Civic Catalyst Newsletter
Summer 2002
Batten Symposium: Luncheon Keynote Highlights
Change: Catch Up to the Readers
Walker Lundy, editor and executive vice president of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, delivered the luncheon keynote. Pioneer Press projects received a Batten Legacy Award. Highlights:
Ifirst met up with public journalism almost 10 years ago because some outfit Jan Schaffer worked for was giving away money. I had never heard of the outfit, but I knew Jan, and I figured it must be legit.
This idea appealed to me on two levels. One, as the smaller dog in a fight against the evil Star Tribune, we were always looking for money in St. Paul. And two, I figured when it comes to newspapers, something new is almost always better than the old stuff.
And it always worked out. Always with groundbreaking, and sometimes award-winning, public journalism.
With the help of Pew money, our first effort was “Safer Cities” in 1996. And it was a learning experience. Not only did the project transform our crime coverage – in addition to a police reporter we added a public safety columnist – it also transformed the staffers who worked on the project. Without realizing it, we planted a dozen public journalism converts in the middle of our newsroom.
The next year, again with the Pew grant, came “Across Generations: What Do We Owe Each Other?” It was the squishiest topic, but the readers loved it. And another 20 staffers came to see how this new kind of journalism not only wasn’t a bogeyman, but also brought the readers closer to the paper.
With “Poverty Among Us,” we launched our first book club; readers loved it, and we had another connection between them and us. That project won us our first Batten Award.
Then came my favorite, “The New Face of Minnesota,” about the burgeoning number of immigrants who were making Minnesota their new home in America.
By now the public journalism advocates on the Pioneer Press staff numbered 83. Those were the people who had worked on one of our projects. As editor Kate Parry wrote in her nomination letter, “What a difference a decade has made in our newsroom, where the philosophy of public journalism now is woven so deeply into the daily culture that it has moved from the realm of controversy to the domain of journalist instinct.”
So my experience with public journalism has been pretty cool. I also have to say, it’s absolutely clear to me this would not have happened the way it happened without the Pew foundation money. It would have happened, I think. But I don’t think these projects would have happened as grandly without the Pew money.
You can’t listen to the award winners today without coming away inspired about this business that we’re in and inspired about the work that they did.
I thought about the Pulitzer Awards over a month or so ago. And I don’t mean at all to denigrate the work they did, because it was wonderful work. And they did deserve the Pulitzers. But when you think about the impact on the readers and the impact on our community, the stuff you heard about today is way deeper and way better than any of the Pulitzer contest entries, in my opinion.
And now the challenge is, for me, to take this – as you heard this morning, it’s alive and well on The Inquirer editorial page – to take it into The Inquirer newsroom. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Changing Newsrooms
I also want to use this podium to talk about something entirely different, and that’s changing newsrooms. Or more accurately, changing the people who work in the newsrooms.
… I know a little more about this subject than some of you may. I tried to change several newsrooms, failing at some and succeeding at others. And now I have the challenge of changing the mother of all Knight Ridder newsrooms in Philadelphia.
I’m talking about this topic today because if you aren’t in a newsroom that’s trying to change, you should be worried. The readers in the world are leaving you behind.
We’ve been talking about this problem for years … [and] it’s been mostly talk. In the instances where I failed, it was because I didn’t go far enough, because I wasn’t bold enough, because I let people talk me out of stuff.
So if I can leave any sermon here with you today, it’s that when you go back to your newsrooms, don’t let them talk you out of it.
The world is changing faster than most journalists are. And here is my anecdotal evidence: There’s only been one public journalism project – by the Akron Beacon Journal – to win the Pulitzer. That’s preposterous.
In the 1990s, public journalism was new. Remember how many journalists viewed it as something akin to a Hari Krishna movement and … ran the other way and proudly gave speeches and wrote articles saying, “By golly, I’m not going to connect with readers. I just report the news”? You could still find editors today who will tell you that.
When Knight Ridder decided to pony up its own money for public journalism, the last year they had only eight newspapers who applied for – hear this – free money to do journalism. The other editors said, “Free money to do journalism? No thanks.”
Last year’s wave of buyouts … left most of us more cynical and whiny and pessimistic and discouraged and mistrustful of authority than we were before the economy went south. I’m certainly not here to defend the business decisions of my company or the publicly held newspaper companies. But I do think a lot of the journalists used the downsizing as an excuse not to change, not to do innovative journalism. They also demonstrate an unwillingness to understand capitalism and the marketplace and Wall Street.
