What is News? Broadening the Definition

Fall 1997

Jeannine A. Guttman
Editor, Portland Newspapers

If you want to get a sense of how disconnected journalists can be from their communities, try explaining the concept of “news” to a reader.

At a recent meeting in Portland, Maine, a group of journalists met with a Bowdoin College ethics professor to talk about our ongoing “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” project.

From an academic standpoint, Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. was interested in public journalism’s efforts to reinvigorate communities by framing stories through the lens of citizens.

During our meeting, he asked why we always published the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” stories on the covers of interior sections. “Why aren’t they on the front page?” he asked.

We tried to explain the hierarchy of news play and how more weighty stories — coverage of a local flood, a fire, the governor’s health care program, etc. — tended to push off the citizen saga.

“In some quarters of journalism, what the 40 citizens of Sanford, Maine, are doing isn’t really news,” I said. “In fact, the amount of reporter time, photographer time and newspaper space that we have given to this project is somewhat controversial. There are some editors who wouldn’t even cover this event. To them, a group of citizens sitting around in a church basement, talking about civic engagement, is not news. Nothing is happening.”

“Maybe I don’t understand what news is,” Glaude said.

We tried to explain: News is anything of significance that happens to a community or that affects a community — from government activity to commerce, crime and social trends. It’s something new — that people probably don’t know about. Something novel, unusual or counter intuitive. Something that has wide impact and importance, that transcends the immediate event.

“But,” said Glaude, ” you just told me that the citizens of Sanford have spent the past two years talking about ways to improve their community. They’ve deliberated as a group, questioned candidates and worked all these months to tend to the democracy of their town.” Yes, we nodded, that’s exactly what they have done.

“Then I have only one question: How is that not news?” The journalists at the table were caught short; we stared at one another.

Glaude was right. What the citizens were doing was very newsworthy. They had educated themselves on issues, they had met with candidates for the presidency and for Congress. They had grilled the governor. They had brought in local Sanford officials, from the school board to the parks and recreation department, to learn more about the governmental structure of their town.

Their aim: to understand the inner mechanics of government, to focus on areas that weren’t working and to roll up their shirt sleeves and help. The Sanford citizens focused much of their energies on education and improving the learning environment in their local schools.

What if a group of selectmen or legislators had done the very same thing? Such a gathering would be called a charter commission or blue-ribbon panel. The group’s meetings would receive high-profile coverage by the media, which would cover the spectacle gavel to gavel.

But when citizens grab the reins of the democracy, the act doesn’t capture media attention. Disturbingly, we tend to cover government as though it were an oligarchy, not a democracy where citizens have the power.

After our meeting with Glaude, the editors of The Portland Newspapers began to do a lot of soul-searching. We wondered about our definition of news. Was it too narrow?

If the definition of news was broader than we’d been taught in journalism school, what should it include? And how do we cover those stories? How did we even recognize them?

For the newspaper staff, the public journalism adventure that is the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” prompted us to widen our news lens.

For us, the key is seeing citizens as participants in the democratic process, not merely bystanders. Think about it: If journalists saw citizens as active players, we would cover them just as we cover other power brokers — lobbyists, lawmakers, spin doctors, pollsters, pundits, experts, analysts.

On the rare occasions when we do see citizens in this dynamic role, we give them the often derisive label of “activists” and cover them as fringe groups. Citizen “activists” are reduced to gadfly status. They are obsessed zealots, pushing a cause.

In Portland, we’re dumping that label. We’re trying to cover citizens as the shareholders of our democracy:

• We’re holding an ongoing series of public journalism seminars to come to terms, as a staff, with this changing definition of news.

• Reporters are covering more “third places,” locales where citizen talk often turns to community issues. These third places, which you can think of as civic water coolers, range from the local coffee hangout to the town recycling center to church.

  
  

• We’re going beyond the “pro” and “con” quotes, adding thoughts from citizens who are undecided or ambivalent. This is a very foreign territory for most journalists. Imagine reporting: “Jane Blackstone said she is unsure where she stands on the proposed property tax increase: ‘I can see where the schools need more money, but I have expenses to pay too. I’m not sure what I really think on this.’ “

  
  

• We’re looking for the underlying stories, the narratives that may tell us about the values and mores of the communities we cover. An example: A bank error landed a local man an extra $90,000 in his checking account, money he promptly spent. An arrest followed. We covered that police story, but we followed with a piece on what other citizens would do if they found that much money in their bank accounts.

  
  

• We’ve invented a new story device called a “talkie,” which is meant to capture the talk of a town. When General Dynamics bought a local shipyard, we assigned a “talkie” to gather workers’ sentiments as they gathered at a favorite noontime lunch spot. The location of the talkie is key; it needs to be a third place where people normally meet. It can be used as a venue to dig deeper than spot reaction to a news event.

  
  

• The idea of nuance and ambivalence in stories has prompted changes in unanticipated places. The end of summer in Maine is a depressing time; eight months of winter are just around the corner. Ordinarily, we would write this story by focusing on beach workers, restaurateurs or vacationers. And the outcome would be pretty ordinary and predictable. This year, a staff writer undertook the assignment as an essay; she wrote an ode to summer that was highly personal and introspective.