Winter 2002
Tell Us Your Civic Journalism Story
By Jan Schaffer
Pew Center
Executive Director
The Pew Center will sunset at the end of this year after 10 years of nurturing civic journalism experiments in newsrooms around the country.
It will be a year to continue our work with training resources and workshops – on civic journalism, civic mapping and interactive news. It will be a year to celebrate all the progress that hardworking, cash-strapped newsrooms have accomplished over the decade.
With a little imagination, a lot of legwork and a good sense of their mission, news organizations have made great strides in creating some new forms of journalism that engage their communities much more interactively. This journalism tries to treat people as players in a self-governing society, not just passive spectators.
At the same time, these journalists have coped with community change, technological change and professional change. In the end, many have come out realizing that while good writing and good reporting matter, relationships matter, too. The relationships we have with our communities.
Once we get the relationships right, they will lead us to the right news-delivery platform.
We, at the Pew Center, feel privileged to have had the opportunity to work with so many creative news people.
We are pleased that we’ve been able to jump-start so many pioneering ideas and then spread updates to the rest of the industry.
We believe it’s our job to help news leaders build their legacy as they try to figure out how their journalism needs to connect to their community as we move into very different times.
Journalism is no longer monolithic. No one size fits all. It’s up to individual news outlets to figure out the best fit for their community.
Those who have been in the vanguard of this grand effort that we call civic journalism tell us they feel very good about where their experiments have taken them. They were very well-positioned for the arrival of the Internet. They were well-positioned to cover growing communities of color. They were well-positioned to localize the fallout of Sept. 11.
Document the Legacy
Now we want you to tell us more. As part of our effort to record and preserve a valuable legacy, we invite reporters, editors, news directors and professors to tell us how civic journalism has changed their jobs and their professional vision.
If you participated in a civic journalism project, attended a workshop or used civic journalism training material, let us know if it made a difference in your coverage or in the way you perceive your job or your community.
As always, we will do the legwork to report on your efforts and share your stories with others.
Send your stories to program manager Dana Clark Felty at news@pccj.org or call us at 202-331-3200.