There’s an interesting chat at FiveThirtyEight.com about how journalists can prove they’re not the enemy (and believe me, I’ve got some things to say about this whole bullshit “enemy of the people” garbage being spouted about the media), but I wanted to hone in on a particular aspect of the discussion as I kick off my little navel-gazing series of think pieces about journalism.

One of the suggestions offered up by FiveThirtyEight’s politics editor, Micah Cohen, is this:

Do a better job. I don’t mean this flippantly. A huge share of journalism is sloppy or ill-conceived or surface-level. Much of that is unintentional or seemingly unavoidable — deadlines, resources, etc. But not all those factors are set in stone. I’m pretty sure that newsrooms could put in place some incentives to just improve the quality of their work by, say, 30 percent.

So, about that. Let me address that by talking about the last newspaper I worked at. The Shelbyville News was at the time, and still is, a five-day-a-week newspaper (no Saturdays, no Mondays, and boy, did we always hear about that). The news staff consisted of myself, another reporter and an editor, as well as a part-time clerk. The sports staff was a sports editor and a part-time sportswriter. We had no photo staff; the reporters took their own photos although we were able to use a stringer to shoot sports and other events on occasion. We had no on-site copy desk; all the page layout was done at a hub in another state, and I doubt they were spending a lot of time editing our copy.

This isn’t meant to come off as whiny. It’s just the reality of the newspaper business nowadays (and for quite some time, really). Do more with less. And I know that it’s not just the small town, local papers like Shelbyville that are dealing with those kinds of issues.

For that matter, as much as I gripe about the quality of local TV newscasts, I’m also aware that they’re trying to fill 90 minutes, or more, every weeknight at 5 p.m. And that’s just the 5 p.m. newscast.

My point: yes, it would be great if journalists had the time to really delve deep into the stories they cover. But most of the time, we’re just trying to get the next paper or next newscast or next whatever out the door.

And the idea of introducing incentives to “just improve the quality of their work” would be laughable if it wasn’t so painful. When you’re lucky to be getting paid above minimum wage in these jobs, when you’re not going to get paid overtime even though you’re likely going to work extra hours, when benefits are only there if you’ve got a spouse with a “real job” – well, the companies that own these newspapers aren’t going to be introducing incentives any time soon.

So what’s the solution? Obviously there’s no “one size fits all” answer. But I think Cohen’s other suggestion could help:

Be more transparent. This is really the big one for me. Treat the reader/viewer as an equal, explain how you’re doing the work you’re doing. Explain what assumptions you’re making and what you don’t know.

Now, finding the time to do this would be a challenge, especially at newspapers with limited staffing. But I think that, if I were an editor at one of these smaller newspapers, I would use some of that space we were trying to fill — maybe on the op-ed page? — to share at least a little bit of info on that week’s bigger stories. Why did we write about this? What are we trying to find out? Why is this important to you, our readers?

Maybe that’s a first step to nixing this “fake news” B.S.