Intervening at the blotter, not the broadcast: Improving crash coverage by targeting police press releases

In this work, we explored an upstream approach to improving news coverage of crashes: improving the press releases written by police. We developed a training program to share best practices and piloted it with 45 officers in New Jersey. We employed an exploratory mixed-methods approach, including a post-training questionnaire and extensive discussions with police officers, journalists, and legal scholars, to understand officers’ likelihood to implement our advice and the barriers they anticipated in doing so. Officers raised concerns about the difficulty of implementing some of the suggestions (e.g., report crash statistics or describe safe systems), pointing to time constraints for the relevant staff. Others disagreed with some of the guidance, principally because they wanted to stick to “just the facts” and avoid legal trouble. Based on this rich data, we carefully refined our guidance in the form of a two-page handout and press release template.