News-media roundup: Citizens want info on government and its meetings; bad news vs. good news; style points . . .

Glenda Arnett accepts the Citizen of the Year award from
Steve Henry of the Brinkley Chamber of Commerce.

Glenda Arnett of Arkansas' Brinkley Argus was getting ready to take the front-page photo of the local chamber of commerce's Citizen of the Year on Feb. 23, just as she has for more than 50 years. “They began reading about the person, and I couldn’t really hear what they were saying when they announced the winner,” she recalled. “I asked my sister, ‘Whose name did they call?’ and she said, ‘It’s you.’” One nominator said of Arnett, “Glenda is the epitome of everything that is great about Brinkley. She is dedicated to the town and volunteers for innumerable charitable activities through civil and religious organizations. ... There are few lives in Brinkley that she hasn’t touched.” There are thousands of Glenda Arnetts at rural newspapers across the nation. Read more about her in Arkansas Publisher, the newsletter of the Arkansas Press Association. 

Google map highlights towns in study.

What readers want: Sarah Stonbely, research director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, surveyed residents about what they need from their local news outlets. Rural Blairstown, urban Paterson (next to Montclair), and the state capital of Trenton are very different, but many of their news needs are the same, Laura Hazard Owen reports for NiemanLab, which she edits.

"All three communities had lost most of their existing local news outlets over the years," Owen writes. "All wanted more service journalism, in the form of information about municipal government meetings or contact information for local leaders. And all relied heavily on local Facebook groups for news, even though they also understood Facebook’s flaws."

Stonbely told Owen, "One might assume that there isn’t a ton of interest in municipal meetings, because they’re kind of boring. So I was really excited to hear that people wanted to know more, to have a list. And it’s easy — it’s kind of low-hanging fruit, right? It shouldn’t be that difficult to keep an updated list of when and where and what the meetings are."

Stonbely's report suggests building a community calendar with help from trusted local organizations, with true collaboration, "beyond just asking them to contribute content, so that trust is built in from the beginning." Also, "Engage to a greater extent on Facebook, and be present on Facebook groups that are relevant. . . . This is where most of the traffic is and where you’ll have the greatest visibility.'

Bad news gets clicks, but many want good news: "A new study has found that negative words in headlines increased click rates, while positive words decreased them," Joshua Benton reports for NiemanLab. "Each additional negative word increased the clickthrough rate by 2.3%." Axios notes, "The human instinct towards negativity has been well-documented, but Joshua Benton writes that this study, which drew on data from Upworthy’s hyperbolic headlines, is unusually quantifiable . . . Upworthy did extensive A/B testing on headlines, with editors required to write 25 headlines for each article. One surprise was the headlines with words associated with sadness did better than headlines associated with fear or anger."

"People find bad news more interesting than good news," Amina Khan writes for the Los Angeles Times, reporting on a study of 1,156 people in Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Ghana, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Senegal, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States: "The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hint that this human bias toward negative news might be a large part of what drives negative news coverage. But the results also revealed that this negative bias was not shared by everyone, and some even had a positive bias: a sign that there may be a market for positive news."

Style points: The Associated Press has updated its Stylebook on several topics, including: using LGBTQ+ instead of just LGBTQ, to make it more inclusive, AP says; a new entry on euthanasia, medically assisted suicide, physician-assisted suicide that spells out proper usage for each term; a new entry on the Civil Rights Movement, which it says should be capitalized when referring to the specific historical period in the U.S., mainly in the 1950s and '60s; and the addition of B.C.E. and C.E. as acceptable options in referencing a calendar year in the period before Christ and anno Domini: in the year of the Lord, respectively. C.E. means the Common Era; B.C.E. means before it.

The New York and Michigan Solutions Journalism Collaborative has compiled a Caregiving Coverage Style Guide to help writers "avoid language that reflect negatively on aging," the Local Media Association reports. "The entries are based on – and credited to – sources including the Associated Press Stylebook, AARP’s Caregivers Glossary, the National Center on Disability and Journalism’s Disability Language Style Guide, and the Changing the Narrative project."