(Richmond) Palladium-Item
Dayton Daily News
Earlham College
The partners developed strategies to make wire stories – the main source of national and international news for most small papers – more engaging and relevant to readers. Earlham professor Cheryl Gibbs and her students created special pages of international news for the Palladium-Item, using wire stories and other readily available sources. Unlike traditional wire-dependent foreign news pages, the Palladium-Item’s “Big Picture” page included reading lists, local organizations linked to the story and ways to get personally involved through donations or other outreach efforts.
The pages were critiqued by focus groups of readers and later pages were further refined. Gibbs and her students found readers became more engaged if they felt a personal connection to a story and suggested that papers could help readers make that connection using a few simple steps. They include translating statistics and demographic information into more local and familiar terms, telling readers how they can help or communicate their views to decision-makers and suggesting reading lists that include literary and cultural content as well as politics and history.
Contact:
Cheryl Gibbs
Assistant Professor
Earlham College
Drawer 62, 801 National Road West
Richmond, IN 47374-4095
Phone: (765) 983-1506
Email: chergibbs@aol.com