Civic Journalism Is… True Stories from America’s Newsrooms
Civic Journalism Is…
About helping people take action.
Sue Deans
Assistant Managing Editor/Sunday
Denver Rocky Mountain News
There was a neighborhood near the Myrtle Beach Sun News called Racepath, where drug dealers would shoot out the street lights and people were afraid to go outside. When I was the editor there, we wrote a series of stories about Racepath. But we also took the extra step of devoting a full page to a list of things the people in Racepath needed to create a cleaner, safer neighborhood.
They needed volunteers, bullet-proof streetlights, heavy equipment to remove abandoned mobile homes, building materials, playground equipment. The university in town agreed to take phone calls from people offering help and we prominently displayed that phone number. So instead of reading the stories and saying, “That’s awful, but it has nothing to do with me,” people could see that there were some specific things they could do to help. And they called that number. And in less than two years, Racepath achieved its goals. We went over when they were turning on the new streetlights, and the streets were clean and children were outside playing and everybody was happy.
To me, civic journalism takes good reporting a little bit further and helps people figure out what they can do to solve the problems we write about.