Take a Walk in the Woods .. Listen to the Public

Glenn Ritt,

Vice President of News and Information, The Record, Hackensack, NJ, on experimenting with some self-publishing partnerships between the newspaper, as an institution, and community groups, including schools, religious denominations and local government.

I’ve dedicated these experiments to two or three principles. One is that to really be successful, we have to build an infrastructure. But I’m choosing to build an infrastructure not so much from inside out but from outside in, an infrastructure that will live beyond any one editor or publisher, in terms of looking at the 21st Century and realizing a newspaper can be a newspaper, but it also must be the news, information and marketing infrastructure for this region.

Second, the microscope has to be used because below the surface there are many vibrant diverse communities operating in worlds that we don’t necessarily see traditionally.

Third, the reality is that while we’re all having conversations about whether public journalism is right or wrong and what the name of it is — meanwhile the rest of the world, through this explosive, awesome revolution on the Internet has discovered it on their own and are doing it every day. And so there is this obvious merging of public journalism with the Net. If we don’t watch ourselves, we’re going to be constantly left out of a world that we may not be aware is occurring around us.

Governments, schools, individuals are connecting and solving on the Net. . . Classified 2000 is obviously a place where there are more classifieds than your newspaper is providing, but that’s not the most profound competition. The competition is really coming from your own municipalities, and counties, hospitals and health departments, police departments and school districts, denominational churches, state government agencies and multiple listing services.

So I’ve begun to ask some fundamental questions: Can we continue into the 21st Century maintaining traditional relationships with these institutions? They’ve always been our source of news and the topics for stories.

Can they become viable, trustworthy publishers of news, information and insight? Can we duplicate their databases and can we even duplicate their ability to connect their databases to their communities?

Will they possibly dis-intermediate us? Are they more trusted by their communities than we are? And can we maintain our watchdog role but also partner with them, and, if so, how?

. . . I try not to talk about business here, but in point of fact, we have spent a lot of time defining a business plan as healthy communities.

Newspapers know how to take the static print product and move it on-line and say, “Here it is.” What they have to learn is how to make it a vibrant, vital community.

We don’t own the communities that would be hosted by us. We want to place the newspaper inside the organization, even the Internet. We want to become omnipresent. Embed The Record. Don’t ask people to find us all the time. Not only be a provider of information, but a search engine and a filter.

. . . But first and foremost, we have to be very sure that people don’t have the expectation or perception that because you’re part of the community you can be bought.

Jody Calendar,

Deputy Executive Editor, The Asbury Park Press, Neptune, NJ., in describing how a hard-news junky came to civic journalism, tried to introduce it to her newsroom, and how the paper used it to unearth the “House of Cards” mortgage swindle.

When I heard about civic journalism, I thought the Moonies had taken over journalism. I was a hard-news, investigative junky.

Where I found the most resistance was not from the publisher or the editor but from the staff itself. One reporter told me: “You’re ruining our integrity, how dare you advance this premise, this is complete bullshit, I hate this. I’m resigning.

This is somebody I really like, really wanted. She turned out to be one of the lead reporters on “House of Cards.”

One of the analogies I tried to use with her involved a trip to Malaysia where I took a bush plane to an orangutan preserve (I’m an animal nut), where they raise orangutans to go back into the jungle after they’ve been orphaned. Logging is the big thing in Borneo and orangutans live in the top of trees. And as a tree is cut down, a mother orangutan will hold the baby close to her and, as she’s falling, will look around for a spot to toss the infant, and the mother dies and the infant lives… You can go to these preserves and watch.

You’re not allowed to touch the animal because the whole idea is to get the animal to go back off into the wild on its own but you’re allowed for the animal to touch you.

There’s a path, just logs, that everybody uses because this is a scary place. There are snakes that kill you, there are monkeys there that kill you.

So, I was following the path when an orangutan named Jessica, who had just lost a child and was in high depression, comes over and takes my hand. And she starts to walk with me. And this is like the coolest thing that ever happened.

All of a sudden, she starts to walk me off the path, and I’m, like, I’m not going there. So I kind of tug her back and she tugs me back off the path. And I tug her back and we go through this ritual a little bit. All of a sudden, she throws down my hand, she spits right in my face and goes up a tree.

I go, “Oh, well,” and I start down the path. Then I feel really guilty. I walk back to this tree. I use my best mother/editor’s voice and I go: “Jessica, come right down here.” And she comes down the tree.

She takes my hand again, she gives me a look, I swear, that said: “Don’t mess with me again. Just do what I say.” And I followed her into the jungle — off the path.

And she took me immediately to a feeding station, where the babies are fed with bananas and milk bottles. Had I taken the logged path, it would have taken me about 10 minutes to get there. With her route, it was about a minute and a half.

To me, that’s the reader. We journalists always want to take the long, established route, and the readers are trying to show us the shortcuts, if we will just listen.

. . . In 1066 the English language got crucified because we introduced French Latinate. And journalists speak in French Latinate. They think in French Latinate.

For god’s sake, listen to the people. Pay attention. That, to me, is the thing. “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” is an incredibly compelling phrase. The French Latinate version is: “I’ve witnessed conflagration, I’ve observed precipitation.” And that’s what we do. And that’s all I’m saying is get back to the fire and the rain. Take a walk in the woods with a gorilla or an orangutan and get back to reality.

