David Plazas
Opinion and Engagement Director, the Tennessean and USA Today Network Tennessee
Rethinking the opinions page
David Plazas is an accomplished writer who began his career in 2000 covering housing and government issues as a journalist in Fort Myers, Florida. He and his husband moved to Tennessee in 2014, where Plazas took the role of opinion and engagement director at the Tennessean, a Gannett publication that’s part of the USA Today Network. He was promoted to director of opinion and engagement for the USA Today Network Tennessee in 2017.
Plazas describes his approach to opinion writing as guiding conversations rather than dictating opinions. However, he says the shift from print to digital news has made it more challenging to engage with communities in this way. The pandemic further exacerbated this challenge, forcing Plazas to adapt to new digital technologies while being physically separated from the community his paper covers.
By Bill Meincke
One of my favorite moments with our readers was organizing an editorial board meeting with the public transit organization in Nashville.
I wanted it to be in a moving bus, and they obliged. So we actually held that meeting on a bus: A two-hour meeting going up and down the road because I said I needed to understand what consumers were going through. At the end of the day, it’s got to be us understanding what’s happening at a grassroots level.
We’re willing to be invested in our community. When COVID-19 happened, all events were canceled. I used to be focused on moderating and attending live events, and then suddenly I had to figure out what to do with my time.
I started hosting a podcast called “Tennessee Voices.” When we started, I said, “What if we were to do something really unique?” We had been publishing an average of 100 guest opinion columns a month. But what if we started interviewing the people who had submitted those op-eds, and put them on this video podcast for 20 minutes to put a face to the name?
I started off with five people who were kind enough to come on the show, and they were very interesting. One of them was a former Navy lieutenant commander who was heading up the Tennessee World Affairs Council [a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes the understanding of international affairs].
Another was a young man who was a Fulbright Scholar who almost got stuck in Spain during the lockdown and was able to find a way home. We had a priest named Rev. Becca Stevens who does amazing work helping former women sex workers who are out of prison.
I had hoped that maybe these five episodes would lead to something. Well, we’ve now published over 300 conversations with leaders, thinkers, innovators, US senators, and reproductive-rights activists. It’s been a great way to connect with people and to show that we are interested in conversations with both very-well-known people and not-very-well-known people.
Jumping the Hurdles of Print News
We have some readers with full access to digital tools, but who still just wanted print. Unfortunately, we’ve seen rapid losses in print advertising; growth is in digital.
This is a national trend. The Pew Research Center did a study showing the decline in print newspaper readership with text and graphs. In 2022, Congress was close to passing a law that would have allowed news publications jointly to “negotiate the pricing, terms, and conditions by which certain online platforms use the providers’ content.” This was in response to social media companies dominating audience’s “eyeballs.” So much of the “news” that people see on social media comes from local newspapers, but oftentimes the audience doesn’t know that.
We’ve been doing reels for Instagram and using Facebook to drive traffic. We’ve found that 80% of people consume news via video, so we create short reels to promote our work. It’s important to be where people are at.
Covering Solutions
However, readers sometimes don’t know that we are the subject experts on these topics. They may assume that we’re just a dime a dozen.
I remember having a comment from a neighbor who didn’t like our paper because she said we’re “not the New York Times.” We’re not trying to be the New York Times!
We’re the best at covering local state politics. We are the best at doing what we do. And that’s what we want to do. We pick up on an issue that people are trying to understand and we create context. We create analysis, and we create solutions.
We continue to produce opinion columns because we see value in them. They create avenues for thoughtful discussion and debate, and they help us fulfill our First Amendment mission.
We have worked with the Solutions Journalism Network to create a solutions-oriented approach, which means we identify problems, but we also offer ways to consider or solve them. For example, “Costs of Growth and Change in Nashville” was a yearlong series about affordable housing and the rising cost of living. It includes three live forums, 12 columns, and a documentary on how to approach various aspects of the growing problem of income inequality in a fast-growing city.
And the Tennessee Supreme Court once cited The Tennessean’s investigation for why it overturned the juvenile life-sentence law. We’ve made a difference on historical preservation and paying acts of kindness forward.
The Future of the Opinion Page
I don’t know what the future is going to look like for opinion columns. Technology has moved so much faster than I could have ever imagined when I first started, but we’ve managed to adapt as a newspaper company — we’ve managed to survive.
We continue to produce opinion columns because we see value in them. They create avenues for thoughtful discussion and debate, and they help us fulfill our First Amendment mission.
In recent years, many of us have also adapted to new ways of doing opinion work, including videos, podcasts, newsletters, and in-person forums. With the rise of artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT, how will this impact the work we do? That remains to be seen. My statement is not to cast doubt on the importance of the work, but to acknowledge that I don’t have a crystal ball.
Not everybody can do opinion pieces. For some people, opinion is seen as kind of an “extra,” but what we have proven — not just from my publication, but from other colleagues across the USA Today network — is that we do essential work that connects communities.