I mean, sure, newspapers are special. I do love them. We all love them. But Wall Street doesn’t give a damn about that, and we need to understand that.
In St. Paul, after watching a number of reporters at their desks thumbing through the paper after starting time one morning, I sent an e-mail telling them I thought they ought to read the paper before they come to work, that that was like part of putting your pants on. In fact, I said, if you’re pressed for time and your choice is to read the paper or put your pants on, come to work without your pants. [Laughter.]
A number were outraged. They said, “You don’t understand: We’ve got kids to get off to school; we’ve got carpools; we go jogging in the morning.” They didn’t see the irony in how our readers have the same kind of lives.
In Philadelphia, I’ve been getting to know the staff six at a time … They are, by the way, known as Walker Talkers … I started to ask the staffers, “If you have read this morning’s paper, how many stories did you read to the end?” Half said they either hadn’t read the paper at all that morning, they’d scanned it, or they’d read only one story to the end.
Now what I’m saying is, our stories are not too long just for the readers, they’re too long for us. …
We aren’t keeping up with change at the speed that our readers are changing. I’m not sure the journalism schools are doing enough to close the gap between journalists and the readers. My anecdotal evidence is some of the most conservative – I’m not talking politically now, I’m talking journalistically – journalists I’ve come across have been 20-somethings, fresh out of journalism school. …
How are the readers changing? To begin with, they’re smarter than they used to be. That old crapola we used to crank out doesn’t sell so well anymore. [Laughter.]
They expect more from us. They’re splintering. The days of the mass media may be numbered. And lastly, they have more sources of information. You know what they are. And what that means is that by the next morning, they know Colin Powell didn’t get peace in the Middle East. But think about how many lead headlines said that the next morning.
The reader’s attention span is evaporating. They bore quickly. Most importantly, they are desperately in need of answers. The notion that utility, usefulness in the newspaper, will drive readership is true.
So what do we do? Some days I think, “It beats the hell out of me.” This ain’t rocket science. You know what to do. It’s the actually doing it part that’s hard.
For starters, we have to change the culture in the newsroom. In the newsroom, that’s harder to break than breaking a scoop. It’s really quite ironic. When it comes to covering and cheering on a changing world, we are Teddy Kennedy. When it comes to changing our newsrooms, we turn into Jesse Helms. …
There’s a trick to changing the culture of a newsroom. You cannot change the culture by focusing on the culture. It makes most journalists hunker down even more. In fact, don’t even mention the words newsroom culture. They don’t realize there is one. They will run screaming from the newsroom if you do. It’s worse than the word synergy. [Laughter.]
Instead, you have to focus on changing the journalism. If you change the journalism, the culture will follow, and change will beget change.
Since I’m speaking here today, I’ll suggest you begin by either embracing public journalism … or practicing it even more. Instead of just doing the big epic projects, push it into the daily, everyday, covering-the-news newspaper. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport. And people armed with information can make life better. And newspapers willing to listen and engage them can help. It should be hard for the grumpiest reporter to argue with that, although some will. …
What happens if we don’t change in these and other ways? Well, I think we’re in danger of losing the franchise over the next generation. I don’t mean newspapers are going to go out of business, because we’re always going to need ads, buyers and sellers. And we’ll always need something to keep the ads from bumping into each other. So our jobs may be safe.
But by losing the franchise, I mean the business of finding new readers and really connecting with them to replace our older readers who, by the way, are dying. Readers turning to newspapers to be smarter, to understand their world, to navigate its dangers, to teach their children, to learn things that they didn’t know they wanted to learn, to marvel at believing in things. If readers go off and leave us, it would be terrible for us, for the readers and for the country.
If Jim Batten were alive today, I believe he would be issuing a similar call for us to catch up to the readers. He is not, so I will. Whether you’re an editor or a reporter or a journalism professor or a journalism student, go back to your newsroom and your classroom and change something, anything. And then change something else. Exceed your authority. Be subversive.
Some people will object, others will caution you, a few will refuse to go along. You’ll undoubtedly run into that passive-aggressive thing. There will be the pocket veto. Listen to all of those people, carefully consider what they say, and then go ahead and change something. And then change something else. I think our future depends on it.
_____________________
Moving the Needle
Jay Rosen
Chair, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication
New York University
“Civic journalism, to me, will be notable because it became a breakaway church against the high church of journalism. This, in the end, became my favorite way of describing the whole thing. If I had to write my book over now I wouldn’t call it, ‘What Are Journalists For?’ … I would call it, ‘Breakaway Church,’ because I think that describes what kind of separation, development and departure took place.”