Today’s Journalism: An Assessment

 in Fall 1997  tagged Civic Journalists

Fall 1997

Today’s Journalism: An Assessment
June 20, 1997 Keynote Address: Pew Center Workshop, Tiburon, CA

By Max Jennings
Editor, DaytonDaily News


I guess this is as good a place as any to admit something. Some of what I’ve been doing most of my professional life is wrong. Dead wrong.


I’ve spent most of the last 30 years or so as a detached journalist. Or so I thought. I think I even referred to myself from time to time, in certain crowds anyway, as an objective journalist.

Worse, while teaching journalism for seven years at Arizona State University, I even taught students to be detached journalists. I remember giving a failing grade to a student who wrote a story about a Vietnam War protest for the student newspaper on the same day she led the protest march.


Wait a minute. I’m confusing myself here. I’d fire one of my reporters who did the same thing. Only way to maintain credibility, after all.

So where am I coming from, anyway? If I don’t believe any more in detachment journalism, then I don’t believe anymore in accurate, fair and balanced journalism, right? Wrong. This is where I’m coming from: the notion that we never really could be detached or unfeeling or uncaring or objective or any other word you want to put on some kind of alleged emotional state a journalist is supposed to transform himself into before he does the reporting.


I think back on my own career at the things I’m proudest of, and confess they tend to capture moments of history that were a far cry from the notion of detachment.


I wouldn’t have wanted to be “detached” the day I watched a father and his teen-age son alone in an Andean cemetery in Peru burying the last member of their family killed in an earthquake. I would not have wanted nor tried to be detached when writing about the members of a poor Mexican family killed one by one in the bluebonnet fields along the Texas border.


I have another confession to make; this is an even more serious one. I also have been a conflict journalist.

And again, I have taught this concept to my former students, and to my colleagues, and to my employees. Conflict reporting, you see, is the most common, the cheapest, dirtiest, easiest kind of journalism. But, in the end, it often turns out not to be enlightening at all, but rather becomes its own form of distortion.


My third confession is that I’ve spent many years in a position of influence in this business trying to convince my colleagues and employees that we should not admit to ourselves or anyone else that we hoped for a particular outcome as the result of what we wrote.


The thinking, I suppose, was that if we allowed ourselves to think that what we were doing could influence our communities in a particular way, we were violating our trust not to become involved.


Report the facts, just the facts, was the job of the journalist, and the consequences be damned. Otherwise, we could not write the truth, not once we started hoping for a particular kind of outcome.


Perhaps some of you in this audience have similar confessions. If so, those of us gathered here for this conference should have some very interesting discussions, indeed. And we mustn’t forget: Our colleagues will be watching. To many, those of us here are the bad boys and girls of journalism.


I would argue that what, for lack of a better term, we call civic journalism holds great promise for leading us into new ways of doing our work.


So where are we headed? I would argue we journalists seem to be divided into three camps — those who long for yesteryear, those who advocate for change, and those who just drift with the tide.


The yesteryear journalists seem to be those who are most alarmed about civic journalism. They have been vociferous. Yet, when these critics go on to describe what they think is good journalism, I find myself in total agreement. The critics of public journalism talk as if it excludes the hard-hitting story, as if it excludes comprehensive local news, as if it gets in the way of such notions as fairness and balance and even accuracy.


Now that he’s teaching, my old colleague Bill Woo, former editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, seems to have more time to stand up for what he would describe, I guess, as traditional journalism.


It’s hard for me to understand exactly where Woo and friends are coming from in their attacks on public journalism, which they also link in the same breath with criticism of consultants, think tanks, researchers and foundations interested in the media.


The technique of these public journalism critics is simple and simplistic. They set up as straw men distorted versions of what they describe as civic journalism and then knock them down. The debate probably is healthy, but it’s frustrating, nonetheless.



Alison St.John, reporter, KPBS-FM, San Diego. (Top) Jennings and Nancy Conway, Oakland Tribune executive editor, are among workshop participants.

Woo and friends, and he has many because he’s a smart and respected journalist, offer, in place of doing things differently, such sage advice as stop listening to consultants and do hard-hitting reporting.


The assumption here — and I believe a wrong one — is that if we do hard-hitting journalism, it can’t be civic journalism. It can’t be journalism guided by listening techniques that show us how to better relate it to our readers. It can’t be journalism that answers the questions our readers want to know rather than the questions of editors.


Woo told the California Society of Newspaper Editors his kind of traditional journalism has no ready market among what he called “consultants, think tanks, and for which our new paymasters, the foundations, are not interested in making grants.” He took special aims at conferences like this one, saying foundation money by definition is promoting an ideology.

As a journalist of 30 years, I, too, want, admire and promote the notion of the hard-hitting story. In my heart, I still want to send bad guys to jail, expose political corruption and be a voice for the voiceless.


But I also recognize that what I want and what the readers want may be two different things. Indeed, this seems to be almost certainly the case.



Carmen Carter, reporter, Cincinnati Post (left) and Nena Baker, reporter, Portland Oregonian.




Since journalism began in this country, old white men like Benjamin Franklin have made most of the decisions governing newspaper content. And the same values certainly have guided broadcast news as well.


We older white men for decades have framed the nation’s news coverage in the same old ways, through the same personal filters, using much the same type of reporter methodology.


