Part A. Finding Civic Spaces
The goal of this part of the workbook is to identify the sources who will lead journalists to key civic conversations and spaces in the community. There are three important parts to this work.
GETTING STARTED
Resources on the community exist right in the newsroom. It is essential to start with them.
GOING OUT INTO THE COMMUNITY
There are community leaders and citizens who can offer many insights on the target area and lead journalists to civic spaces and conversations.
KEEPING IT GOING
Don’t try to do everything at once, instead start small and build as the work unfolds.
On the following pages are a series of steps for tapping into a community’s civic life. At first, be sure to follow all these steps. Journalists will find that as they engage more in this process, they can go to the one or two steps that need their attention.
When using this section, be sure to refer to the previous frameworks section.
 The Wichita Experience
Deciding where in Wichita to explore took more than one conversation. Many options were on the table. Should The Eagle focus on a particular issue, such as personal security and community safety and how it moves through a neighborhood? Should it explore two adjacent areas to learn how they each work and the interplay between them? Or should it venture into two very different neighborhoods regardless of their proximity to one another? It was decided to tackle the security and safety issue in the context of two very different neighborhoods. When choosing the neighborhoods, a main question The Eagle considered was which Wichita neighborhoods Eagle reporters thought they knew well, and which ones they did not. They picked one of each. Riverside, a small, well-educated neighborhood of mostly white career professionals was familiar to many reporters; some even lived there. Far fewer reporters had any connection with Northeast, a mostly poor and working-class neighborhood with boundaries much harder to pinpoint. Most residents were African-American. During the work, it became clear that focusing on an issue was not as important as once thought. While some civic spaces were unique to the safety issue, most were not. If a newsroom wants to focus on a particular issue and the civic spaces that relate to it, the focus should be on the issue, which may take the newsroom across a number of neighborhoods.
“CHANGING YOUR WORK REFLEXES” When tapping into civic life, it is important to think about the community as something dynamic — a place where people constantly come and go, where new civic leaders and catalysts emerge and others leave, where new civic conversations and spaces form while others disappear. Efforts to find new civic conversations cannot be accomplished in a single sweep through a community. Rather, such efforts need to become a reflex, a way of approaching journalism. As journalists gain new insights into their community’s civic life, the insights will need to be updated, expanded and better understood. If this work is seen as something that comes and goes, whatever insights are gained eventually will become obsolete. |