Steve Smith,

Editor, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, CO., on how he’s trying to affect deep cultural change in his newsroom’s routines, rituals and reflexes.

You can come at this concept of civic journalism from the outside in, viewing people as citizens and not as readers, journalists as community builders. Those are all concepts that I fundamentally accept and there’s some outside in to what we’re doing in Colorado Springs. But there’s also a lot of inside out.

My starting point at The Gazette was the fact that we had an ineffective newsroom… that is, the journalism we were doing wasn’t working… and there were quantitative measures to prove that. In a boom market, circulation was not keeping up… The disconnects between the news organization and the community were overt and obvious.

I wanted the newspaper to become civic and I wanted it to become connected. And I wanted the style and tone and flavor of our journalism to get down to a level that related to people in their lives.

We weren’t going to change the structure of the newsroom. I wanted to prove something I had been saying for two years, which is: you can change the journalism by changing the way journalists think, you don’t necessarily have to change the way they sit and who they talk to. I wanted to come at it from the heads, not the desks.

How do we do that?

There are times when it is appropriate to talk about civic journalism as a “big, hairy, audacious thing” (from the book, Built to Last) but we’ve tried to break it down into little pieces.

We spend a lot of time talking about and retraining our folks on interviewing, writing. We’ve talked about civic mapping and we try to identify what we call “third places.” We do some role playing and we do a lot of story framing.

And we’ve created a handbook. It is a set of questions, tools and ideas and concepts that, while they have the look of a Harwood Group publication, are the words of Gazette staffers, who frame the language, ask the questions, create the standards.

. . . We have to change our culture to one of innovation, experimentation and individuality. What I tell our reporters is: You have to create your own journalism. We no longer give you the templates to operate from. You have a license to break the rules, invent rules, and then change those rules. You have to find your own way through the swamp. And if you’re uncomfortable on the soft spongy ground, then it’s probably not the culture for you.

Chuck Clark,

Government Editor, The Charlotte Observer, on efforts to give government coverage a civic, instead of institutional, frame.

We don’t use the term public journalism very often any more. Basically, we approach all of our journalism with two guiding principles. One of them is to focus on impact rather than process. It’s real easy to focus on process when you’re covering government.

And the second is to give people the tools they need, the information and the context to participate in public life, to be citizens.

. . . I’ve learned a couple of things. First, citizens will pick up the gauntlet, if you give them the tools. Number two, how you sell this in your newsroom is you get your newsroom leaders to understand and to practice it.

Third, you’ve got to be flexible. There aren’t any formulas to this. You’ve got to do what feels right and what gets the information communicated effectively.

Fourth, you’ve got to maintain your core standards- integrity, accuracy, fairness. And, finally, you’ve got to have fun. If you’re doing this because you have to do it, stop. Have some fun.

Roy Peter Clark,

Senior Scholar, The Poynter Institute, on some observations about the writing that is evolving as civic journalism evolves.

There’s a recurring question resonating throughout the land: Does it have to be boring? How do we write about certain things that we think should be of interest and try to help make them interesting?

Let me make a quick list of some of the things I’m seeing that I find exciting and interesting as a reader, citizen, writer. You all seem to be relying upon — you know that category of grammar, syntax, we learned when we were little kids. What’s the number? The first person. We can say it’s one, two, or three.

The reason I get excited is in terms of my role, someone who is attempting to help writers identify tools to solve different problems. I can say maybe this movement or these activities have led to a revival of the lost number, which is the number two and the use of second person as a writing tool, obviously to make this relevant and demonstrate the impact and to suggest that this is a conversation.

And I want to suggest that it may be the first-person plural — “we”– that might be a sort of grammatical symbol of a kind of writing in which we don’t think of the community as the other, but think of the community as included, as a news organization and as individual members of the community.

I’m fascinated by the mixing of modes. I see civic leading to investigative, civic leading to editorial, civic being combined with reporting. Civic being linked with the column, with the commentary.

I see the borrowing from other media, documentary film and video. Like The Observer’s walking tour through Charlotte.

I think one of the things that you are re-teaching us, maybe as a result of thinking about values, is the way in which stories can take off and land. And so the metaphor I want to use is altitude.

For years, I’ve attempted to help reporters ground stories in the reality and the texture of ordinary human lives and places and to fill the stories with common speech and real-life characters interacting, and the kinds of details and appeal to the senses that make stories memorable.

But I now realize that there’s another way to make stories memorable and that is to give them on occasion some altitude. I’ve seen some examples in which the writer moves from the concrete and specific up the ladder of abstraction to achieve a level of meaning that is also memorable and tends to reflect things, communicate things like values, or a vision of the community and the future.

I think you’re grappling more than any other group in American journalism with the problem of priority and comprehensibility. You’re attempting to take responsibility for what readers know and understand about the world. And in so doing, you’re imagining that they can actually use the information you are providing. I think that’s very important.

And I think it’s very important that we don’t have to understand what we’re doing. We shouldn’t let it paralyze us, but to reflect on those (experiments) in a way that we turn those abstractions into routines and methods and tools.

Forty seasoned civic journalists spent a weekend at a Pew/Poynter workshop, discussing new directions for their civic journalism.