SACRAMENTO, Calif.,
Nov. 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/
-- McClatchy (NYSE American MNI) announced the launch of an
ambitious initiative to cover the 2020 presidential race
differently -- by leveraging its local expertise to tell the
stories of the voters and communities who will decide this
election. Impact2020 will tell a full national story powered by
local reporting and offer a standalone politics subscription
product for political obsessives who know the election will not be
decided inside the Beltway.
The plan to cover the 2020 presidential race was announced today
by Kristin Roberts, Vice President,
News. "McClatchy is better positioned than any single news
organization to tell the real story about voter sentiment," said
Roberts. "It is a story the polls fail to capture. It is the story
that parachute journalists from national media will likely
overlook. It is the story of how the race for the 2020 Democratic
nomination and the presidency will be won and lost."
Subscribe to Impact2020 here.
A vast network of McClatchy's local political journalists from
across the country will produce informed and unique political news
and commentary on a variety of platforms including digital, video,
podcast and a daily newsletter, launching exactly one year before
the presidential election. Reporters and editors in Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, North
Carolina, South Carolina,
California, Kansas, Missouri and Kentucky will contribute to McClatchy's
political reporting effort. Together with the core politics team in
McClatchy's Washington Bureau, the team will offer an
outside-the-beltway perspective as well as breaking news,
delivering exclusives, and providing smarter and faster analyses to
help dominate coverage of key states.
The journalists who will produce election-year coverage work for
more than a dozen McClatchy local news brands across the country,
guided by experienced politics editors such as Jordan Schrader at Raleigh's News & Observer in North
Carolina and Amy Chance at
The Sacramento Bee. The reporters include
Jim Morrill at The Charlotte
Observer and Dawn Baumgartner
Vaughan, Will
Doran and Colin
Campbell at the N&O; Anna
M. Tinsley, Tessa Weinberg
and Bud Kennedy at the Fort Worth
Star-Telegram; Jason Hancock and
Jonathan Shorman at The
Kansas City Star; Sophia
Bollag, Hannah Wiley and
Bryan Anderson in California; David
Smiley at the Miami Herald in Florida; Daniel
Desrocher at the Lexington Herald-Leader;
and Maayan Schechter,
Avery Wilks and Joe Bustos at The State in South Carolina's capital of Columbia. These reporters will work in
collaboration with McClatchy's core Washington-based politics team of Toby Zakaria, McClatchyDC managing editor;
Politics Editor Adam Wollner;
political correspondents Alex
Roarty, Dave Catanese and
Emily Cadei; data reporter
Ben Wieder; and White House
correspondents Francesca Chambers
and Michael Wilner. Their work will
be complemented by a team of talented opinion writers led by
Colleen Nelson, McClatchy's opinion
editor based at The Kansas City Star.
One of the key strategies driving McClatchy's coverage will be
reporting the campaign through the prism of electability, which
represents a radical departure from traditional presidential
election reporting. Story selection will focus on key voter groups,
among them rural Obama/Trump voters and suburban
Romney/Clinton voters, as well as
voter groups identified by McClatchy's political team and campaign
insiders as critical to a winning coalition. The 2020 coverage plan
will dive deeply into candidate policy positions as well as
strategies aimed at putting those coalitions together; it's a
strategy that will be driven by insight on the ground about voter
sentiment rather than polls or the story of the day out of
Washington.
"We'll refrain from chasing the daily tweet or the latest poll,"
said Roberts. "Our commitment is to pursue stories that,
during the primary, concentrate on examining the coalition a
Democrat might need to defeat President Trump, and during the
general election, examine the coalition-building on both sides,"
said Roberts. "This concentrated effort will help differentiate
McClatchy's news reporting over the next 12 months from other media
outlets covering the campaigns."
McClatchy will offer a free, daily election-focused newsletter
designed for deeply engaged political enthusiasts around the
country — people who are just as eager to know how Florida will vote as they are North Carolina, Texas and other increasingly critical states,
such as Pennsylvania. The
Impact2020 newsletter, which launches today, will feature the best
political coverage from McClatchy's reporters along with a curated
collection of important stories from other reputable local news
sources. Reflecting our commitment to elevating local journalism,
our newsletter will regularly identify the most well-sourced local
reporters to follow as the primary moves from state to state. In
addition, as part of McClatchy's election-year coverage, it has
relaunched its weekly politics podcast, "Beyond the Bubble," to
take listeners inside the Democratic primary and the race for
the White House.
About McClatchy
McClatchy operates 30 media companies in 14 states, providing
each of its communities with strong independent local journalism in
the public interest and advertising services in a wide array of
digital and print formats. McClatchy publishes iconic local brands
including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star,
The Sacramento Bee, The Charlotte Observer,
The (Raleigh) News &
Observer, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. McClatchy is
headquartered in Sacramento,
Calif., and listed on the New York Stock Exchange American
under the symbol MNI. #ReadLocal
Contact:
Jeanne Segal
jsegal@mcclatchy.com
O) 202-383-6085
M) 202-271-8880
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SOURCE McClatchy