TAPPING INTO A COMMUNITY’S
roots can make your journalism more complete and compelling. That’s because it will allow reporters and editors to:
GET IT FIRST
Journalists will hear about events, trends, and people’s concerns long before they reach the community’s official world of politics and institutions, where they tend to get framed in official jargon and technical terms. In Wichita, for example, a Harwood Group researcher found that a local supermarket was planning to close – and what the closing meant for the people and their neighborhood. This was months before Eagle reporters knew, and before the story had become part of the official community debate, where people’s concerns often get overshadowed.
EXPAND SOURCES AND VOICES
As journalists dig deeper into their communities they will discover an expanded group of “Go To” civic spaces and sources to understand community concerns and events better. These sources will provide authentic community voices and perspectives, allowing a newspaper to reflect more accurately the “wholeness” of the community.
ASK BETTER JOURNALISTIC QUESTIONS
This work can help journalists gain insight to frame tougher and more probing interviews, not only with citizens, but with a mayor, business leaders, and other sources for news. For instance, having a deeper understanding and sense of context, of people’s concerns on a particular problem like youth violence can prompt a journalist to ask a superintendent of schools probing questions about how a recent proposal reflects people’s concerns; and if not, how the proposal relates to those concerns.
SEE MORE POSSIBILITIES FOR FRAMING STORIES
By tapping into civic life, journalists can gain a rich sense of the dimensions of community concerns, issues and events; the context in which people think about a topic or challenge; the various perspectives that are in play (moving from perhaps two to many perspectives); the emotions at work; the ambivalence people experience and the nature of their struggle to make sense of things; and the language people use. These and other kinds of insights can lead to new possibilities for framing news stories.
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WRITE HARDER-HITTING STORIES
Often when journalists hear about tapping into civic life, they groan and say, “We don’t want to write ‘soft’ stories. We need to keep our edge!” doing this work can help journalists create an even sharper edge by knowing what and how the community thinks; gaining a clearer sense of the underlying tensions that are at work; uncovering the different dimensions of concerns, perspectives and voices. These and other insights can help journalists produce stories that report authentic tension rather than conflict that is based on extreme views and often leads readers to turn away from a newspaper’s pages.
IMPROVE STORY AND PLANNING MEETINGS
By tapping into civic life, journalists can bring deeper insights, more probing questions, a stronger sense of personal engagement, and new ideas to story and planning meetings. This is a critical part of how tapping into civic life can truly help to strengthen the newsroom’s daily product.
CREATE MORE MEANINGFUL NEWSROOM CONVERSATIONS
Informal newsroom conversations are where a lot of daily work and breakthroughs occur for journalists. Tapping into civic life – and encouraging the newsroom to talk about what is being learned in every-day conversations – will improve the ability of individual journalists and teams to work smarter and harder.
BRIDGE CIVIC LAYERS
People in communities often have trouble connecting, for instance, their neighborhood conversations to discussions they hear in civic meetings or public hearings. Newspapers can help people see those connections (when they indeed exist) by coverage that bridges the different layers of civic life. For instance, as people talk about education in their neighborhood, they also want to know how their concerns connect to a civic association or a school board discussion.
UNCOVER JOURNALISTS’ PRECONCEIVED VIEWS OR BIASES
People who gather information and write come to their jobs with their own personal experiences, ideas, and beliefs. By aggressively tapping into the dimensions of civic life – its rich mixture of voices, perspectives, tensions – journalists can begin to uncover and understand their own preconceived views and, while not abandoning them, perhaps be more aware of them in their reporting.
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