Civic Journalism: A Work in Progress

Spring 1998

New Video
Civic Journalism: A Work in Progress

Sit in on a news meeting held in the middle of the newsroom at The Gazette in Colorado Springs to see how this paper is re-inventing itself. It’s all in a new video available from the Pew Center.

Civic Journalism: A Work in Progress focuses on the efforts of Gazette editor Steven A. Smith to create what he calls a “civic culture” in the newsroom.

The Gazette is trying to do civic journalism from the “inside out” — by developing new routines, building new reflexes, listening to new voices, experimenting with new reporting tools, and building bridges to the community.

“My fundamental goal here has been to not do civic journalism on a project level but to do it as part of what we do every day,” Smith says in the video.

By insisting on using a civic vocabulary, Smith is trying to reinforce the direction he wants his staff to take.

“Language is probably the number-one barrier for explaining all this,” Smith says. “Use the term civic journalism in certain quarters and you can feel the lead screens just drop down in front of folks. The idea is to just constantly reinforce the direction we want to go, using the vocabulary we’ve developed.”

By tapping new voices and engaging in more intensive community conversations and other kinds of public listening, The Gazette is finding alternative frames for news stories that are more relevant to readers and that can be applied in other departments, such as sports and arts and entertainment.

“I love talking about sports in civic terms,” Smith says. “If you weren’t up in the press box observing the action but you were down on the field, as a referee, still neutral — referees are neutral just like reporters, with no stake in the outcome — but if you were on the field as a referee running back and forth, up and down, side to side, interacting with the players, how might your view of the game be different from that of the reporter in the press box?”

Smith openly challenges his young reporters to invent their own journalism. “We are not going to give you the templates any more,” he says. “Experiment, break the rules, try something different.”

Boston Globe media writer Mark Jurkowitz recently said Smith was engaged in “one of the nation’s most dramatic journalism experiments.”

A Work in Progress is one of a series of new videos the Pew Center has produced that give step-by-step descriptions of how papers are trying to serve readers better by breaking old habits and using some new tools of civic journalism.