Ohio Newspapers Team Up for Election Coverage

By: Anna Crane Their state was destined to be a big story this election year, and to do that story justice two groups of Ohio newspapers teamed up to make sure they got it right. One group of three weeklies split the task of writing candidate profiles, while another group of three metro dailies coordinated their editorial pages.

Back in January, editors from The Columbus Dispatch, the Dayton Daily News, and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland agreed to coordinate their editorial pages for a time. On three Sundays in September, the papers would print editorials, cartoons, and columns dedicated to a particular campaign topic. Each paper would also publish the material from the other two.

The group decided on three issues to cover: elementary education, higher education, and jobs/economy. "All we were doing was collaborating on issues that we knew we were going to be writing about anyway, and we did it in a coordinated fashion," said Brent Larkin, the opinion editor for the Plain Dealer.

"It leveraged our resources, which put pressure on the candidates to talk about things that really matter rather than those extraneous issues that tend to divert voters."

Endorsements and editorial content were left entirely up to each paper, but coincidentally, said Larkin, each paper endorsed Mike DeWine for Senator and Ted Strickland for Governor. The purpose was not to push a particular agenda, he said, but instead to raise awareness of the issues.

"When we're all singing from the same hymnal, it definitely makes the music louder," said Larkin.

A similar theory was behind a collaboration among three alternative weeklies in Ohio: the Cleveland Free Times, the Athens News, and the Cincinnati CityBeat.

John Fox, editor and co-publisher of Cincinnati CityBeat, said that producing a profile of each of the major candidates might have been difficult for his eight-person editorial staff, so in order to go more in depth he sought the partnership of the other two weeklies.

"We happened to notice that each of the candidates came from one of the areas. Blackwell is from Cincinnati, so we might be able to cover that story better than the other papers because we're here," said Fox. "Likewise, Brown is from Cleveland and Strickland is from Athens, so it just occurred to me that we have three papers and three candidates from three areas."

From there, said Fox, things fell into place. Each paper was responsible for producing a profile of the candidate from its area. According to Fox, Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent senator, was left out because there were only three papers and he'd had twelve years to establish himself, so the papers wanted to use their resources to cover the less-known statewide candidates.

Frank Lewis, editor of the Cleveland Free Times said it was easier for each of the articles to be more in-depth when a hometown paper was writing it.

"It was enormously helpful," said Lewis. "Geography and location can mean a lot when you have limited resources."

Both Lewis and Fox said that a collaboration like this might be a good model for smaller papers to follow when covering larger issues. They have also discussed doing some more substantial collaboration in the future, such as splitting the reporting, and sharing the writing among the three staffs.

Larkin, the Plain Dealer opinion editor, said that newspapers might be wise to experiment with these types of projects.

"We all know the issues that newspapers are facing in revenue and readership, and we have to be willing to try different things," said Larkin. "We didn't sell our soul to the other papers, it was just a collaborative effort."

Both Larkin and Fox attribute the projects to the papers wanting to step up their coverage of the midterm elections.

"I remember thinking to myself that there is a lot of attention on this state and that we need to 'up' our coverage -- if not in quantity, then at least in quality," said Fox. "This collaboration flowed from the feeling that all eyes are on us, and we need to get better."