Opinion: Hearing differing perspectives with Forum
On a bonus episode (first released on April 7, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: People are passionate about their views, and we'll continue to bring you that pulse from readers and listeners like you. Today you’ll hear from Senior Voices Editor Casey Blake about how her team envisioned Forum, a place for people to share their opinions on topics in the news.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Michael McCarter:
Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt, I'm Michael McCarter. In the aftermath of the last November's hotly contested elections, Americans were deeply divided. Artisan rhetoric was tearing communities apart with disrespectful and sometimes even hateful speech, and we thought to ourselves, there must be a better way for Americans to talk to each other, to disagree in a more civilized way while respectfully hearing the perspectives of the other side. So, we created Forum, a new series from USA Today's Opinion team dedicated to showcasing views from across the political spectrum on issues that Americans are starkly divided on. Turns out, our little experiment is working. Here to share more on how readers and listeners have been responding to this new initiative, I'm now joined by Casey Blake, senior voices editor for the USA Today Network. Casey is one of a handful of folks who conceives of and puts together the weekly Forum package. Thanks for joining us on The Excerpt, Casey.
Casey Blake:
Thanks so much for having me, happy to be here.
Michael McCarter:
You were in on the ground floor helping to shape Forum from the start, what is Forum and what were your initial goals?
Casey Blake:
First things first, I have to say, I can't overstate what a team effort this has been, my fellow voices editor, Joel, our audience editors, Louis and Janessa have just been working so hard and are so brilliant and making sure that we're giving readers what we want on this, so I have to give all the kudos to them. But the initial goal really was to create a space where readers could hear each other out in their own words, in a format that sounded like their own words, and especially those who they disagree with. And we wanted it to feel more like a conversation and a dialogue between our readers than a diatribe or a lecture from one reader or one expert.
So, initially we joked about creating a utopian comment section where you can get that pulse that we all crave when we're processing the news, and we want to get a sense of what our fellow humans think about something, but instead of it being scary and combative and toxic, it's a space where everything is fact-checked, and it's a place where you can get that authentic sense of what are people thinking without it being bombarded with attacks or misinformation or that ugly keyboard warrior experience that we've all come to expect online, unfortunately, when we're talking about polarizing topics. So, that was really the vision and the impetus.
Michael McCarter:
Why did Forum make sense for USA Today? Why now, and why this format?
Casey Blake:
Well, I think what's so special about USA Today is just the breadth and depth of our audience, we have a very engaged national audience, of course, like any legacy media organization, but we also have this network of readers who find us through local news organizations that are across the country. And these are folks who may not be hyper national news junkies, following every turn of the screw, but still want that sense of where their fellow Americans stand on these issues, and they want to be informed and to understand where their neighbors are coming from, especially if they disagree with them, that's so important to us. And I also think we have a uniquely diverse audience politically. We wanted a place where readers could come and feel like they were overhearing snippets of kitchen table conversations from people who they might disagree with, or might come from different backgrounds, just talking about how they experience the news in their everyday lives. So, that's what we're going for and that's what we're trying to build.
Michael McCarter:
So, Forum's been running for a while now. Can you give me some broad strokes on how people have been responding to Forum so far?
Casey Blake:
The response has been overwhelming, honestly. Not surprisingly, anything to do with President Trump and the current administration is getting a lot of responses, we had more than 1300 submissions inside of 24 hours on one topic related to Trump and his first 100 days in office, but we've also had some really thoughtful, really personal responses and questions from folks about dating across political lines, about topics as intimate as the decision of whether or not to be a parent, as listeners would have heard before. So, we're getting high volume on really high hot button news topics, but we're also getting these really deep, really personal essays from folks who've been really generous, and it's just heartening to see that grow and to have that trust from readers.
Michael McCarter:
That's great. Has anything so far surprised you?
Casey Blake:
Honestly, the thing that has surprised me most is the number of people who go out of their way to say, "I'm not a political person, or I hate politics," and then go on to write the most impassioned responses about the most hyper-political issues that we're covering. So, I think we're really finding something here about how burned out we all are with the current political moment, and how polarized things feel, but how deeply impacted we all are at the same time, and how much we're feeling it in our day-to-day lives. And we've had responses from all 50 states at this point, I forget which Dakota was the holdout, but we finally got them, and we hit all 50 states. So, we're really getting a diverse sense and starting to see some of these common threads, and a big one is folks both really struggling with the political moment, but feeling it deeply. So, that's a big part of what we're trying to get after.
Michael McCarter:
Many of the initial call-outs for submissions have been focused on President Donald Trump, why did the team choose this as such a major theme?
Casey Blake:
The honest answer is that's what readers are telling us they care about right now, and such an important part of this project is matching what readers are reading, is looking at the topics that they are hitting every day, that they're clicking on, that they're engaging with, and asking them about it. So, these aren't just clicks to us. We are reading all of these responses, we are looking at what they're most engaged with, and each week we are trying to match that and start fresh, and the reality is that this administration has moved at lightning speed in a very short time, and that's just really where readers minds have been. So, that's what we're going to keep asking about as long as it's important to our readers.
Michael McCarter:
And Casey, now that this is going well, what are you looking forward to for the rest of the year? What topics excite you the most?
Casey Blake:
Well, Michael, I'm going to do the thing that we all hate as journalists, and I'm going to not answer that question quite directly, but it's important. The point of the Forum project is that we want readers to tell us what they want to talk about, we want this to be a dialogue. So, we want it to move with the news, and the honest answer there is two weeks from now, I do not know what is going to be at the top of the news, and I don't know what topic they're going to tell us they're interested in. So, whatever we're seeing our readers engaging with most, whatever we are seeing them most passionate about in that Forum inbox, that's what we're going to ask them about, week to week. Whether it's egg prices, or pop culture, or Trump, or whatever comes. So, our hope is just that folks will keep an eye on that forum page, stay engaged, speak to topics that speak to them, and they are always welcome to send us their ideas at Forum@Usatoday.com, and we really are listening.
Michael McCarter:
I love that. The flexibility, the variety, something to come back for every week, that's really good. Well, thanks so much for joining me today, Casey.
Casey Blake:
Thank you so much for having me.
Michael McCarter:
That's all we have time for today. This is a co-production with the Forum team at USA Today, where we invite our readers to weigh in writing on a national topic of interest. If your submission is selected for print, we might invite you to add your voice to future special bonus episodes. There's a link to Forum in the show description. Let us know what you think about this episode by sending an email to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Michael McCarter, vice president of the Gannett Opinion Group. Cody Godwin will be in for Taylor Wilson tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.