The Batten Winners: Journalism that Took Risks

Taking Risks. This year’s Batten Award winners all took them. Quite a few.
Unlike other journalism contests, the Batten Awards are distinguished for heralding work that not only moves the needle in the community-but also moves the journalism to some new places.

Unbidden, this year’s winners all talked about taking risks. They started down some journalistic trails, not always certain where they would lead, but confident their gut and their journalistic values would keep them on course.
And it was precisely the risks they took that produced such impact in their communities.

“It’s really important to emphasize that we did not know, as we were proceeding down this path, where it would take us,” said Jeannine Guttman, editor of The Portland Press Herald after an eight-part series on alcohol abuse produced an outpouring of interest in the community – and an insistence on doing something about the problem.

The newspaper, with a gulp and a prayer, agreed to help communities hold study circles to come up with specific solutions. Sure, the newspaper had held study circles before, but the paper had always been the catalyst. Now, community leaders were asking the journalists to share those skills and help them develop a statewide conversation. Ultimately, more than 70 Maine communities and 2,000 people got involved.

Guttman agreed but cautioned that the newspaper would not abandon aggressive reporting on the group’s activities.

“I think, in some measure, that’s what makes civic journalism, to some journalists, a bit frightening. Because it’s a path you are blazing and you haven’t blazed it before…and you do have to monitor your ethics meter all the time. And you do have to evaluate where you are. And your comfort zone professionally. But it’s worth the journey, I think,” she said.

It’s interesting to us at the Pew Center that journalists who have tentatively ventured into new territory and gotten good results develop an appetite for even more adventure the next time. They like the journalism they produced, and they like the fact that their readers noticed.

Take the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In its third foray into a large civic journalism initiative, the Pioneer Press sought to write about poverty and also engage the community in the issue. So, in addition to publishing stories, it also published a guide and tool kit to help people set up discussion groups. And it worked with the public libraries to set up reading groups on the literature of poverty. More than 2,500 people participated.

“It is a huge commitment of manpower that takes weeks and weeks of reporter time, and you’re sort of committed. And you cross your fingers and you say. ‘Gee, I hope it’s going to be worth it,’ and sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. And this time it was,” said editor Walker Lundy.

But, as Kate Parry, the project’s senior editor, noted, once journalists’ appetites are whetted, they build on the techniques. “They are won over to the fact that civic journalism is a valuable tool to good journalists – and not an affront to their independence or integrity.”

This year, a television station, KRON in San Francisco, shared the Batten Award. The station has worked with newspaper and radio partners for years in civic journalism efforts.

News Director Dan Rosenheim persuaded his bosses to run the “About Race” series during the February 1998 sweeps period – a time usually reserved for a different sort of television enterprise reporting. In a business where news directors turn over frequently, Rosenheim jokes that he’s only been on the job for a couple of years – yet he’s now the news director with the longest tenure in the Bay Area.

Can all television stations do what KRON did? In Rosenheim’s view, there has to be a culture that is willing to take some risks.

“I’m lucky to work at a station where the newsroom is given quite a lot of latitude in terms of deciding the kinds of topics. There’s a willingness to experiment, a willingness to seek new ways of doing the news and, above all, the desire to have a serious, substantive newscast that makes a difference in this community.

“I think there has to be a commitment on the part of the newsroom to take some chances both in the choice of topic and the way it’s explored and certainly, if you run it in sweeps, there’s some risk involved.

Throughout the country, editors are taking all kinds of risks. One of the most intriguing was The Orange Country Register’s use of a remarkably unconventional, yet powerful, narrative technique to tell the stories of impoverished children living in residential motels literally in the shadow of Disneyland. It was a Batten Award runner-up.

In chronicling the lives of these children, you see reporter Laura Saari’s “legs” but the voices you hear are the children’s. She masters almost a playwright’s use of dialogue to tell the tale.

“I was afraid people wouldn’t get it,” says story editor Kathy Armstrong. “It was so different than most journalism. But when I listened to the phone calls the next day, I could tell: people got it.”