Listening to the Public? Ghetoizing the Job

Often during a typical day in the newsroom, a smart-aleck reporter pipes up: “Hey, Bill, what’s the public saying today?”

My smart-alecky response: “They’re declining comment.”

Welcome to the public journalism ghetto. It’s a place where many journalists trying to do public or civic journalism find themselves these days. While the ethic of public journalism is pervasive at a few newspapers, at many other news organizations this new and evolving approach is practiced mostly at the margins, the mission of one reporter or one team.

Listening to the public? That’s their job.

Maybe by examining how we got there, we might spot some paths out of the ghetto.

My public journalism ghetto was built in the fall of 1995, when I became the public life reporter at The Indianapolis Star and The Indianapolis News. We had been using a public journalism approach in our election coverage for several years. Other projects — such as a race relations series — also featured civic journalism techniques. Our next challenge, one that many newsrooms are facing right now, was how to expand public journalism beyond projects and incorporate it broadly in the daily workings of the newsroom.

Our experiment was to create a beat around the idea. This had many advantages, and some disadvantages. First, the advantages:

• Having been an editor for most of my five years at the paper, I have better connections with the editors here. That helps maintain support for the idea and gives me a way to spread the message throughout the newsroom.
  

• In the rough and tumble of a newsroom, giving someone a beat — a clear set of responsibilities — works much better than asking a person to add extra duties or trying to share duties among a group. That’s a sure way for something to fade away.
  

• My initial editor took the approach that instead of evangelizing other reporters directly, we would prove the worth of public journalism in a way that they would understand and respect — by doing good stories. This has been a watchword for my first year-plus on the job.
  

• Having this be a reporting position places me in the middle of the newsroom’s reporting culture. By example, I think I can evangelize from the bottom up as opposed to the usual method of change in newsrooms — from the top down.
  

• Finally (and to the editors out there, I am joking), having a job that is unprecedented in a newsroom, where no one exactly knows what you do, is great. It’s not like someone can say, “Gee, Bill, you’re not doing nearly as good a job as our last public life reporter.”

Now, the downside:

• Placing responsibility for civic journalism in a reporter position tends to ghettoize the concept. Part of my job is to act as a liaison within the newsroom, but I have found that role is often secondary.
  

  
  The fact that I am a reporter gives me less structural power within the newsroom. More importantly, it gives me less access to information about what stories are being worked on and therefore less opportunity to suggest a civic approach to those stories.
  

  
  

• Finally, I find myself isolated intellectually because few people in my newsroom know enough about the subject to debate it in any meaningful way. This is not meant as a put-down because many of them have complex subjects to tackle. It does mean that I am left in the odd role of defender of public journalism, even dumb public journalism, and not the role I’d prefer — participant in a reasoned debate about how this philosophy might be applied to our work.

Now, for some possible paths out of the ghetto.

First, in my mind, is the problem of language. I know that whenever I use the words “public journalism,” or “framing” stories or any other part of the lingo, I get blank stares or rolled eyes. I place part of the blame on public journalism advocates themselves. It’s fun being part of a secret club with a secret language. It means we’re “inside” and everyone else is “outside.” We put ourselves in the ghetto.

Part of the blame, too, goes to mainstream journalists. I agree with Jay Rosen at the Project on Public Life and the Press at New York University: Journalists are loathe to challenge themselves or one another about how they do their jobs.

At the same time, I agree with Holly Heyser, who was the Listening Post reporter for the San Jose Mercury News in the 10 months prior to last fall’s elections. In that job, she convened citizens regularly to discuss the issues of the campaign and wrote about what they had to say. “It’s all well and good to stand up for civic journalism and I do it all the time. But let’s remember here that our goal is to do better journalism, period. And if lingo about really good ideas if off-putting to some reporters, don’t use it. It really doesn’t matter what we call any of these things. What matters is doing them,” she said in a recent Internet discussion.

Rosen agreed, but said journalists must do more than just “do it.” They also have to think about it.

“I am convinced that doing better journalism doesn’t come just from doing. It comes from doing and reflecting on what you’re doing at the same time. . . So use whatever works. But don’t pretend that the real work will get done unless some sort of intellectual challenge is posed to an anti-intellectual culture,” he said.

What this calls for, I think, is a public journalism approach to the discussion of public journalism.

In the newsroom, it means continually struggling with the sort of language that will connect with other journalists where they are at, not where we are. It means talking to reporters about their stories, paying more attention to what stories and projects are in the works, and sharing information from outside sources — like the Civic Catalyst — with people in your newsroom.

Outside the newsroom, it means networking with those people trying to do this thing called public journalism and paying attention to our intellectual Moseses, like Rosen, who help point the way to the promised land.