Fall 1999
Civic Journalism: Savior of Newspapers in the 21st Century?
By Chris Peck
Editor
The Spokesman-Review
Excerpts of remarks by Chris Peck, Editor, The Spokesman-Review, Aug. 6, 1999, at the Pew Center Luncheon during the AEJMC Convention, New Orleans. You can read the full speech in the Fall 1999 issue of Civic Catalyst.
This year, newspapers of 20,000 circulation and up will earn a profit of at least 20%, and often much more. … Indeed, this is one of civic journalism’s major challenges. Why listen to calls for change when things are going so well?
Well, get out the kindling because, at the risk of being burned at the stake, I’m going to point out three clouds that could rain hard on newspapers’ parade of success. Then, I hope to make the case that much of what newspapers have learned in a decade of experiments with civic journalism offers a pathway to survival and renewed prosperity in the 21st century.
Dark Cloud #1:
The Internet, and how it may change everything about information gathering and dissemination, including the role of newspapers.
The big picture of Internet growth and newspaper readership decline is well known. Twenty-five years ago, 70% of adults read a newspaper regularly. Today, 51% regularly do. Five years ago, not 1 in 10 American households had access to the Internet or ever went online. Today, over 50% of Americans have access to the Internet and the number of people who sign on regularly is growing at the rate of 100% a year.
As of August, about 56 million Americans will read a newspaper. About 48 million will sign onto the Internet.
So, why not put newspapers online and solve this problem? A majority of American newspapers now are online. Is everybody happy? No.
Online newspapers are, for the most part, money drains and staff intensive … But the money issues miss a crucial point: The most significant problem newspapers face from online technology is the growing sense among online users that newspapers are marginalized and irrelevant online.
Only one newspaper site, USA Today, ranks in the top 20 of the Media Metrix ranking of online news, information and entertainment sites. The number-one news site is something many of us have never heard of: ZDNet. ZDNet is an online news site of Ziff-Davis, the publishing, media and marketing company with little newspaper history.
… The 1999 ASNE research on newspaper credibility showed that TV already outranks newspapers in terms of believability for most people. More significantly, a survey by Jupiter Communications published online by ZDNet (August, 1999) shows that 87% of online news consumers trust online news as much or more as newspapers or broadcast TV.
Perhaps understandably, many editors and publishers have turned inward to examine why they aren’t read as often as 20 years ago. It is like examining yourself for cancer. You look for lumps, rough spots, open wounds.
You recall the six credibility problem areas identified by ASNE’s 1999 Ethics and Values Committee earlier this year. Newspaper readers complain about:
- Too many factual errors, spelling and grammar mistakes.
- A perception that newspapers don’t demonstrate respect for, or knowledge of, their readers and communities.
- Bias in the news reports and in the decisions made on what to cover and what not to cover.
- Over-coverage of sensational stories.
- A vast gap between what newsroom people feel is ethical and right compared to what the public feels is ethical and right.
- First-hand accounts of being covered by newspapers and having that coverage be inaccurate, incomplete and unfair.
But the most important revelation is to understand the bigger picture these problems reveal about the relationship newspapers today have with the communities they are supposed to serve.
… External forces at work in the communities we serve, combined with the newsroom’s often toxic response to these external forces, have dangerously affected the health of all those who are doing the First Amendment’s work. And that leads to…
Dark Cloud #2:
Community fragmentation, erosion of “the common good.”
… Ted Glasser, director of Stanford University’s graduate program in journalism, has pulled together an excellent book called The Idea of Public Journalism. In his introduction, Ted talks about what has happened to the idea of a common good and concludes, “it is not realistic today to expect individuals to reach across their social and ideological differences to establish common agendas and to debate rival approaches.”
Instead, Glasser notes, public participation today most often occurs through participation in what he refers to as spericules, a term coined … to describe distinct political groups organized around affinity and interest but not a sense of the common good.
