I hope over the past few weeks you’ve been able to catch at least one of our Viewers Voice segments and that you’ve noticed a few changes. If not, here’s a link to them.
WSLS has been doing Viewers Voice for more than a decade now. Through the years, the format has changed from time to time. In December, I took over responsibility for producing these segments with the goal of bringing a fresh approach to them.

How will we accomplish this? Well, through both presentation and content.

First, content. My intent is to make Viewers Voice more interactive, with more comments from you about the way we cover the news. Along with those comments will almost always be a response from WSLS. Sometimes I’ll defend our coverage. Sometimes, I’ll give you more perspective into how the news gathering process worked and why we made the decision we did. And, sometimes I’ll simply admit we screwed up. Already, we’ve taken responsibility for several mistakes. Some have been minor and some a little bigger. But let’s be clear, I’m not afraid of saying we got it wrong and we’ll work to make it better.

Now, there will be times when we’ll use Viewers Voice to simply share your thoughts about a hot-button topic or controversy. But, more often than not, it will be your chance to sound off about our coverage, both good and bad. And our chance to respond.

Second, presentation. On this front, we’re making only slight modifications with new graphics and new locations for shooting our responses. All of this is in an effort to present the cleanest product possible.

Right now you’re hearing a lot about transparency in our government and the need for more of it. Well, we believe the same applies to our news coverage. What we do should not be a mystery to you. Viewers Voice will help us pull back the curtain and give you a look at our news gathering process, our decision making, and our ethics.

Finally, I’d love your feedback on this. What do you think? How can we change this to make it even better? Should we include something else?