Fall 1996
A Listening Exercise
By Karen Weintraub
I was in a church last Dec. 26 when I got an interesting lesson in civic journalism. I was there to cover another installment in a long-standing story about City Council efforts to buy up an historically black neighborhood and turn it into an industrial park. The residents felt the city was trying to buy their heritage for insultingly low prices; the council members believed the city needed the jobs the industrial park could bring. And all of a sudden I realized that they had no idea what the other one was saying. The council members’ view of the situation totally precluded them from hearing the citizens; and the citizens were completely deaf to the arguments of the council members. Instead of just remarking on this to myself, as I would have done before civic journalism, I made it the crux of my story. The piece that appeared in the paper described why the council members were so hard of hearing and what it was about this group of citizens that made them both so passionate and so uncaring of another point of view. I think the story I came up with was far more interesting than the “Two sides clashed last night” piece I could have written, and it was far more truthful. Yes, the groups clashed, but it was more than a screaming match, it was a fundamental miscommunication I thought the public needed to know about. The other thing that happened when I wrote the story that way was that I stopped seeing the residents and property owners as victims. Instead of portraying them as the people who were being run over by that mean-ol’ City Council, I was depicting them as active participants in the process, as people with a point of view that could not be ignored. Doing that made me realize how often I had made people like them into the powerless victims of the process, instead of actors in their own right. I don’t think one story like this can change public policy or opinion on an issue that’s already dragged on for most of a decade, but as I continue to cover it with this approach, hopefully, each side will begin to see a little more of the other’s point of view and the reading public will understand the true implications of their city’s policy. To me, those are worthwhile goals.