Sure, it would be better to spell more names right and show a little more respect for the community. … The far more serious problem confronting newspapers, however, is the nettlesome question of what it will take for fragmented, divided, spericuled communities to agree on some definitions of the common good so that newspapers may continue to maintain their basic business model.
… Only last week the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released its survey results on the top issues in the public mind and concluded, somewhat wistfully, that no single issue dominates the public’s mind these days. Some people are worried about health care (18%), some people are worried about Social Security (14%), a few worried about Medicare (11%), and others are thinking about gun control, education, and a balanced budget.
… The issues of today are linked to personal values, lifestages, and class and gender issues. Yet newsrooms, for the most part, are still organized around bricks-and-mortar buildings.
The problem confronting newspapers is more than getting spelling right. It’s about building personal and social relationships with the many publics not organized around traditional public institutions and therefore largely invisible to newspapers. Only as these relationships are strengthened can newspapers then begin to look for opportunities to connect the dots, find overlapping areas of concern, and create a business model for the 21st century.
Dark Cloud #3:
The classified problem.
… At publisher conventions these days … all agree the decisive battle to protect the economic foundation of newspapers likely will be fought over classified advertising.
In the July/August issue of Brill’s Content, a team of media futurists warn that 40% of newspaper revenue and 50% of newspaper profit comes from classified advertising and is at risk in the next decade. “If newspapers lose half of their classified revenue … profit margins will evaporate and scores of papers will close,” the magazine warns.
Prayers anyone? Last rites? Not yet. I believe help is on the way. It comes in the form of lessons learned from the past decade’s experimentation in civic journalism.
… In my view, it’s time for newspapers of all sizes to cut the losses and cut back on the newsroom resources devoted to those areas where TV and the Internet have a long-term, strategic edge.
Editors tomorrow should get out the red pencil and begin trimming back the newsprint and staff currently devoted to such lost causes as incremental coverage of international news, breaking news that everyone heard about on last night’s TV, national sports that don’t involve a local team, weather and Hollywood gossip.
Newspapers can’t win in these news and information categories. So they should cut them back – and fast.
The time, money and intellectual effort spent on wire editors, people column writers and national sports columnists would then be redirected on training and development of civic journalism skills that gather more local news from non-institutional sources and provide local perspective and connections on national and world events.
In other words, newspapers should go on the offensive against the weaknesses of the Internet.
Go for the Net’s Weaknesses
The Internet is very deep, but has trouble connecting issues, ideas and concepts across a local landscape. It’s more like a microscope than radar. It can see the smallest things but can’t look at the landscape.
Newspapers, the good ones, are very much a community radar system. Newspapers that work to truly and deeply stay in touch with the people and communities they serve can detect very early the issues, trends, and activities that define and engage a geographic community.
Here then, emerges the unique, relevant value of a newspaper that engages in high-level work with civic journalism. Such a paper will be working hard to, first, better understand the communities it serves and, second, help citizens develop greater ability to make connections and good decisions on matters of community and public life.
That will also provide newspapers with their best defense in coping with Dark Cloud #2, the fragmentation of society and the loss of the common good. Newspapers, alone, cannot hope to undo racism, rebalance wealth, or keep people from moving out of the central city to the suburbs.
But newspapers can, and must, seek partnerships to resist these larger forces. Newspapers must assign many more resources to the work of getting to know the various and distinct publics that now exist. … (Then) they must retool and realign their content to serve each of these separate publics.
This means more niche publications, more targeted sections by class and interest.
In all of these specialized sections, the newspaper must constantly be on the lookout for themes that cross the bounds of the separated worlds in which we all live and can be used to recreate a sense of the common good.
To rebuild in this way, newsrooms will need some new tools. The tools of civic journalism, particularly those that stress interaction between a newspaper and a particular community segment, offer tremendous potential for repairing fragmented communities and defining a common good.
Now, it’s important to not try to fix everything all at once with civic journalism. You still need good writing, accuracy, emotion, story telling. Early proponents of civic journalism proclaimed that all of democracy and all of civic life could be repaired with the tools of this new approach. That’s overselling the promise, and missing the first steps that need to be taken.
