By Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center for Civic Journalism
Knight Journalism Fellows Reunion
Stanford University
June 20, 1997
Is it still possible to do good journalism amid these seismic upheavals? I think yes. But not by maintaining the status quo. Furthermore, I suggest that the status quo is not very good journalism and not deserving of the hand-wringing going on these days in a lot of newsrooms.
I’ve had the chance in the last couple of years to step back from the grind of putting out daily sections of The Philadelphia Inquirer, to step back from the small screen of my computer and look at our profession on a big screen.
I’ve also again and again found myself “on the other side” of the news — as the subject of stories — and the level of sloppiness and inaccuracy I’ve encountered has been a sobering, distressing experience. I would recommend a tour “on the other side” to every journalist. It’s an eye-opener.
I’ve come to the conclusion that while, sure, there is some excellent journalism out there — not all of it is good. In fact, a fair amount is quite broken. And this brokenness is increasingly being documented: 56% of the American public think the press is often inaccurate — and in my experience I have to agree.
And they think television is more accurate than newspapers. They think the media is biased, opinionated, sensationalistic. They think we emphasize bad news too much and we intrude too much on the privacy of others. This all comes from very recent surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
Who did the public blame for the Richard Jewell case? The law enforcement folks who leaked it? Nope, the media that reported it. Who did the public blame for the Dallas Cowboys rape allegations? The police? Nope, the media.
In fact, it’s so broken that Steve Brill, creator of The American Lawyer magazine, is seeking venture funding for a clone, a magazine that will take arrogant, lousy journalists to task just like its counterpart did to lawyers. Imagine someone who actually sees mass-market potential in a publication that bashes journalists.
For many of our colleagues, it will be like the Great Adventure waterslide: One day, they’re at the top of the celebrity ladder; the next day they’re doused at the bottom of the pool.
Can we still do good journalism? I would ask by whose measure?
- By what other journalists think is good journalism? A scoop, an incremental advance, some cosmic investigative series?
- By what public officials think is good journalism — because it adopts their spin?
- Or by what our readers think is good journalism — because it helps them find their way out of their confusion, tells them something they didn’t know, gives them information they need to play a rolein our democratic enterprise? Readers, after all, are — or should be — our primary audience.
The editor of a weekly paper in Tampa, Fla., recently told me how he struggled to frame stories about the privatization of a local public hospital. He said the St. Pete Times and the Tampa Trib were all doing articles about winners and losers, but he found that a discussion group of citizens scratching their heads over much more basic issues. Such as what does it mean to privatize a hospital that no long receives public funds? Would the new entity still care for the community’s needy? And what were the options to privatization? For the first time, he said, he felt assured of what he should be covering.
If we keep going down the current path, I don’t think good journalism will result. And corporate bean counters and the Internet will not be all to blame. Journalism needs to change — and I’ve come to learn that change freaks journalists out — even change that seeks to get them back to their core values.
What are some of the changes I think are needed?
- We need to figure out not how to give readers what they want, but to give them what they need. And we should not assume that we automatically know what that is by virtue of holding a title “editor.”
- We need to listen to our readers — and viewers — not to pander to them, but to figure out what’s missing and how to engage them. It means listening, instead of interviewing. Having conversations instead of grilling them.
- We need to break out of the conventional wisdoms that are currently straitjacketing so much of our coverage. Is it possible for us to write a story about PBS without assuming everything it does is mired in its funding status? Or closer to home, to write about civic journalism without falling into a four-year-old convention of calling it “controversial” and framing it as a debate, pro and con/ Will a reporter think of it or an editor allow it?
- We need to open up our news coverage: To appreciate and do the legwork to show that there are more than two sides to most stories. And to convey to our readers that truth may be a plural — not a singular — word, depending on the point of view. Again, the Tampa example comes to mind. Sure hospital board members were pitted against citizens. But there was a whole group of African Americans who had yet other issues, namely broken promises.
- We need to get back to some basics. Consider that competitive pressures have long caused some of our most respected newspapers to give up the two-source rule of attribution and to require that comment and responses be !–#include virtuald in the same news cycle as the original allegation itself.
- We need to change our recruiting practices and bring new types of people into our newsrooms.
- We need entrepreneurs and risk takers — who will find new groups of news consumers and develop the products to meet their needs. Who will break out of the box and enter joint ventures with local magnet schools or religious groups who may fulfill a journalistic function — if we guide and train them.
- We need to let go of our words — and, yes, this hurts some. But I think we need to hire fewer wordsmiths wed to long narrative stories. We need to include in the mix some other kinds of information purveyors — people who can tell readers about issues in quick charts and grids — just as ably and as beautifully as a well-crafted story. And for our writers, we need to develop some new writing styles that will better synthesize complex webs of concerns, abandon less useful anecdotal leads (there is no “everyman” any more), and respond creatively to space constraints with serializations or other new ideas.
- And we need a new cadre of leaders — people willing to experiment and improvise. People willing to let go of an inverted pyramid that was invented in the Civil War. People who are not going to keep looking over their shoulders and wonder what their buddies at ASNE will say — but will have the courage of their convictions to carry on.
The goal of all of this is to build a better product: One that meets today’s information needs, that will stand the test of time and that the public can rely on. These are the challenges that the rest of the business world faces every day — so perhaps the guidance of some corporate moguls might be useful. I think it’s time to stop pointing our fingers at Walt Disney or Westinghouse, at Bill Gates or Bell Atlantic. I think it’s time to stop whining and hitch up our pants and get about the business of improving our business. Change is all around us. The bottom line is that we have to change too, or we will be as dead as every other institution that refused to change in the middle of change.