Anybody who finds themselves talking about coronavirus could learn from Poynter’s Al Tompkins’ tips for reporting on the outbreak without adding to people’s fears. The column is great for journalists, but I think it’s just as important for all of us as communicators and news consumers.
One part that jumped out at me is this:
Statistical stories are less scary than anecdotal stories. For news stories to really connect with the public, we want to attach faces and names to issues.
During the Zika outbreak, the scare took off when we started seeing children born with deformities. Those closeup stories of individuals overwhelm the statistical probabilities of contracting the virus.
When you do anecdotal stories about sickness and death from coronavirus, infuse them with the data that points out the wider context of the issue.
It’s a great illustration of how we need to get rid of the notion that “storytelling” is simply about personalization. Stories are often seen as a way to take something abstract from macro to micro. But the disservice this does to our audience is just as bad as loading them down with stats alone. As Tompkins writes, stats and stories go together.
To many people, the term “storytelling” conjures memories of bedtime stories or powerful human feature profiles. But for communicating, we need to think of strategic storytelling as a way to rely on the underlying principles that have made stories the oldest and most effective means of communication. That could be as simple as making sure your message flow has a beginning, middle and end and that the important information isn’t hidden behind extraneous fluff.
I’ve also been thinking about a great 2016 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about how storytelling could have improved public health outcomes during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Authors Anne Kott and Rupali J. Limaye studied information from coming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and how that was filtered through the evening newscasts.
Differences in framing and delivery could have led the public to interpret risk in a different way than intended by CDC. Overall, public health agencies should consider adapting risk communication strategies to account for a dynamic news environment and the media’s agenda. Options include adapting communications to short-form styles and embracing the concept of storytelling.
Kott and Limaye essentially argue that there was so much information coming so quickly that it was difficult for journalists to receive, process, contextualize and report the information in a relatable way, especially in a rushed and frantic news cycle. (Speaking of the network newscasts, check out this Tompkins-approved NBC Nightly News coronavirus segment that gets Vanderbilt University’s Dr. William Schaffner out on the streets answering Nashvillians’ questions.)
The key to using story effectively is understanding your audience and crafting the right mix of content and context – whether you’re covering a global health crisis or just telling a better joke at happy hour.