It may be finally catching up with us in the age of new media. The decline in television news viewing seems to parallel the decline of newspaper readership. So, it is pure folly to say we don’t need to examine new approaches, gather new information, make new analysis and set new courses for the news media.


Yet, Woo and his ilk would say that focus groups, consultants and public journalism are unlikely to bring readers back. Rather, he says imperiously, we were right all along in choosing to source our stories through the politicians, the college professors and the bureaucrats. He says he is doubtful that the opinions of the man or woman on the street will shed as much light on a complicated issue as can these traditional sources.


Herein, I think, is mainstream thinking in the news media. Why else, in the face of overwhelming evidence that our credibility is declining, would we in the media continue business as usual?


A new study by the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors tells us we have not met the expectations of news consumers. It’s the biggest study of its kind in 10 years.


One message the respondents had for all the media is that what they want and what they get are significantly different. Three-fourths of the respondents said they wanted the media to be fair and accurate, but only about 50 percent thought they achieved that.


Almost three-fourths of the respondents said they wanted the media to look for solutions and not just problems. More and more consumers of news believe the media are biased.


All of this suggests a fundamental rethinking about the state of American journalism, and it’s well-timed… We’ve got to do a lot more than just talk about reviving local news and producing hard-hitting stories just like we did in the old days.


If we start to think of ourselves in fundamentally different ways, we will have begun a very important journey.


In a June meeting of media executives discussing the impact of the Internet, a stunning revelation came from New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who said, “I am not in the newspaper business.” Instead, he said, his business was collecting and editing the news. Distribution was not a critical issue.

Lawrence Young, Managing editor, Arlington Morning News.
I guess I’m ready to agree with Arthur Sulzberger. It’s quite evident to me that content is king and delivery can and should become an afterthought. There are going to be countless forms of delivery, but not countless forms of the kind of content we produce so well.


Although it’s easy for virtually anyone to become a publisher/ broadcaster on the Internet, it doesn’t mean our traditional news sources won’t be more valued than ever… We may be in the best shape ever if we produce unique content that is useful, relevant, accurate, fair and balanced. People will want useful information they can depend on, and they’ll be more and more confused about where to find it. Familiar “brands” will be important, as the marketers would say . . .


Our salvation will be in our usefulness. It’s one of the reasons I was so attracted to the notion of civic journalism… I saw in it a way to fundamentally think through what we news gatherers do. Without being smug about it, I don’t think some of my fellow editors have done this, attempted to do it, or even seen a need to try to do it.


For journalists to change, the kinds of admissions I made earlier are necessary. We have to agree that conflict reporting is wrong-headed and even misleading.


We all know how conflict reporting works. Name the issue — abortion, gun control, taxes, traffic, inflation — and we experienced folks can grab our Rolodexes and make the calls to get the quotes that are sure to be lively, entertaining, and if we’re lucky, provocative. This usually produces great quotes on the best side and the worst side — the polar extremes — of any issue so we could claim balance and fairness.


These sources, by the way, usually want to be quoted. They make themselves available, and they know how to talk for a quote… Bill Woo says that these sources, the politicians, bureaucrats and academicians, have been studying their respective issues for years and therefore are most legitimate.


It was through my newspaper’s association with the Kettering Foundation and its interest in the nature and process of civic journalism that we began to explore the whole notion of framing stories. It was novel to consider the idea that we would begin our reporting by first engaging in a process of listening to what Kettering president David Mathews calls the “quiet inner voices” on an issue . . .

The challenge I’d like to put before you is how do we in the media begin to include the middle ground in addition to the inevitable conflict reporting? Walk into your newsroom and ask your reporter to go out and find the “quiet inner voices” on his beat and you’ll get that special look they reserve for editors in such situations. They don’t know how to find those people. They have not been trained to do that nor have they even been asked.

Learning to frame our news coverage in ways that really relate to the needs of our readers and viewers is a daunting task.

My own newspaper has attempted time and again to do this. We did one major project called “Kids in Chaos.” After a particularly horrifying series of violent events, we mounted a community wide effort to discuss youth violence in as many ways as possible.


We had a similar project for the 1996 election that we called “Your Voice Your Vote.” We assembled a panel of 200 ordinary citizens to meet five times during the course of the campaign to discuss the issues. We attempted to frame our coverage around those issues, and not around the issues introduced by the candidates.


Frankly, I can’t claim revolutionary results. “Kids in Chaos” did leave behind two dozen community organizations pledged in some way to work on the problem of youth violence. Our panel of citizens loved their experience, but was our coverage changed so profoundly that the average reader seemed to notice? We did not research this, but I suspect the answer is no.


Earlier this summer, we and our media partners completed a series of reports on urban sprawl, concluding with a community forum attended by more than 350 persons. The praise is still rolling in. Our community seemed to think it was of great public service and that it could lead to important new public policy. We’ll see, but this stuff is very hard to measure.


No matter what, it’s certain we’ll also continue to cover conflict, and we’ll continue to do the traditional hard-hitting stories we know so well. And we will not compromise our standards of fairness and balance and accuracy.


But we can be of far greater service to this nation and our communities and our news organizations if we embrace the notion that we can and should do more than just report the day’s headlines in the context of the greatest possible conflict we can find.


There is no danger in reassessing our role like this. Indeed, there is great urgency for us journalists to abandon the notion of “detachment” and instead learn to engage and listen. Really listen, before we report.