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I was getting irritated. I had been in a tight space inside a mobile home in a rural area outside Fort Myers, Fla., for almost two hours listening to a woman, probably in her 50s, complain about every aspect of local news. It was hot, humid and cluttered. And she was more than happy to share her misery.
She didn’t like the news. She didn’t like the people. She didn’t like the stories. She didn’t like anything. Then she threw out a comment that connected some dots for me: “Last week I watched the anchor on Facebook, and he was just a normal guy. Then you could tell the news was starting again on TV, because he…” then she started making robotic gestures and imitating what became known on these tours as “the voice.”
This was the summer of 2016. At this point, Facebook Live was an area of experimentation, and the trendy thing newsrooms were doing was having anchors engage with audiences on the platform during commercial breaks. These ended up generally being awful, but they did offer viewers something they hadn’t seen in a while — a small taste of authentic humanity from the people who deliver the news.
These in-home immersions were an approach to expand beyond the traditional research that had guided local news for decades. Instead of interviews over the phone for 20 minutes or an online survey, we got to know the people behind