Looking for new ways to tell the stories of your listeners? Why not ask them to share their lives — in sound? See how a handful of newsrooms have approached the challenge of using the sounds their communities have shared.
Liza Long recognizes her family doesn’t fit this year’s political stereotypes. She’s a female, Catholic Romney supporter, while her son is a Mormon Obama supporter in Idaho. Her family’s divided loyalties haven’t divided the family, though. Political conversations at the dinner table are stimulating and respectful — and sometimes even funny.
Rev. Bonnie Wilcox, like so many clergy around the country, knows her congregation is politically divided. She walks a delicate line between offering pastoral guidance about “moral issues” and keeping her own political views to herself — even on social media, where she is both minister and “friend.”
Is Facebook actually helping you express yourself in ways you wouldn’t feel comfortable doing in person? Have you learned something important from a Twitter post? Or are you so sick of election noise that you turn to social networks as a form of refuge?
Every two years — and especially every four — Americans are confronted with a red-blue divide that polarizes the candidates and the public. The stories we’ve heard from more than 500 people paint a picture of a social fabric under tremendous strain from the pressures of the political season.
Instead of social media being the cause of our problems, couldn’t it be that it just highlights the problems we already have?
