Fall 2001
Students See Value in Civic Mapping
By Judi Hetrick
Miami University, Ohio
Assistant English Professor
Like other small journalism education programs, we focus on the basics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Our students are smart. They get a strong liberal arts foundation in four years here. And we teach enough reporting, writing and editing skills to launch them into careers.
We don’t have much room in our core classes for “extras” – and that includes projects in civic journalism.
But we also teach senior capstone classes – an end-of-career integrative experience now required in many colleges and universities. And civic journalism – with its mission of bringing a broader picture of community life into the news – is one “extra” well-suited to a capstone experience.
For the spring semester of 2001, I was inspired by the Pew Center publication, “Tapping Civic Life,” and my own experiences doing oral history to challenge a group of 20 capstone seniors to design a community mapping project. My basic requirements:
- Read Jay Rosen’s “What Are Journalists For?” for background on civic journalism.
- Inventory a year’s worth of The Oxford Press, a local weekly, to learn some history of news coverage in our small town.
- Audiotape interviews with community members not usually in the news.
The group took several weeks to think through how a civic journalism approach differed from the type of journalism they had seen and practiced as undergraduates. The group took even longer to gel and to begin to envision a final project.
But we eventually adopted civic mapping as a metaphor – not a literal task – and moved into the community to interview about 80 citizens.
Among the questions we asked: What in the community frustrates you (or makes you angry)? What are you proud of? What would you like to see changed? What do you think is missing in the news?
We were lucky to have a group member who was also a computer whiz. He designed active server pages that allowed all class members to easily enter and update thumbnail profiles of all the interviewees. The profiles could then be sorted by neighborhood, topics of concern and other basic information.
As the interviews came to a close, the students shared their interview logs and quotes and constructed stories that spotlighted community members’ views. These stories – which some students used to experiment with different ways of framing information – were posted on the Web and linked to summaries of The Oxford Press content analysis.
Before they said goodbye to Miami and Oxford, the students were each asked to write a self-analysis. One question: Have your thoughts on journalism in general and civic journalism, in particular, changed during the course of this project? If so, how?
While enthusiasm for their foray into civic journalism was not universal, these student responses reflect a strong majority “yes, for-the-better” view: “I am more aware of how stories are framed – even if they’re not framed intentionally. I’m also more aware of the many voices that get overlooked in a community.”
“I think of civic journalism as being a link between newspapers and/or news media and real people. I used to not get the difference at all. I much prefer civic! But I also think they are not necessarily very different, at least I don’t think they should be. I think all journalists should strive to listen to people, not just whoever is screaming the loudest. Experienced journalists could still learn from a project like this.”
“This course has definitely challenged me to think of journalism in different ways. I realize journalism is so much more than just finding a story and reporting the facts. Journalism is one of the key foundations to our democratic society. I do believe that journalism is a public service that should use its influence to attempt to give each citizen a voice.”
“What I discovered is that people really do want to talk. It thrills them to have a voice and to know that someone wants to hear their voice. Through our interviews, we found out that many residents feel they are misrepresented or not at all represented by the news. I can only imagine that as the town gets bigger, this feeling grows larger. For this reason, I think that every journalist should find some way to incorporate the elements of civic journalism.”
So in this Miami capstone, the “extra” of civic journalism proved for many a valuable experience – and a good bridge from the world of school to the world of work.
(E-mail Hetrick at hetricjl@muohio.edu.)