A Citizen’s Eye View: Civic Journalism, Civic Engagement

Highlights from Batten Awards Dinner keynote speech by Zack Stalberg, editor and executive vice president of The Philadelphia Daily News, a tabloid with a circulation of 200,000 – 90 percent of it from street sales. So, it has to speak the people’s language.

I’ve become a true believer in civic journalism or whatever you’d call it. I guess I’d like to call it potent journalism…And my conversion was sort of a surprise to me. It is basically because we just sat down with a bunch of loyal readers and asked them what they expected of The Daily News. While they did not use the term, obviously, their definition of what The Daily News should be very much included what I think those of us in this room would call civic journalism.

I work out there on sort of a frontier of journalism. The Daily News has to prove its worth every day to every reader, and I think we’ve had to figure out how to try to make civic journalism work daily as a result of that. It’s almost entirely single-copy sales. It’s got the highest masthead price in the country. It is hopelessly bound up with The Philadelphia Inquirer, which is a little like the comedy team of Jerry Lewis and Madeleine Albright.

There have not been many efforts to really reform American journalism. You know, because of the criticism that civic journalism has gotten, that basically it’s a very static, tradition-bound, self-centered kind of a profession and it resists change. One of those reform efforts was P.M.

P.M. was – it was a tabloid much like The Daily News – a noble idea. Goofy but noble…P.M. made a valiant effort to recreate the American newspaper in a more serious but lively form…It never attracted much of an audience…But its style and intelligence allowed it to have extraordinary influence for a period of time.

I happen to think that’s relevant…given what’s gone on in the news with diminishing circulation and media fragmentation and shrinking audiences…I think that influence is a very good thing to have. And I think that civic journalism is clearly something that can take us there.

But what really distinguished P.M.…It was, most of all, a paper with a real sense of purpose…This was the purpose: We are against people who push other people around just for the fun of pushing. Now that’s a purpose. It’s not a marketing purpose. It’s a purpose.

I guess I lean toward news organizations that can define themselves or are willing to define themselves that clearly. I think if civic journalism’s sweeping goal is to rekindle a broad interest in civic life, then the building blocks must include news organizations with a sharp, gutsy, locally defined, locally tailored, clearly articulated sense of purpose.

I want to talk for a few seconds about “Rethinking Philadelphia,” which is our big adventure in civic journalism, if you don’t count Beergate.

It was, like most things at The Daily News, an accident. It started out as a story, and then a one-shot project, and then a campaign and now it’s a permanent department…with its own department head and its own staff, just like the sports department, which at The Daily News is really saying something.

Its purpose is to help Philadelphians imagine: “What if?”…We’re trying to get people in the Philadelphia suburbs and in the city to say: “What if? What if this took place? What if that took place?”

So it’s not a civic journalism project in the more traditional sense…But it’s an effort to mobilize people behind that idea of “What if?”

There have been a lot of critics in the newsroom, a lot of critics outside. The mayor called me right before this was about to run and said, “You’ve got to stop this. I hate it.” And I said, “How could you hate it? You haven’t read it yet.” And he said, “I don’t hate the story yet. I hate the name.”

This was the first time I ever got a call from anybody in authority seeking to change the name of a story. He had seen the logo promoting the next day’s story and, at the time, he hated the idea that Philadelphia had to be rethought.

Over the course of time, he’s become something of a believer in “Rethinking” content. So have the people in town. So have the people in the newsroom.

There’s a woman who covers wine for The Inquirer. And Joe Sixpack covers beer for The Daily News.

Anyway, Joe (his real name is Don Russell) was at Veterans Stadium, which is city-owned, and bought a glass of beer. He expected it to be warm. He expected it to be bad. And his experience as a beer drinker told him that this was not the advertised 18 ounces of beer. In fact, it was 16 ounces of beer for, I think, $4.75.

So Joe goes on a tear with a lot of civic involvement. He had a lot of fans who really got invested in this story. There was a City Council investigation. Underneath all of this there was a very smelly 15-year vending contract…In the end, this year the concessionaire dropped the beer prices and is now serving the full 18 ounces of beer. So it was a great victory.

The meaning here for me is that because of things like that, because we’re willing to get very emotionally involved about topics that the readers really care about, we found that there’s a bit of a quid pro quo here. That they are willing to get very seriously involved with some of the more serious topics we’re dealing with in “Rethinking Philadelphia.”

So much of what we view as civic journalism is intelligent, elegantly packaged – and utterly bloodless. Like the rest of the newspaper or the news report that surrounds it, there is no life to the work and even less humor.

We talk about civic engagement as if we really don’t know what engagement means. If you say engagement to a journalist they think, Monitor vs. Merrimack or Battle of Bull Run. If you say engagement to me, or at least to the civilian in me, what I think about is (my wife) Debbie and I walking down the Mall in Washington in the springtime, arm in arm, a relationship with its share of passion, or more than its share of passion. That’s engagement to me.

The straight-away journalist within each of us wants to pursue civic engagement as if it’s an intellectual exercise – not a relationship. An engagement is an emotional state, whether you’re talking about romance or really whether you’re talking about citizen action. That’s really why I dragged Beergate into the conversation.

Daily, what we’re trying to do is connect emotionally with the readers…What we’re striving for is a chain reaction. When The Daily News goes to the wall on an issue the readers really understand and care about, say beer or the stolen van of a crippled child, we win a little piece of their hearts for the larger battles. If we invest more feeling in our work, and not just in the work we consider to be momentous, the citizenry might just take our serious work more seriously and perhaps move a little bit closer to action.

We can look at the cream of civic journalism, the Batten Award-winning work and feel good about the way civic journalism is evolving. But I’m worried about us overstating the successes. And I remain concerned that the criticism the movement has faced in its early years will make it safe and the safety will make it hollow.

So what do I wish for civic journalism? First, that it be practiced as much with the heart as with the head. That’s a very difficult thing for us as journalists…

Second, I wish that we understand we cannot be austere and unconnected on one hand and somehow promote connectedness on the other.

Third, that we quit seeing civic journalism as something that can be contained in a project. It’s a daily obligation. These awards might be quite appropriate now, but five years out or 10 years out, I hope you can give it to a newspaper for its work for the year, not for a project.