New The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Citizen Voices ’99”

“An extraordinary and original editorial page initiative that clearly laid out, not only the background on issues and policy matters in the race for Philadelphia’s mayor, but also the various options for dealing with those issues. It did not make decisions for people, rather it got people thinking about the underlying values surrounding various choices. And it made use of a lot of techniques, such as neighborhood conversations, that you would not expect on the editorial pages. You seldom see an op-ed page put to work as hard as this one.”
– The Batten Award Judges

The Philadelphia Inquirer is a big city daily with a circulation of about 400,000 but editorial page editor Chris Satullo says any news organization, no matter how small, could pull off a public listening project like the Batten Award-winning “Citizen Voices.”

“The whole thing was really run by myself, a half-time person we hired and Harris (Sokoloff) running around in his 22-hour work days while he’s a full-time professor” at the University of Pennsylvania, Satullo said.

Satullo recruited a representative cross-section of several hundred citizens through his column on The Inquirer’s Op-Ed page and also through a separate voter project being conducted by Penn. He invited them to a series of discussions on the issues in the 1999 mayor’s race – a potentially divisive contest in a city with notoriously antagonistic politics.

The editorial board wanted to keep its coverage issues-focused but it wanted to make sure the issues reflected the real concerns of voters. The project guided about 600 people through a process of naming and framing issues. In more than 30 public forums, the participants first zeroed in on five key concerns: education, jobs, public safety, government reform and the quality of life in the city’s neighborhoods. In another two dozen forums, they framed how they saw those issues.

The various discussion groups also came together to determine how to phrase questions for candidates appearing on three televised debates. The first debate, aired before the primary on WPVI/ Channel 6, won its hour in the ratings, reaching 250,000 households.

Prior to the general election, citizens questioned candidates at two other forums aired on Channel 6 and on WHYY public television. Philly.com also hosted two electronic town-hall meetings. And the citizens regularly contributed pieces to the OpEd page about their analysis of issues.

“It’s a terrible thing to sentimentalize citizens,” Satullo said. “Citizens are not experts in anything but their own lives. They tend to be, particularly in Philadelphia, stubborn, cantankerous, dedicated to finding the glass half empty, much more prone to reason from their gut, to favor anecdote over analysis or fact or any kind of statistical information. But they’re all we’ve got if we’re going to make democracy work, so you have to work with them. You have to listen to them. You have to talk with them – and not at them or to them.

“Our project tried to be a model of how you could do that. How you could think through the issues, think through the emotions, think through everything going on in an important political race, along with the citizens and share the fruits of that thinking with the rest of the public, so they could join in.” Participants reported a feeling of connection to the electoral process they’d never experienced before.

“It’s one of the few times I’ve had even the smallest sense of feeling empowered,” said Darcell Caldwell. “It was one of the few times in my life that I felt like a true citizen.”

“It’s a chance to make a real difference without being one of the moneyed interests most politicians listen to,” said another participant, Eric Schopf.

For The Inquirer, the project officially ended on Election Day. But several “Citizen Voices” participants are trying to continue working on their own without the direct involvement of the newspaper.

About 50 citizens are developing a “Citizens Agenda” for the city’s future, which The Inquirer has agreed to publish. A smaller group, about 15 people, is working on establishing an ongoing role for “Citizen Voices” with the help of Sokoloff and Bill Schechter, director of the National Civic League’s Washington, D.C., office.

Sokoloff says the group is not yet sure what kind of organization they will become but they want to encourage more community conversations. “There’s no organization in the city encouraging talking to one another about issues without a special interest,” says Sokoloff. “It’s really exciting to watch citizens try to figure out what their role is and deciding to … tell politicians what they believe the public perspective is. It’s wonderful watching them find their voice.”

“One of the most difficult things,” adds Schechter, “is to convert that energy into an ongoing institution to keep it alive and develop some sort of memory about what happened.”

To Schechter, who has witnessed a number of deliberative projects, “Citizen Voices” is “one of the most interesting things that has happened in a community involving a paper and a cross-section of people.”

“It’s uncommon for a big city newspaper to get involved in a project like this and clearly it’s the kind of thing whose outcome is not always controllable and predictable, so it takes a certain amount of faith and optimism to bring that off. I’m glad they’ve gotten recognized.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer winners (l-r) Chris Satullo and Harris Sokoloff.