Spring 1998
Orange County
Newsroom Conversations, New Approaches to News
By Dennis Foley
Fifty reporters, editors, photographers, and page designers shift uncomfortably on hard wooden benches in a cramped room at the 226-year-old Mission San Juan Capistrano. Outside, the sun tries to fight through gray clouds and rain pelts the coin-filled plaza fountain. The blustery wind causes some of The Orange County Register journalists, chilled after seven hours in the dimly-lit room, to zip their jackets tighter. It is “Commencement Day.” The “graduation” ceremony — seven hours of intense conversation fueled by enchiladas, muffins, and Starbucks coffee — marks both an end and a beginning. The end of 11 months of work, talking about what they do, why they do it and who they do it for. The end of 11 months of producing stories and graphics and photos that reflect a different way of thinking about news. The beginning of incorporating those new ways of thinking about stories, sources and their community into the way journalists approach their work every day. It’s also the beginning of the same journey for The Register’s other 325 journalists, who will in smaller groups go through a set of intense conversations similar to the pilot group about what they, their newspaper and community value. Why is the nation’s 22nd largest daily newspaper (daily circulation 350,000), engaged in intense competition from the Los Angeles Times, doing this? Brusic, the No. 2 person in newsroom management to Editor Tonnie L. Katz, sees higher stakes, too. “The community is at stake,” he said. “We are one of the few institutions that tries to make sense of things, to cut through the fog and make connections”What I hope we can do is give people knowledge they can use to talk to one another. Out of those conversations among people you see public policy and civic life emerge. People find out where they fit in. That gives them the power to know and to act.” The risks are great, too, he says. “A lot of people on the staff need to be convinced this effort will do something to improve their work,” Brusic said. “There’s a powerful default mechanism that kicks in. So, when we are not thoughtful, the old reflexes come back. A new way of thinking about our community gives us the opportunity to ask better questions. Reporters can concentrate at getting at meaning rather than just grabbing quotes. This allows us to look at our community in different ways.” One key motivation for the evolution in thinking, Brusic said, was his admiration for the way in which weekly newspaper editors and reporters understand and cover their communities. The Register publishes two dozen such community newspapers. “The weekly editors really are a part of the communities they cover, as opposed to the metropolitan model that says when you get to a certain size it doesn’t seem to matter what people think.” The nation’s fifth largest county, with 2.7 million people, Orange County has 31 cities, a large concentration of Hispanics and Asians and a changing economy fueled by technology (more high tech jobs in the region than Silicon Valley), tourism (Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm) and trade (Pacific Rim). The newspaper needs new tools to connect to its communities and their interests, Brusic believes. Enter the Harwood Group, a Bethesda, MD, research group hired by the newspaper. Harwood leaders provided structure and a process for the newsroom conversations — and shared their experience listening to the public talk about its relationship to the community. Some journalists, inside and outside the pilot group, were skeptical of the newspaper’s motives, concerned that the goal was softer, “touchy-feely” stories that could push out hard-edged reporting. (The newspaper won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.) They bristled at the implication that they were out of touch or were not doing their jobs well. They resented consultants who talked about stories with an unfamiliar vocabulary, using such terms as essence, frame, fence, catalyst, and connector.
“We are defining what things we think are most important,” Executive Editor Ken Brusic says. “And we’re talking about how we can produce a great newspaper. “Through our work, we hope to build a sense of community and of discovery for our readers. I believe that without that sense of community, there’s no need for a newspaper. Unless we can bring people useful news, information, and knowledge we’ll lose them, not in my career, but over time.”
Goals
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Early working-group sessions were stormy. Two turning points came early in the process:
- The Harwood Group conducted a conversation with a dozen county residents, viewed by the pilot group. Out of that came the discovery that growth and related quality-of-life issues had emerged as the public’s key concerns, and that they linked those changes to other worries, such as the quality of education, the impact of immigration, and crime. A major newsroom effort has been launched to examine those connections and the changing communities.
- Internally, the group confronted the job of critiquing its own work and of using the new concepts, tools and reflexes in every-day assignments.
Assigning editors such as Rebecca Allen were initially skeptical.
“We’re journalists, we’re hired to be skeptical,” she says. “The concepts seemed very vague and difficult to apply. But they gave us a shorthand vocabulary that helped us cut to the heart of what the story was about. That’s when it became clear to me that this was going to help.”
Allen worked with her education reporters, one of the newspaper’s highest-profile teams, to consider different places and ways to look at stories. For example, reporter Kimberly Kindy and Allen were already working on storytelling, when the Harwood work was introduced.
“It was hard going at first, because we both were skeptical,” Allen says. “We are extraordinarily busy and there’s a lot of pressure already on the desk. This felt like a burden.”
That feeling eventually gave way, she says. “Once we brought all the concepts to bear and really pushed down on a single story, we learned a lot,” Allen says.
Kindy agrees that early attempts to use the concepts brought frustration.
“I was put off by the jargon. But once I forced myself to use it I began having better conversations with my editor,” she says.
“From a reporter’s perspective, there’s a huge disconnect between what we say and what editors hear. When a reporter asks for another day to do a story, they’re usually asking because they want to get more depth, go out in the community, find more people, so they can tell the whole story. The editor seems to think you want another day to screw off.”
“That means the pressure is on the reporter, because we are a daily newspaper, to sit at the desk, make some phone calls and turn in a story that is weaker and shallower than it should be. The reporter blames the editor and the editor blames the reporter.
“But if we have a uniform way of talking and we agree up front that we share the same values, then there seems to be a willingness to give the reporter some additional time to go out in the community. That results in better stories, which is what reporters want.”
The changes in her work have been subtle, Kindy says, but “I’m finding ways to tell people what really happened, in the proper context, without dulling the story.
“When people go to an event and read about it and say, ‘That’s not what I saw,’ they mistrust the reporter and the whole newspaper. But if you can give the proper context by taking more care, it increases the faith people have that you are telling the truth.”
Allen has been named to lead the rest of the staff through the new conversations. She has helped devise an eight- to 10-week “curriculum.” Groups of 10 to 15 people will meet at least two hours a week, be assigned readings and homework — producing stories as a normal part of their beat coverage — and critique their efforts.
Changing Conversations
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“I was heartened when I asked the original group how they saw the paper in two years and they almost unanimously said they see a good newspaper getting better,” she says. “People all over the newsroom have become leaders in ways they haven’t been before. Other people are going to them to talk about better stories.”
The potential payoffs are great, Brusic says. “Right now, readers don’t think our stories about their communities sound right; they’re not authentic.
“If we accomplish this, we’ll have a better newspaper. And it will be a place where readers will actually believe what’s in the paper.
“We’ll also help build community by arming people with knowledge they can use to make good decisions, say, about their government and schools. They’ll get a better sense of where they fit in the community.
“We’ll be giving them control of their lives.”
Foley, the Register’s politics editor, is part of the pilot group.