Scouting Out Third Places: Framing for Depth

The Missourian profiled various third places.

Here at the Missouri School of Journalism, we’ve long believed in learning by doing. We’ve been doing civic journalism experiments for five years now, and we’ve learned a few things that might interest other pioneers.

We began with Big Deal projects, usually multi-media. The most educational was one of the first. We combined efforts of the Columbia Missourian, the city’s morning daily and the school’s teaching newspaper; KOMU-TV, our NBC affiliate; and KBIA-FM, our NPR radio station. We pulled together an expert panel and citizen focus groups to help tell a series of stories about the need for health care reform.

We carefully coordinated those stories so that the breadth of television’s reach promotedthe newspaper’s deeper reports. On radio, we had conversations.

Journalistically, the outcome was far from perfect, but surveys showed that people had watched, read and learned. The most interesting research finding was that there seemed to be a synergistic effect, with those who had both viewed and read learning more than those who had done either alone.

Our most recent project was an examination of race relations in our community. The reporting began with focus groups, included a scientific survey plus lots of standard reporting, and concluded with a round-table discussion among citizens chosen because they had some interest but no official status. Again, we teamed with television, though not quite so closely.

The results won us praise from civic leaders (and a state AP award) but not the continuing public conversation we had hoped for.

From the projects, we’ve learned:

• Cooperating across media is really difficult. The time constraints of television frustrate print partners, while the time demands of print reporting leave television partners itchy to move along. What’s a great print story doesn’t necessarily play on the screen and vice versa. We had thought working together might increase students’ appreciation of the other media. Instead, the experience seemed to strengthen existing prejudices.
• The demands on coordinating editors, who in our case are also faculty, can be all-consuming.
• The splash is satisfying, but lasting effects are hard to find. In our teaching newsrooms, where the reporting staffs turn over at least three times a year, follow-up is even more difficult than in professional newsrooms.
• The relatively small number of students who can get involved come away with an intensive learning experience. Some have taken into their careers both an understanding of what civic journalism is and some appreciation of how it can be done. Others feel more comfortable with traditional journalism.

More recently, we’ve done some smaller-scale experiments in scouting out third places and in framing. These are a lot less splashy than the projects, but – as some who are ahead of us on the trail have already learned – they may produce more valuable journalism. The learning may also be less stressful and more widespread.

Last fall, I sent the students in my introductory newswriting course in search of third places, the informal gathering spots that serve as the nerve centers of communities. With “Tapping Civic Life” as our textbook, we figured out what sorts of locales were most likely to qualify. The assignment was to watch, listen and describe before moving in as unobtrusively as possible to interview and, eventually, to report back to our readers.

As you’d expect, progress was slow. Like more experienced reporters, the students were uncomfortable at first in places and with people unaccustomed to dealing with journalists. But over a few weeks, some of the students made breakthroughs, won acceptance and began developing insights they could never have learned at city council meetings.

One story introduced readers to a neighborhood restaurant where the customers function as a sort of extended family and where all strata of the city’s black population mingle over coffee and pie. The most enterprising discovery was “Red-neck row,” where jeans-wearing, pickup-driving teenagers convened in a high school parking lot to share a lifestyle scorned by most of their suburban peers.

The lessons:

• Patience pays off. The students who wound up with interesting stories were those willing to invest their time. You can’t demand entry to a third place. You have to earn your way in.
• The stories are worth the investment. Nearly every voice that spoke in these third places was new to me and to our readers. All who read the half-dozen pieces this experiment produced were assured of broadening and deepening their acquaintance with our community.
• Reporters sharpen their observing skills. There are no standard interviews, no canned quotes in third places. Reporters have to become conversationalists. They also have to use their senses of sight, smell and timing.

Framing may be the most useful of the concepts. For one thing, framing is universal. Every reporter puts a frame around every story, even though few stop to think about the frame or its limiting qualities. For another thing, framing at its more basic levels is easy to discuss and demonstrate. The metaphor of the camera lens – what’s in focus and what’s out – works well as entree to examining a reporter’s focus.

Framing discussions lead to exploration of values and lead away from our standard emphasis on conflict. So attention to framing encourages depth in reporting.

For example, we reconsidered our coverage of a dispute between a local college and its neighbors. The all-female college, which is struggling to survive, wants to build a prefabricated gym just across a narrow street from a row of modest single-family homes. The obvious conflict was the frame for early coverage.

We decided to look for the values involved. We learned that the college and neighbors had at least one common value – the health of the college – and others that made conflict inevitable. In our story, we told readers in the lead that we were writing not just about conflict but about deeper values. We summarized those values in the third paragraph. The overall result was journalism more explanatory and less inflammatory than usual.

Lessons learned:

• Framing discussions should be much more common than they are. Every story and every reporter would benefit from early consideration of viewpoints and values.
• Talk and thought about framing encourages talk and thought about the basics of journalism that we too often take for granted. Considering the values of others leads to considering our own.
• Conflict, our most common frame, is seldom satisfactory for really understanding people or issues.