2000 Batten Award Winner
Savannah Morning News
“Aging Matters”
“A comprehensive and creative examination of the issues surrounding an influx of retirees and an aging community. It stretched the definition of civic journalism in engaging and healthy ways through its use of community forums, polls, focus groups and web interaction. Its compelling information, well-edited and well-displayed, broke a lot of stereotypes. Notable was its inclusivity and the ethnicity of its subjects.”
– The Batten Award Judges
The top vote-getter for the Batten Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism “wasn’t intended to be civic journalism,” according to Sally Vornhagen, the Savannah Morning News quality of life editor.
The paper planned to do a basic five-part series on aging after the staff identified it as the most important issue in the community. But in trying to figure out how best to cover this complex topic, Vornhagen learned about the tools of civic journalism and decided the best way to get at aging was to get community voices into the research, reporting and writing of the stories.
“We did just a wide variety of things to try to get community voices, to hear what people were thinking and to talk to them about how things could change: How we could take resources for senior citizens and put them under an umbrella organization, how we could change legislation in the state of Georgia to reflect this growing population and reflect what we’re going to need in the future,” says Vornhagen.
“We had focus group after focus group after focus group” with various stakeholders, says the paper’s executive editor Rexanna Lester. “We had caregivers. We had doctors. We had lawyers. We had financial planners. We had health-care workers. We had adult protection services people. We had lots of people who had their own agendas on this thing and we tried to decide, ‘Okay, where are the stories?’ And it was so big. It covered so much of our community.”
Vornhagen says the paper also found an economical way to conduct polls by partnering with Georgia Southern University. GSU students conducted telephone surveys in the community. “We didn’t spend a lot of money on our surveys,” she says. “So my recommendation is to find universities that are always going to be there to help out.”
The project has developed into something much larger than the five-part series the paper set out to write. From September of 1999, when the series began running, through the summer of 2000, the Morning News produced some 40 stories, with more set to run by the end of that year. The focus groups helped the paper identify topic areas to explore, including the physiology of aging, caregivers (including seniors who are raising grandchildren), nursing homes, hospices, other living arrangements, the economic issues of aging, seniors and crime and the political impact of a growing senior population.
Each topic was explored through a week-long series of stories that always included the positive side of aging, featuring seniors staying active and contributing to the community.
“Every time we’d do a story,” says Lester, “we’d get a call from the senior citizen activist groups, the centers and hospices and they’d say, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ The number of volunteers really shot up every time we’d write a story so we knew we were hitting something that was going on when we started it.”
Policy makers were paying attention, too. Congressman Jack Kingston launched a series of discussions with grandparents who are raising their grandchildren, with an eye toward federal legislation that could ease the financial burden on this group.
A state legislative panel convened a study committee over the summer to determine what changes the state might make in licensing requirements for nursing home staff and certified nursing assistants.
For David Donald, precision journalism editor who oversaw the paper’s polling, the most exciting aspect of the series was being out in front of an issue that was gaining in importance. “Often times, civic journalism, any kind of journalism, looks at problems that are already developed,” says Donald. “For instance, sprawl is something that a lot of people are concerned about but, to a certain extent, it’s almost too late. We’ve already got the shopping centers and the traffic problems.
“Demographers have a term for what’s happening in this country. It’s called the pig in the python. It’s the baby boomers going through. That’s one of the reasons we started to look at the aging thing, how that’s going to affect our communities. One of the fun things about that is not to be talking about ‘Well, I wish we could have done this’ and what we should have done. But now the community has a chance to decide how it wants to be out in front of the pig moving through the python.”
The Morning News has received support from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism this year for a series on improving education and Vornhagen says the lessons learned through “Aging Matters” are guiding that effort along. “We want to do true civic journalism,” says Vornhagen. “We don’t want to tell the community that this is the issue. What we’re doing now is having the community tell us what their issues are on education. It’s the biggest issue in our community, but which way do we go with the project?
“So what we’re hoping to do, and what we’ve developed into, is true civic journalism, to really let the community voice be heard.”
Photo Above: Savannah Morning News winners (l-r) David Donald, Sally Vornhagen, Rexanna Lester.