Catherine Rampell has done a good service by laying out for her colleagues what they need to do to fulfill their responsibilities in 2024. Here are the two I think are most important: Spend less time reporting on who’s likely to win an election and more on what they’d do if elected. The point of winning elections is, ostensibly, to govern. Yet a voter could spend hours watching or reading presidential election coverage and come away with only a vague understanding of what any of the contenders would do as president. Too often journalists ask candidates questions like “Why are you so far down in the polls in Iowa?” rather than “What would your position on [food stamps/tariffs/banking] mean for Iowans?” Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor, has pithily boiled down our mission as “Not the odds, but the stakes.” These days, Rosen’s refrain is usually quoted in the context of the stakes for democracy (specifically, under another Trump administration), but it’s a good principle for any substantive matter that affects the lives of everyday Americans. We must produce more coverage of what, say, the health-care system would look like under different candidates’ platforms. Also climate, working conditions, immigration, civil rights, taxes, nutritional programs and so on. This is harder to do than just covering the horse race, but it adds more value. People need to understand the stakes.There’s so much cynicism and disinformation out there that a whole lot of people just buy into the fatuous notion…