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Defector’s Kelsey
McKinney on how
2020 destroyed
the concept of
“sticking to
sports”
WALT HICKEY

The Ballot aims to

cover every 2020 How Eviction Lab
is helping
election — except for journalists cover a
spiraling housing

the one in the U.S. crisis

SARAH SCIRE

“I often say to the writers, ‘Write this as if it were a letter to

your friend.'”

By HANAA’ TAMEEZ @hanaatameez Sept. 3, 2020, 9:44 a.m. %

For many journalists in the United States and around the world, Should the
government use
the next 60 days will be filled with polling stories, debate previews Section 230 to
and recaps, voting guides, pandemic updates, and lots of push force the tech
notifications, all leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. giants into paying
for the news?
Madeleine Schwartz, the founder and editor of The Ballot, knows JOSHUA BENTON

there will be no shortage of U.S. election coverage before or after

November 3. That’s why, since it launched in February, The Ballot
has skipped the Trump vs. Biden race altogether. Instead, it’s
laser-focused on the (many!) other countries that have already
voted or will head to the polls this year. The plan at the outset was
to cover nearly 70 elections, but many scheduled for 2020 have Journalists
been postponed due to the pandemic. perceive stories
published in local
“We have this extraordinary series of changes happening around news outlets to be
less newsworthy
the world; it sometimes feels like you could pick a point on a map
MARK CODDINGTON AND SETH
and you would see almost the same story,” Schwartz said. But LEWIS

political coverage often doesn’t “take account of what’s happening

outside of U.S. borders, so I was trying to think of a way to
provide a corrective. Then the idea came of ‘what if we covered
every 2020 election except for the U.S.?'”

Schwartz, a journalist based in Berlin, started The Ballot with the

prize money from the European Press Prize, which she won in The Pentagon
orders the military
2019 in the opinion category for her Guardian piece “The end of
newspaper Stars
Atlanticism: has Trump killed the ideology that won the cold and Stripes to shut
war?” She and seven other editors work as volunteers. The down by the end
of the month
donations that come in are put toward paying freelance writers.
LAURA HAZARD OWEN

After covering different elections in other countries, Schwartz

found that the America-centric focus of U.S. press’ foreign policy
coverage can be inaccurate and misleading. Earlier this year, she
wrote in CJR:

Journalists will likely point to the economic pressures that

drive decisions about how and where to focus coverage.
When there are cutbacks, foreign bureaus are often the
first to go; increasingly, the work of foreign
correspondents is left to freelancers. But it’s not just a
money problem. The paradigm of the American media
puts American politics at the center, out of a belief that
American politics steer the world. In 2020, however, that’s
no longer true, if it ever was. The US does not set the
agenda for world policy. Moreover, no matter who our
president is, our future as Americans depends nearly as
much on who wins elections in other countries. That’s the
reality of a world that is truly interconnected.

The Ballot is a sort of digital magazine, publishing one issue of

three to five stories roughly every two weeks. (A new issue comes
out Thursday.) The website is minimalistic on purpose, web
designer Lucy Andersen said. Schwartz wanted the look to
straddle the lines of a print and digital publication. The images for
stories are just the country flags, the font is one that can
accommodate characters from different languages, the lines are
clean, and there’s a high contrast between the colors and sections
for easy readability and navigability.

Schwartz and the other editors look for writers who are well-
versed and/or well-known journalists who live in the countries
they’re reporting on. This helps avoid parachute journalism, and
each writer brings with them a built-in audience from their
country.

“It’s important to me that the stories not be really dry. You can
find good wire reporting about a lot of parts of the world,”
Schwartz said. “But what was really interesting to me is how
people are experiencing these changes — what they’re seeing,
what they’re thinking about it — in a way that I don’t think always
comes through in the shorter and drier form. I often just say to
the writers, ‘Write this as if it were a letter to your friend,’ but of
course because they’re also excellent journalists, they’re also
bringing in all of the things that they’ve reported on, that they’re
seeing, and that they know. We wanted it to feel really accessible
and to be a kind of conversation in a way.”

One story that worked particularly well in that format was written
by an anonymous writer in Iran, where conservatives swept the
parliamentary elections in February. “The Islamic Republic used
to be described as a curious mix of theocracy and democracy. The
democracy part of the mixture, however constrained it was before,
seems to be shrinking by the day,” the writer wrote. “‘It’s
ridiculous,’ a 56-year-old woman who works in a government
agency told me about the past few months. ‘It all seems like what
you would see in a badly exaggerated movie that you’d walk out
on.'”

Another story is a Q&A with an NGO president and lawyer in

Guinea, where in April the government published a new
constitution that was different from the one that had been voted
on during a national referendum in March. The conversation
reads like a discussion, in person or over text message, between
two friends. “You can’t just change the constitution that was
submitted to a public referendum as soon as it’s published!”
Frederic Loua, the interviewee, said.

“A lot of what we’ve covered hasn’t been widely reported in

English and or has been reported really sporadically,” Schwartz
said. “A lot of the places that we’re hearing from don’t get a lot of
air time in American media, or [if you want to read about them]
you would have to already know what you were looking for, as
opposed to it coming to you. [Coming to you] is part of the
advantage of a site with a bi-weekly newsletter.”

So far, about half of The Ballot’s readers are from the United
States. The other half comes from all over the world. Since The
Ballot’s essentially launched into the pandemic, it’s leaned into
virtual events. “We had a really interesting one where about the
future of cities where we brought together some urban planners in
the United States and some urban planners in Seoul,” Schwartz
said. “It was a multi–time zone live event that actually took place
on two different days, depending on where you were
geographically, and those bring in a really international audience
of people, coming in from five continents and chatting.”

With just three months left in 2020 (reader, I gasped too) and the
donations still flowing in, Schwartz said that The Ballot will
expand its coverage to explore more political stories that are
focused on what different countries can learn from each other on
a range of issues, from economic policy to climate change.

“I think a magazine is not only a publication, it’s also a

community,” Schwartz said, “and all the more so when you’re
bringing in people from different parts of the world to talk about
problems that affect all of us.”

PHOTO BY MORNING BREW ON UNSPLASH.

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Defector’s Kelsey McKinney on how 2020 destroyed

the concept of “sticking to sports”
“We can’t cover sports right now, or ever, as an individual and separate thing
because sports are the gift we get for making our society as just and fair as
possible.”

How Eviction Lab is helping journalists cover a

spiraling housing crisis
As the pandemic has worsened an already critical situation, researchers started to
live track evictions in 17 cities and launched a scorecard to compare protections for
renters in each state.

Should the government use Section 230 to force the

tech giants into paying for the news?
A new paper argues that the “26 words that created the internet” should remain in
force — but only for companies that agree to certain new regulations and
restrictions.

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