Winter 2000
Linking Civic and Conventional Journalists
By Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center
Columbia Journalism Review in a recent issue reported on how much of the current political campaign coverage is – shhh, say it softly now – civic journalism.
“Reporters and editors nationwide, many of whom recoil at the civic-journalism label, are experimenting with civic-journalism-like ways of making their campaign coverage meaningful to tuned-out readers and viewers,” writes CJR reporter Brent Cunningham.
While not everyone wants to use the label, civic journalism tools and techniques are percolating through the coverage of national and local elections this year. The notion of making the election relevant to voters and focusing on issues important to the electorate seems, to us, hardly the stuff of rocket science. So, we’re happy to see these ideas, which have been refined and advanced over the past decade, taking hold.
And we’re not ready to stop with how these concepts have evolved to date. The Pew Center is nourishing even newer election coverage ideas – this year through the Best Practices 2000 project for broadcasters, through our civic journalism initiatives and through our national workshops.
More Convergence
Just as the concepts of civic journalism are converging with the ideas of good conventional campaign coverage, so are they converging with the journalism credibility movement.
Many journalism leaders have credited civic journalists with helping to fuel the current brainstorming on media credibility, undertaken by such professional groups as ASNE, APME, RTNDA and the NAA.
Now, with no small irony, we observe these discussions coming full circle: Research is showing that much of what is hurting the news media’s credibility are many of the things civic journalists set out to address from the start: Knowledge of the community, the media’s relationship with readers and viewers, and the creation of roles that not only allow the media to be community watchdogs but stewards as well.
The research for the new Readership Initiative of the American editors and publishers organizations “gives us some important clues on where to focus,” writes Jennie Buckner, editor of The Charlotte Observer. Listen and her clues will sound familiar:
ASNE’s credibility research points to a half dozen factors affecting public attitudes towards the press. In addition to complaints about inaccuracies, arrogance and sensationalism, the public voices this concern: “That newspapers don’t demonstrate respect for, or knowledge of, their readers and communities.”
“The most important revelation from [the ASNE] study, in my view, is to understand the bigger picture these problems reveal about the relationship newspapers today have with the communities they are supposed to serve,” Spokane editor Chris Peck told journalism educators last summer. “The far more serious problem confronting newspapers is the nettlesome question of what it will take for fragmented… communities to find some common ground and agree on some definitions of the common good so that newspapers may continue to maintain their basic business model.”
The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s “Framing the News” report tries to quantify many of the reflexes civic journalists have targeted from the beginning: The tendency to polarize stories, to use a combative or conflict frame, and to ignore consensus by overemphasizing disagreement.
“What ultimately deserves more reflection by journalists is whether their use of frames is balanced … There may be too great a tendency to view the news through combative frames. Explanatory frames are underused, points of agreement are undervalued and policy undernourished,” the study asserts. “… Journalists framing by rote may be failing to ask the right questions, choose the right stories and serve the public as they intend.”
In fact, the journalism reform movement that began in the early ’90’s is now so mainstream it has become the topic of panel discussions like AJR’s November 19th gathering at the University of Maryland: “Journalism’s Reform Movement.”
Amid so many bridges now linking civic and conventional journalism comes this idea for another one: E.J. Dionne, an astute political and journalistic observer – after challenging a roomful of broadcasters last month to rethink their election coverage – prodded the Pew Center to rethink some ways of re-engaging the early critics of civic journalism.
To be sure, many have come around to endorse the quality work done in the name of civic journalism. Nevertheless, others have not kept up with developments. Instead, they are content to erect straw-man arguments and then gleefully knock them down.
These critics are certainly not as vocal as they were only five and six years ago. Indeed, it is hard to render valid criticism on the excellent civic journalism efforts emanating from newsrooms around the country. They stand up to pretty intense scrutiny.
And, in truth, we’ve spent much more of our time with the inventors than the naysayers, confident that quality journalism would hold its own.
Now, we’re never ones to turn our backs on a good idea. And as we embark on a third renewal of the Pew Center, we invite our readers to weigh in.
Should we bother to seek out and engage long-time critics? And how? E-mail me at jans@pccj.org.