By Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center for Civic JournalismColumbia University, First Amendment breakfast, May 24, 1995 – Last month, I was at a conference at Apple Computer in Cupertino. And this gathering, in particular, crystallized for me some of the obstacles — and opportunities — of the new media — or new communications revolution — for journalists. Especially civic journalists.Present were several hundred tech weens, librarians, community network developers, entrepreneurs.
There was a recurring refrain: It was the search for stories — narratives about ideas and solutions that were working in one community that could be shared or transported to other communities. The power of prose — ON-LINE.
Stories? Narratives? Where were the journalists?
They were not to be found here. Nor would they have been particularly welcome. For another common refrain was the contempt in this crowd for the media. After all, journalists were “traditional gatekeepers” — and in the new communications revolution, citizens will be empowered to bypass such intermediaries and access their information directly — from original sources, from the wires, from one-on-one dialogues with other people. Free information, unfettered at last from the news-hole and the air-time constraints of newspapers or broadcasters.
“Journalism is for journalists,” were the complaints over dinner. “It’s about threatening those in power. It’s not about empowering others.”
“Journalists live in a cocoon that has nothing to do with the real world.”
Ironically, this conference was all about folks who wanted to run their OWN community newspapers. Only they wanted to do it ON-LINE.
And it was just another lesson in how far journalists have fallen, how much credibility we’ve lot, how eager some people are to dismiss us from their lives and replace us with alternative sources of information.
And it’s all ratified by the numbers: latest circulation figures show punishing declines for nearly every major newspaper in the country — down 4 percent for the LA Times, 7 percent for Newsday, 5 percent for the New York Daily News.
People admit they’re not reading and watching. A recent Times-Mirror survey showed that only 45 percent of respondents had read a newspaper the previous day — down from 58 percent a year ago. Same with TV news: 61 percent said they had watched network news the previous day versus 74 percent a year ago.
Then, as you all read, on Monday another Times-Mirror poll shows a gaping cultural divide between journalists and the public.
- Sixty-six percent of the public think journalists are too focused on misdeeds and failings of public figures — about the same percentage of journalists disagree.
- Sixty percent of the public think the press is too adversarial — about the same percentage of journalists disagree.
- The public says the press has made too much of Bill Clinton’s character and Whitewater problems and gives journalists a C; the press thinks its had done a good job covering the administration and grades itself a B.
So, there’s a lot of public discontent with media out there and it’s not all aimed at tabloid or sensational journalism.
Long before this study came out, journalists began recognizing that they were not connecting very well to their readers and viewers. Civic journalism is one attempt to address that. I can’t promise you that civic journalism will fix all the problems. But for editors and news directors who are trying it, they are getting some encouraging results.
OK, a definition.
Civic Journalism is simply an effort by journalists to reach out to the public more aggressively in the reporting process– to listen to how citizens frame their problems and what citizens see as solutions to those problems.
Civic journalists strive to go beyond their dog-eared Rolodexes filled with the phone numbers of elected officials and experts willing to render their verdicts on the issue du jour. Instead, they try to tap into the wisdom of the American people, giving citizens a bigger voice in describing the forces that affect their lives. Sometimes these listening exercises occur through polls and surveys, through town halls and focus groups, or through more intimate “living room” or “kitchen” conversations, often convened by a local newspaper or television station.
Usually, journalists discover that citizens are pretty smart at pinpointing the problems. And pretty creative in suggesting what can be done about them.
Journalists find this information enriches their report and gives them road maps to do what they do best — add value, bring in context and analysis — so they can give citizens the information they need to increase their participation in the civic life of a democracy.
When citizens begin to hear their own voices in the media, when citizens have an opportunity to discuss and debate issues in common, an interesting energy evolves and they are often inspired to get involved, take action — participate in the life of their community.
There is a concern among some journalists that we are teaching something called “learned helplessness” in our news coverage. We do this in two ways: By buying into the expert view of things or the hopelessness view.
The expert view suggests that our problems are so great that only the experts are qualified to speak about them. Nobody else is worth quoting.
The hopelessness view occurs when we don’t find sources to quote who have the sense that the problems we’re writing about are no more difficult or insurmountable than problems we as a nation have solved in the past.
This isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even particularly new. It’s the same kind of thing the small town newspaper editor used to do when he walked out his front door to have lunch in town and ended up chatting with half a dozen people along the way and learned what was on their minds. It’s the kind of information that journalists used to gather off-hours — at their churches, their PTA meetings — except not as many journalists have the time or inclination for such things these days.
