Framework 3: Engaging People Differently

This framework is about the principles and questions journalists will need to tap into civic life.

By engaging people differently, you can enhance your ability to learn from civic conversations and produce stories for readers that have greater context, meaning and perspective. This will require asking different kinds of questions in civic spaces, listening for different kinds of responses and then using these insights in framing and writing stories.

Importantly, this framework applies not just to finding a community’s civic life, but also to the conversations and interviews you do as you seek to engage people in your work.

A veteran general assignment reporter who lives in and covers South County went to a weekend event in a nearby community. She saw a booth with a lot of people at it and wanted to know what was going on. She discovered that one of the county government leaders was polling people about where they would like a new library. She came back and was planning to write a small brief on the poll.

As she talked about it with her editor, they both realized that South County had figured out a way to build new libraries despite the failure a couple of years ago of a county bond measure that would have provided funding for new libraries. The citizens had figured how to overcome that obstacle. Or, as Karen Lin Clark, South County Editor, put it, “Being where people are, seeing what people are talking about, we realized there’s a much bigger story we could write.”

Key factors for engagement

Meaningful Chaos: How People Form Relationships with Public Concerns, a report prepared by The Harwood Group for the Kettering Foundation, is a good starting point for understanding how and why people engage in public concerns and the implications for journalism.

The report covers nine key factors that The Harwood Group has used in newsrooms across the country (see table below). You can use these factors to understand:

• How people think.
  You can better understand and capture the full, rich and often complex ways that people think about their communities. How they come to form their views on concerns and use words and phrases to describe their views.
• How to engage people in conversation.
  These factors, when carefully applied, can help you understand better the nature of civic conversations and to ask questions that will uncover key aspects of how people are thinking and why.
• Implications for journalism.
  By using these factors you can strengthen your stories. For instance, you will see the context in which a concern or event holds importance to people. You will see that while journalists often frame issues at the extremes, people struggle with being ambivalent. You will also see the connections people make among their various concerns.

On the surface the factors may appear to be rather simple, but as a journalist begins to watch for them in civic conversations and see them interact, their richness and complexity emerge – as do the implications for journalism.

Adapted from Meaningful Chaos: How People Form Relationships with Public Concerns, prepared by The Harwood Group of Bethesda, MD, for the Kettering Foundation, Dayton, OH, 1993.

Listening

Journalists often tell us that when they call a source, they may ask a few questions, take a few quotes and go on to the next phone call. The goal is to obtain information quickly to write a story.

In civic spaces and conversations, your role is different. You are there to learn about the community and to understand it better. The goal should not be to “find the quote.” Instead, it should be to discern patterns in what people are saying, to probe to uncover meaning and figure out how people’s thinking unfolds as they talk.

You also should keep in mind that you will be in a different kind of place. Civic spaces are “owned” by citizens, and journalists need to recognize that they are the outsiders in these spaces. The extent to which you are able to gain insights from people will depend largely on how well you manage the civic conversation.

For instance, you will need to build trust by talking openly with people in civic spaces, engaging them in give-and-take conversations and being clear about the role of a journalist when entering civic spaces. What’s more, you may need to wait to ask any questions until you visit the civic space a few times.

“Even before civic mapping training, we had begun to hold monthly community dialogues in different geographic areas of San Diego County. At one, where we expected to hear about San Ysidro, an often-ignored area of San Diego, we heard instead about a proposed cargo airport. Residents were upset about the plan. They were also upset with the newspaper because they felt we had only covered the government story-not the community story. They also suggested that we were covering the approval process, not the issue of whether a cargo airport was needed.

“They were right on both counts.”

– Karen Lin Clark
South County Editor, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Tips for managing civic conversations and spaces:

1. Take nothing at face value.
Notice what words and phrases people use. Ask people, “What do you mean?” when they use a certain word. Often, people’s words, phrases and entire thoughts mean something quite different than what you might think.

2. Listen for where people get stuck.
Watch for when people seem to want more facts or if a perception blocks them from talking more about a concern. This insight can help a journalist learn where people need more information or need to hear more perspectives on a topic.

3. Ask people to share their contradictions.
Throughout a conversation, a journalist will hear people contradict themselves. Set up the contradiction for people, saying first: “You know you just said X; before you said Y.” Then ask, “I know this can be a really tough issue but what do you make of the two things you said?” or “How do you square those?” The goal is not to “catch” someone but to illuminate what they are struggling with so as to learn more.

4. Piece together what people are saying and test it with them.
Usually people don’t make one all-inclusive statement about what they think or how they feel about a concern. Nuggets of insight emerge over time and a journalist will need to piece those nuggets together. Test with people what they are saying, “This is what I’m hearing: Do I have it right?” or “Is this what you are saying?”

5. Keep in mind the “unspoken” rules.
Different civic conversations and spaces will have their own set of “rules” by which they work. When engaging people in civic conversations, make sure to scope out the nature of conversation, the level of trust people have toward journalists and what these insights mean for how journalist should interact with people.

6. Watch out for preconceived views.
Everyone has what might be called “biases.” Each journalist grows up with his or her own set of experiences, values, and notions – all serve as filters when thinking about a story, asking questions, framing the story and writing it. Beware of possible preconceived views when engaging in civic conversations. Otherwise, it may be hard to hear and learn what these conversations have to offer.

“Our newsroom divides itself into teams and I supervise six reporters. We have gotten those reporters together several times and we said, ‘OK, let’s focus on Mary’s beat.’ Although people don’t know the players on her beat, they can say, ‘Well, I can see (because we write them on a board) you are mainly talking about official people, so let’s try to figure out the other kinds of people on your beat.’

“What I see, and this is the terrific value in civic mapping, is that the reporter sees it too. They don’t really know the other kinds of people on the beat – the activists or the people in social agencies who are plugged into the community. Somebody will say, ‘Do you know that funeral director?’ or ‘Do you know that drug store owner?’ And they’ll say, ‘You know, I really don’t know that person.’ To me this is the biggest leap forward. Reporters realize that there are key people who don’t get paid by the government in a community and they really need to start branching out as to whom they’re touching base with on a regular basis.”

– Jack Keith
Central Team Leader and Editor, The News Tribune, Tacoma, WA