Fall 1996
Civic Journalism: Doing Less Harm
By Karen Weintraub
City Hall Reporter
The Virginian-Pilot
Part of my working definition of civic journalism is to do less harm than conventional journalism.
What exactly does that mean? It means I try to frame my stories to focus on what’s real and relevant to people, on the things that will encourage citizens to take action rather than discourage them from caring.
I think I’ve become a better journalist since I began exploring civic journalism two years ago, as the Virginia Beach City Hall reporter and a member of The Virginian-Pilot’s Public Life Team.
The biggest way civic journalism has changed me is in how I look at readers. I used to view them as the people I was writing at: the guy sitting at home at the breakfast table in his underwear, the retiree who wanted to be entertained.
I no longer see readers as passive. Instead, I write to them as active participants in their civic life, as people with a stake in their communities who care about the outcome of whatever I’m covering.
That puts a burden on me to make clear when and how people can get involved — even if it’s as simple as including a phone number or the time and place of a City Council meeting.
To find a way to make policy-wonk stories relevant to real people, I try to take a mental step back from a story before I start writing, to focus on the underlying values instead of just the surface details. For instance, not a lot of people would automatically see their stake in a story about a proposed development project — maybe the developer, the contractor who would build the houses, and the environmentalists who would fight them. So, instead of writing about the pros and cons of the project or the battle over it, I focused a recent story on the values behind the debate.
When I first heard about the 900-unit retirement community proposed for Virginia Beach, I had just finished holding two discussion groups with citizens as part of our spring election coverage. In those meetings, which we call community conversations, I had heard clearly from two-dozen residents that they wanted growth stopped, that they were sick of endless strip malls and subdivisions.
Then I met with the developer, who had come up with the idea for the project from his own search for a good home for his aging mother-in-law. He presented a convincing argument for the development: It would be unique in Virginia Beach, a place to age gracefully, with friends, family and recreational opportunities nearby.
What I saw after mentally stepping back from the story was a clash of two valid views. That was a story that was far more interesting to me, and, I believe, far more compelling to readers than just another project-stirs-controversy piece that I might have done. I also think the version I wrote was more accurate because it more truthfully reported the complexity of the issue than the story I would have written before discovering civic journalism.
That’s what doing civic journalism means to me: Giving people information in a way that they can do something with it — even if it’s just wrestling with the issue themselves — not so they’re left feeling their political system has failed them. And that’s what I mean about doing less harm with civic journalism.
In this instance, dozens of readers were prompted to write letters to their City Council members and letters to the editor about the issue.
Because I view civic journalism as a philosophy rather than a tool, it doesn’t make sense to me to use it solely for projects or campaigns. That’s like saying I’m going to have journalistic ethics only during election season or when working on a series. For me, the power and importance of civic journalism is the way it has transformed my relationship with readers, but that wouldn’t have happened if I had only used it in half a dozen stories.
The truth is, all this philosophy makes it harder for me to get home in time for dinner. Civic journalism is difficult, it’s frustrating, and it requires more work than conventional journalism — particularly at the beginning. Because it’s still being developed and discovered, there’s no way for me to know if I’ve “gotten it” or arrived as a civic journalist.
I do civic journalism as much day-to-day as anyone else at The Pilot, which does it as much as any other paper in the country. And I still can’t say I know exactly what it is I’m doing. But the exploration continues to fascinate me.
