New Article: Improving news coverage of crashes by targeting police press releases

Happy to share my 3rd article on coverage of traffic crashes with Tara Goddard and Calvin Thigpen. In this paper, we shift our focus from journalists to the police, who write the press releases that inform crash reporting.

For those in a hurry, you can access the full paper here (It is Open Access-aka Free!) and you can download our 2-page guide to improving police press releases about crashes here.

As our followers know, news coverage of crashes tends to have several recurring problems. Articles tend to subtly victim blame and typically treat crashes as isolated incidents rather than predictable outcomes of a broken system.

We have also shown how seemingly simple editorial patterns profoundly influence how readers think about crashes, which in turn shapes their views on how we should make streets safer. How we write articles definitely matters.

Based on these findings (and similar work from Seth LaJuenesse and Marco te Brommelstroet), several groups now offer advice and guidance for journalists to improve their coverage including webinars and workshops from Pedal Love, Road Collision Reporting Guidelines from Laura Laker, and a self-paced course from CUTR on Shifting Narratives.

But in speaking with journalists, we kept hearing that police press releases were VERY central to their reporting. Lots of news articles were essentially a list of quotes from the police, a long block quote, or even a screenshot from a police department.

To be clear, this isn’t always the case; some news coverage of crashes is truly excellent. But most of the time overworked journalists are scrambling to meet deadlines and tackle other stories. Here’s how journalist’s explained their reporting:

Given this, we wondered whether it might be helpful to head upstream and improve police press releases. Plus, lots of police departments communicate directly with the public (via services like Nixle). So better police practices is good target for improvement.

We developed an *initial* training for officers and then asked officers for their feedback. Important caveat: This was a pilot project, so the number of officers offering feedback was small.

Key takeaways:

1) Officers were mostly on board with implementing our suggestions. Woot!

2) Some ideas would be difficult to implement (adding info to press releases)

3) Police disagreed with one idea: Making the driver the "star of the show"

Based on this feedback and interviews with police, legal scholars, and journalists, we revised our guidance (see final version here). Now, we have slightly different recommendations for police and journalists because they have different roles.

We offer five tips for improving police press releases. Two are about WORD CHOICE.

The last three tips are about reporting "JUST THE FACTS." But keep in mind that some facts are easier for officers to identify than others.

Because of this, we advise officers to think carefully about which facts they do and do not include.

Finally, to keep things simple and get these ideas into practice quickly and easily, we offer a template for press releases.

In closing, we would like to thank the thoughtful officers, journalists, and legal scholars who spoke with us for this project. Ultimately, changing traffic safety culture is a work in progress and we're looking forward to continuing the conversation.