Use Some New Tools
Start with what I characterize as the ‘small c’ civic journalism … Newspapers need to do the little things that mean a lot. Things like good neighbor contests that celebrate community building one neighborhood at a time. Things like sponsoring backyard forums to get people talking about how to solve very local problems.
This ‘small c’ civic journalism strategy allows resources to be spread throughout different sections of a newspaper … Sports should have a civic journalism component, and the TV page, and the teen page. The tools of civic journalism, including forums, small group meetings that frame coverage, interactive features, directed letters to the editor, listening posts, and other methods can connect the newspaper to its various audiences and quickly engage a wide swath of the newsroom.
By contrast, the ‘Big C’ civic journalism projects built around elections or politics miss the fact that most people aren’t voting, aren’t involved in politics, and are building their civic lives around things like church, fly fishing or Beanie Babies.
Saving democracy and improving citizenship can, and will, come later. Right now, civic journalism needs to be focused on reconnecting readers-at-risk readers, non-readers and the next generation of potential readers-to the newspaper.
In short, civic journalism must move from being an idea of the elite, to the reality of a community-based newspaper that offers visible access points for the people living on their own islands.
A New Kind of Journalist
This will take a new kind of journalist. … Journalism schools need to train the next generation of journalists how to run focus groups, how to do basic civic mapping, and how to frame stories so that they connect the dots on key issues so that fragmented elements of the public can see where others are coming from. The next generation of newsroom staffers need not just computer-assisted reporting, but community-based reporting in neighborhoods and cultural awareness that gives them the confidence and ability to reach out to diverse communities.
Newspaper editors will need quick and effective training in things like how to build a public agenda page, how to direct a staff to meet with stakeholders in a story prior to reporting, how to organize civic mapping to gain much quicker and deeper access to communities that often go unnoticed because the Rolodexes are out of date.
To exploit the weaknesses of the Internet and to defend against further erosion of a common community … entirely new kinds of editors must be imagined and then empowered – public editors, or civic editors, or interactive editors. These editors will make sure reporters know how to listen to community voices, how to fashion news that addresses the concerns and cares of community segments across generations, rich to poor, Christian conservative to non-believers.
New kinds of beat assignments must be conceived. Newsrooms must, in my view, rapidly move away from traditional politics and institutions and toward community-affiliated groups that don’t have a brick-and-mortar headquarters but are powerful greenhouses for cultivating civic life.
When an interactive or civic editor detects a cause that resonates across social, class and racial lines, the paper would build a bridge, one story at a time, between the separated publics. Story by story, the newspaper would knit together a fractured community and repair the idea of the common good.
If classified advertising is lost … a third stream of revenue and a new economic proposition must be developed.
Mypaper.com
… Imagine the day when readers of newspapers actually became the owners. I can envision a relationship between a newspaper and its geographic community where readers buy a share of the community’s journalistic resources.
Under this stakeholder model, every city and town would truly have “their newspaper” – or mypaper.com. Readers and citizens would be a kind of board of directors that would, from a distance, have a voice in where the spotlight of journalism should next be shone, including investigative reporting.
Civic journalism with a ‘small c’ would routinely keep open lines of communication and interactivity with readers of all ages and interests from sports, to cars, to fashion.
Civic journalism with a ‘large C’ would tackle major community issues that were brought forward by the stakeholders who owned part of the newspaper. The community-based newspaper would … manage community knowledge like anniversaries, weddings, deaths, promotions, and achievements. Newspaper Internet sites should be re-crafted and used vigorously to track, chat and tie together the local, online communities.
For this to happen, the organization within the newsroom, and the orientation of reporters and editors would have to be far different than it is today. It would be a community-based organization with journalists as the most important assets. I don’t know if this will work. But I believe continued experimentation and application of civic journalism offers newspapers in America a survival strategy for the 21st century.