feeling today. So, trust seems to be a core issue in so much of the news that we’re reporting today.
Collins: Yeah. I want to ask about how we operationalize this as a news organization because the exploration of any value or attribute is going to prompt different starting-point ideas from different writers and editors.
At one recent meeting we had, we talked about whether trust was something to be gained through work toward solutions or whether it was a precondition from which to build. So it’s a both/and, right? You can have an absence-of-trust story.
Sappenfield: Absolutely, I think one of the things you never want to do with any approach to journalism is to impose a narrative. The journalist always needs to go in with a spirit of inquiry and say, I’m going to do my reporting, I’m going to research all the different angles I can find, and where do these things lead me. That’s the job of the journalist. We are confident that trust is such a major force behind the news that we will find our way there if we do our reporting fairly. And there will be some stories where we start off [by] saying “This is a trust story,” and the reporting is going to say: “No, it’s really not.” And there’s going to be some stories we start off thinking it’s something else entirely and go: “You know what, this is actually a trust story and it just happens organically that way.”
In the conversation you talked about, it does seem there are two main ways to go about it. One is just to say: “Is trust an issue in driving this news?” And that can be a lack of trust. That can be a false trust. But that might be driving something that’s going on in the news. And the other way is, where is trust being built? And that’s a harder one to find because, to be honest, the media is really bad at finding stories where good things are happening. So that’s, again, kind of the Monitor’s form of investigative journalism. But it is happening. You see examples. They might be small examples. But those small examples have a lesson in them. So looking for those two different approaches: Where is trust an issue, and where is trust being built? I think we build our series that way.
Collins: Yeah, to your point … whether it’s trust or another value, we talk a lot at the Monitor about how we can deploy resources toward this pretty specialized, boutique approach to the work, while also sometimes just … covering the news. Can you talk a little about that challenge, and also about what it means for staking out a distinctive identity?
Sappenfield: Yeah. And you and I have talked a lot about this just in conversations in the newsroom, and I have to say my viewpoint on that has evolved somewhat. I would say you and I tend to be more in the boutique, kind of, let’s do something totally different. You know, for me, if I was just doing the Monitor for my happiness, I would probably do the values approach all the time, because I find it really insightful and I think you can cover. Everything through the lens of values because values are ultimately the driver behind everything.
But we do find readers who just, [seem to be saying], “I just need to know what happened. You are a daily newspaper. You need to keep me updated on that.” And there what the Monitor can bring to it is it can bring a calmness. It can bring a thoughtfulness. And it can bring a fairness. All three of those things can kind of go away in the hot takes of today, clearly on cable news, but [also], even in respectable newspapers, that calmness, that thoughtfulness, and that fairness can attenuate a little bit when you’re just talking about news. So I think it’s ... you’ve got to be ambidextrous. That’s a balance we’re still trying to work through.
Collins: Right. Well, witness this early success of “news briefs” [a new feature of the Monitor Daily], which is basically the outsourcing of breaking to organizations that make breaking their stock and trade. But we can pair that, in a way, with our own offering.
Sappenfield: Yeah. And there was a reader who wrote me back, actually, before we launched the news briefs and said, “the Monitor has gotten a lot less newsy.” And I kind of had to look in the mirror and say: “Well, that’s probably something I’ve done.” And recognize, again, listen to your readers. What do they need from you?
Collins: Right, right. The time is always right for constructive thinking. And this new/old Monitor approach feels like something that can reflect the kind of agency, uh, [that] I think you’ve said can be a balm to the hopelessness that the news can make people feel.
Globally, things feel more dire maybe even than they did when you were here last in 2022. How do you hope readers can use the Monitor to improve not only their own outlooks, but [also] to collectively improve the world?
Sappenfield: Yeah, I probably have a little bit of a counternarrative take on this, in the sense that it feels to me that so much of what we think is worse in the world today is a result of how we are thinking about it. And that might seem very meta, but I kind of think about, OK, we have these pictures of this awful war that’s going on in the Middle East right now. We have what’s going on in Ukraine. But then I think back, you know, we’ve had wars before, this is not new. Are these so much worse than the wars that happened in the past? I’m not sure they are. I think we see them more closely, and I think on some levels we probably care about them more, and that’s good.
OK, we’ve got inflation. But we’ve had much worse inflation in the past. We got through that. You know, is there a sense that what we’re facing economically right now is something outside of the realm of normal economic variations? I don’t think so.
You know, you look in the United States where, OK, we are dealing with new challenges to democracy that we probably haven’t faced in a century or more. OK, that feels real, but where does that come from? One of the big topics is immigration. Yes, we have large numbers of people coming across the border. But if you put that aside and look, is this an existential threat to the country? I don’t think there’s much evidence to suggest that this is going to overthrow the country or ruin the country or....
And I’m not saying that you can’t have a wide variety of opinions on the value of immigration, and we can debate it. But this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that we have around everything today, whether it’s immigration, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s abortion, we’re now talking about these things in apocalyptic terms. And then the result is we get apocalyptic politics. That’s what’s new. This inability for us to see each other in a way where we can work together toward a goal, because that’s what a democracy demands. That’s what America has always done so well.
And to me, that’s where this trust project can come in, is can we help put things in context, give credible counternarratives? We can make huge progress, because I do think there is a different narrative there to tell, and I do think that there is a way out of it that begins with changing how we see the world and how we think about others.
Collins: Thank you, Mark, for articulating this current refinement of our journalism, and for your leadership of The Monitor.
Sappenfield: You’re welcome.
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Collins: Thanks for listening. You can find more, including our show notes with links to Mark’s previous show appearance and to stories in which he has explained the genesis of the Monitor approach, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus and Jingnan Peng. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.
