Spring 1999
Five Newspapers, One TV Station Inaugurate Harwood Civic Mapping Seminars
Six news organizations have been selected to take part in the first Harwood Civic Mapping Seminars, a series of three two-day workshops designed to improve reporters’ and editors’ capacities to understand and interpret their communities. They are co-sponsored by The Harwood Institute and the Pew Center for Civic Journalism.
Participating will be The San Diego Union-Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, the Tacoma News Tribune; The Denver Post, and the Tampa Tribune with Tampa’s WFLA-TV.
“The Harwood Civic Mapping Seminars are an experiment to help newsrooms tap into new places and alternative sources of news in their local communities,” said Jan Schaffer, the Pew Center’s executive director. “And we are delighted that we have attracted so many adventurous news organizations eager to examine fresh approaches to tapping different layers of civic life in their areas.
“We promise to pass the lessons learned onto other journalists.”
The initial seminar took place March 19 and 20 in Denver. Subsequent seminars will be held in April and June.
Participants will learn the complex approaches and skills to literally map the civic layers of communities and neighborhoods. The approach was first outlined by The Harwood Group in “Tapping Civic Life: How to Report First, and Best, What’s Happening in Your Community,” a workbook based on research at The Wichita Eagle, supported and published by the Pew Center.
“In order for newspapers to report on their communities, they need to understand those communities deeply,” said Richard Harwood, president of The Harwood Group. “Tapping into civic life is an important part of that process.”
The news organizations were selected based on proposals by editors outlining the newsrooms’ needs for a deeper understanding of the complex layering of their communities and the challenges facing their efforts to tap neighborhoods, leaders and communities in developing stories.
The Harwood Institute and its sister organization, The Harwood Group, have spent more than 10 years learning about the relationship between citizens, public concerns and the media – and how these critical relationships can be strengthened. The firm works with many major newspapers and has also led one of the largest initiatives ever undertaken by the American Society of Newspaper Editors – the Journalism Values Institute.
The Pew Center is an incubator for civic journalism experiments that enable news organizations to create and refine better ways of reporting the news as a part of an overall goal to re-engage people in public life. The Center shares the results of various civic journalism experiments with the journalism community through its workshops, publications, videos, and other outreach programs. Since the Center was created, nearly 1,500 journalists have attended 27 workshops on various aspects of civic journalism; more than 6,000 journalists and civic leaders now receive the Center’s quarterly newsletter, and 148 news organizations have participated in 77 civic journalism initiatives supported by the Center.