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The Desert Sun’s print opinion pages. (Photo: Al Franco/The Desert Sun)

In the summer of 2019, The Desert Sun’s opinion pages took a “vacation” from national politics. For the month of July, we took a break from all the machinations of Washington and put the focus back here at home — no columns, no cartoons and no letters about the president, Congress, the Supreme Court, etc.

As I explained in a column in June that year, I was inspired by the work of a trio of university researchers from Louisiana State, Texas A&M and Colorado State who published a fascinating — and troubling — study that found that the ongoing extinction of local newspapers across the nation contributes to political polarization.

Al Franco, who was then our opinion editor, and I wanted everything in our opinion section that month to be about stuff happening here in the Coachella Valley, or in California.

We wondered if the experiment would have any impact. Now, we have our answer.

Those same three researchers — Joshua P. Darr, Matthew P. Hitt, and Johanna L. Dunaway — heard about our experiment and decided to study it. On Wednesday, Cambridge University Press published their book about our summer vacation from national politics. Their conclusion? Our experiment slowed polarization.  

“Removing national politics reordered the priorities of the opinion page, and the attitudes of Palm Springs residents, by bringing opinion back home and deemphasizing party politics,” they found. “The Desert Sun showed that localizing the opinion page can engage readers and recruit writers while chilling polarization. The short-term investment deepened the pool of regular local contributors. The readers who noticed the change largely approved, and ownership was supportive.”

Download the book for free

The 68-page book — “Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization” — is a fast read (for an academic work) and you can download it for free until April 21 through this link.

“The July opinion page experiment was a dramatic change for readers, and the newspaper followed through on its daunting commitment,” the researchers wrote. “The lessons from July showcase some of the promises and pitfalls facing other newspapers looking to localize.”

The researchers noted that pieces mentioning either Democrats or Republicans fell by more than half in July. In June and August, one in every four opinion page items mentioned one or both of the parties, compared to only 1 in 10 in July. “Political topics were less commonly discussed with a partisan frame in The Desert Sun, so opinion page readers in July experienced less priming of their partisan, nationalized, political identity than readers of unchanged newspapers,” the researchers found.

You might assume that, as a local newspaper, we publish opinions on mostly local issues. But the researchers looked at our June and August 2019 opinion content and found that 6 in 10 letters were about nonlocal topics. “Many readers express their opinions on national issues in their local newspaper,” the researchers found.

The researchers used online community surveys before and after our July experiment — reaching nearly 2,000 local residents — to gauge political polarization. They compared us with a similarly sized California newspaper — the Ventura County Star, also owned by Gannett — that conducted no such experiment that month.

The researchers found that political polarization accelerated in Ventura during July, but did not in Palm Springs. It also found that of those surveyed who were aware of our “summer vacation from national politics,” most approved. (Not mentioned by the researchers, but another upside was the fact that online readership for our opinion content nearly doubled from June 2019 to July 2019, according to our internal tracking metrics.)

Room for further improvement

Not all that the researchers found was positive. For example, they found no evidence that localization improved gender equality or racial diversity: Women continued to be underrepresented, as did Hispanic/Latino writers, who did not contribute to opinion in proportion to their population in the area.

“The opinion page also included more messages from executives, politicians, and corporations in July,” the researchers found. “For example, the syndication service CalMatters supplied many more columns about California state politics, but usually from the perspective of lobbyists, interest groups, or politicians. While the topics discussed in July were undeniably more local, more elites were also represented.”

Such analysis is useful to us in that it helps point the way for further improving our opinion pages as we bring on a new editor for the section.  

As I announced in a December column, Al Franco took a buyout from the company and we are currently interviewing candidates to take over the role of opinion editor. The Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation has raised nearly $60,000 to underwrite this position — a response that is truly incredible.

With the help of our soon-to-be-named new opinion editor, I hope to make the opinion pages more local and more relevant to you. We will be launching new efforts to solicit opinion pieces and letters to the editor from people throughout the Coachella Valley. For those who are nervous about their writing skills, we will develop ways to help break down those barriers. Our full submission guidelines are available online at https://bit.ly/31C1pD6.

In their conclusion to the book, the researchers suggested other media outlets might be encouraged to follow in our footsteps.

 “At a time when the value of opinion content is being questioned, emphasizing home style and excluding national politics could be a good option for editors, owners, and philanthropists looking to strengthen their contribution to their communities and to democracy,” the researchers wrote. “The Desert Sun’s experiment showed that localizing the opinion page is popular and worth the investment. Newspapers should adopt this localization policy because it is … cost-effective in the long run, and engages community groups as stakeholders in the newspaper.”

I couldn’t agree more!

Julie Makinen is executive editor of The Desert Sun and California editor for the USA Today Network. Email her at [email protected].

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