LAist launched Make It Make Sense in March as a short-term newsletter that informed Los Angeles residents about the results of the 2024 primary election. Starting with Election Day on March 5, each newsletter tracked the ballout count and key race results while explaining what the results meant for Angelenos’ lives in L.A. and what was next on the campaign trail.
With more than 80% of Angelenos voting by mail-in ballot, it can take weeks to know the final results, especially in close races. Newsrooms tend to move on from election coverage as soon as Election Night is over, unless there is some kind of scandal related to the vote count, but voters don’t want to move on until they know the outcome of the votes they cast and what that means for their lives going forward. LAist created Make It Make Sense as an answer to that in-between period.
Make It Make Sense didn’t just explain what happened in the primary election, it explained why it happened. Elections are full of confusing processes that can seem like trickery and malfeasance, especially if no one’s answering the question, “Why is this like that?” For example, in states like California with a surplus of mail-in ballots, early returns increasingly don’t reflect outcomes. Newsletters are well positioned to repeatedly explain processes like this in an accessible, shareable way until they sink in, serving a key journalistic tenet of informing readers.
LAist sent 13 editions of Make It Make Sense from March 5 to March 28, maintaining an almost-daily touchpoint with a few thousand readers at a time when reader attention tends to drop off steeply. They harnessed the reporting and expertise of the LAist newsroom to explain what the results said about voters and what they meant for city governance going forward and they employed data visualizations to make numbers-heavy results updates easier to understand. Many of the newsletter editions were repackaged for radio and the website.