Mind you, though, talking to the public is a scary proposition for some journalists. They balk, they make excuses. They say this is pandering to the public. They say this might make them less objective.
But editors and news directors who have used civic journalism techniques talk of epiphanies, of the sense of connection. They say they will never return to the old ways of doing journalism.
It’s amazing what you learn when you talk to the public. For one thing they don’t talk in terms of scorecards, who’s winning who’s losing, who’s up in the polls, who’s down.
Citizens talk about very basic things, often local things.
Take Charlotte, N.C., where the Charlotte Observernewspaper and WSOC-TV, the ABC affiliate, decided to tackle crime in a joint effort called “Taking Back Our Neighborhoods/ Carolina Crime Solutions.” But they did it by first sending reporters out into some of the city’s worst-hit neighborhoods. They talked to community leaders, they convened a town hall meeting, reporters spent the night in the community. And only then did they write their stories. Seven neighborhood profiles, to date. Seven different tales of how those residents view their problems.
And just as importantly, seven lists of very specific things that residents said their communities needed: recreation centers, baseballs and bats, uniforms for the girls’ drill team.
Not the stuff of local ordinances, or state statute. So, a bank raised its hand and donated $50,000 for a new recreation center; 18 local law firms volunteered to filed public nuisance suits, pro bono, to close crack houses. And one woman who knew how to sew raised her hand and said “I can make those drill-team uniforms” — and those girls were so proud they didn’t want to take those uniforms off to go to sleep.
Readers and listeners just needed a road map of what other people needed and they were happy to volunteer.
Another secret to Charlotte’s success: each profile of crime is accompanied by, if you will, profiles in courage, of people in these neighborhoods who succeeded despite the odds in overcoming a problem.
These are the stories, the prose narratives, that the public access computer networks are looking to share.
In Madison, Wis., “We the People/Wisconsin” — one of the nation’s longest-running civic journalism projects — has invited citizens to draft their own state budgets, vote on which health plan they wanted, and quiz all kinds of state and national candidates for office. Again and again, they have discovered that citizen involvement can made a difference.
One of the best examples happened last fall, during the gubernatorial debates. Three locations throughout the state were hooked up by satellite to debate-central. And from Eau Claire, Wis., a citizen wearing an American flag shirt raised his hand. Oh no, the executive producer groans, thinking this man is surely a nutcake. But the guy ended up asking the best question of the campaign. It was Page One news around the state the next day.
He simply demanded that the candidates deliver, in writing, their specific plans for property tax reform — and deliver them two weeks before the election. The candidates were stunned for a second — because they had managed to avoid this through the whole campaign. And then they gulped and said — “OK.”
It just showed the benefit of a citizen asking the question. The candidates brushed off the journalists, but they couldn’t kiss off the citizen. Besides, a journalist asking that question would have sounded arrogant.
This year, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism is funding 12 civic journalism efforts around the country. In Rochester, N.Y., dealing with education; in Tallahassee, Fla. with a community dialogue; in Bergen County, N.J., with the Quality of Life; in San Jose, Calif., with legislative reforms. In every one, a newspaper has teamed up with a radio or television station in its market.
And the projects keep taking surprising twists and turns.
Last month, The Bergen Record tried an experiment that brought three local cable companies — TCI, Time-Warner and Comcast– into a civic journalism exercise that invited citizens to call in live questions to elected officials. Seventy citizens called, asked great questions and the experiment was such a success, it’s going to continue in an expanded form.
Tallahassee has invited its residents to participate in a three-year dialogue about the future of the community, called The Public Agenda. In December, the Tallahassee Free-Net devoted two hours exclusively to the project, and more than 300 citizens called in to chat on-line. It was such a hit that the Free-Net has just added 30 more phone lines for more chat sessions.
Mario Morino, of the Morino Institute, says that the new Communications Revolution is marked by a number of phenomena, including:
- a level of interaction that allows every participant to be a producer of information as well as a consumer;
- the struggle for future market position among the converging telecommunications, entertaining, publishing and information technology industries;
- and the growing populist communications movement in which forms of public access networks allow people to make their voices heard and develop their own means for solving problems.
Civic Journalism finds itself at the crossroads of a number of these currents. It’s interactive in that it seeks to get reporters — and their editors– out in the community, talking and listening; in future market positioning, it seeks to help restore credibility and meaningfulness to newspapers and broadcasters who seem to have lost both; and it’s populist in that it seeks to give the public a voice in the communications process.
And from what we’ve seen, the public likes to be invited into the process and, once they get there, they have something worthwhile to say.