Summer 2002
High Impact Logged in 600 Civic Projects
By Lew Friedland and Sandy Nichols
Center for Communication and Democracy
University of Wisconsin-Madison
For years, journalists and scholars have asked how many newspapers were practicing civic journalism.
Now, a new study of more than 600 projects in the Pew Center archives documents, for the first time, that at least 345 newspapers and magazines have experimented with some form of civic journalism between 1995 and 2000.
Moreover, much evidence indicates the success of the civic journalism experiment – what Michael Schudson, one of the foremost historians of U.S. journalism, has called “the most impressive critique inside journalism in a generation” and “the best-organized social movement inside journalism in the history of the American press.”
To measure the degree to which these projects established civic roots in the community, they were given a civic index rating: very high (4), high (3), moderate (2), low (1) and none (0).
Slightly over half of all projects rated between very high and high on the index, showing significant impact on community life. Another one-quarter received a moderate rating due to efforts to encourage and support citizen participation in solving community problems.
The study chronicles clear patterns of growth and development – within individual news organizations and within the industry – as civic journalism moved through definable cycles.
Civic journalism was launched with an early interest in election coverage. The study shows it spread quickly to community and civic life, then branched from a general interest in community to a range of specific issues, always deepening newsroom engagement with citizens.
In the late ’90s this engagement flowered in yet newer ways with the growth of civic mapping and the application of interactive tools to civic journalism.
With the initial, decade-long phase of the civic journalism movement coming to a close, the Pew Center commissioned the Center for Communication and Democracy to conduct the first systematic study of the range and scope of civic journalism experiments and provide a descriptive analysis of the movement’s reach.
The study sought to identify which U.S. newsrooms have experimented with civic journalism. What journalists in these newsrooms consider to be civic journalism. What types of issues were addressed. How and to what extent civic tools and techniques were being used. And how these tools and techniques changed over time.
Doing the Study
The research examined and coded three sets of materials collected by the Pew Center: news reports generated by newsrooms receiving funding for civic journalism experiments; entries competing for the Center’s Batten Awards for Excellence in Civic Journalism; and examples of civic journalism submitted for informal recognition, advice or assistance from the Center.
As of our final data collection, the Center’s archive contained 651 journalism projects published between 1994 and 2002. Of these, 121 were selected for Pew funding, 466 were submitted for the Batten Awards (some funded projects also entered the awards competition), and 109 were sent to the Center for informal recognition.
However, we began our analysis with 1995, the first year for which complete data was available, and ended in 2000, the last complete year at the time of our data coding, giving us a total of 604 cases of journalism spanning six years of the movement.
The Larger Pattern
We found several broad patterns that show the trajectory of civic journalism. Many early experiments began with attempts to develop civic election coverage. This was true of almost all the major innovating newsrooms and almost all newsrooms new to civic journalism.
The pattern of election coverage was cyclical and began tapering off after 1996. Community projects dominated a broad middle period, at first taking the form of large projects addressing community vision or major community problems, but rapidly diversifying to address specific issues such as race, immigration and youth.
By the late ’90s, projects shifted toward mapping communities to understand their diversity and integrating new technologies to expand community connections.
Election Projects
Civic journalism began with election coverage in such projects as Wichita’s “Your Vote Counts,” Charlotte’s 1992 “Citizen’s Agenda” and Madison’s “We the People/Wisconsin.” Early projects addressed the role of the press in democracy but also had to construct the new civic coverage, using a variety of now-familiar techniques – citizens’ agendas, polling, focus groups and analyses of issues and candidates. The new coverage spread rapidly with new organizations joining annually, but it naturally increased during bi-annual election cycles.
Civic election coverage peaked in 1996 with 25 projects, nearly half of the 54 in the sample; the Center funded six of them. After 1996, the study shows the Center directed its funding towards other civic innovations. In interviews, Center officials explained that many civic election techniques were being adopted by mainstream media.
Newspaper and broadcast partnerships were a hallmark of many election projects, a pattern that began to decline after 1996, although there were two groundbreaking projects that year. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Citizen Voices ’96” sponsored a series of deliberative forums on the mayoral race involving more than 600 people solicited by the editorial board.
The Charlotte Observer’s “Your Voice, Your Vote” expanded to collaborate statewide with news organizations. Although the number of election projects began to decline in 1997, significant initiatives in Maine, Philadelphia, Madison and Charlotte continued, as did innovative coverage of a proposed state constitutional convention in Rochester, NY.
The election projects scored high on our civic index. Of the 54, nearly 88 percent were very high or high on the civic index; 12 percent fell between moderate and low; none received a zero rating.
Community Life Projects
The community life category breaks down into two phases and two types of coverage. The first phase featured community-wide deliberations on public problems. The second tended to focus on specific issues, particularly those concerning race and diversity, immigration and youth.
The archetypical large community project, Charlotte’s “Taking Back Our Neighborhoods,” began in 1994 as an investigative story on crime and continued into 1997 as a community action project. The Binghamton (NY) Press & Sun-Bulletin’s “Facing Our Future” in 1996 organized a community-wide deliberation on the future of the regional economy in the wake of economic collapse and was taken over by citizens themselves.
Of the 61 community projects, nearly 64 percent rated very high to high; 8 percent fell between very low to none.
As early as 1995, papers began to explore community issues in new ways. That year 17 projects concerned diversity, including 10 on race relations. The number of diversity projects dropped during 1996 and 1997, then surged in 1998. They included “The New City: La Nueva Ciudad,” the San Francisco Examiner’s early use of civic mapping to explore urban racial and ethnic change. Diversity projects dominated years 1998 and 2000.
The 80 diversity projects scored well but were not as highly civic as election and community projects. Over 46 percent were between very high and high on the index, another 24 percent rated moderately civic, and the remaining 30 percent showed evidence of low to no civic elements.
Family and youth stories represent another strong trend in the community category, totaling 56 projects – many of which were reported from the perspective of young people themselves.
In 1995, there were 12 projects on youth, including The Syracuse Herald American’s “Through the Eyes of Children” and Detroit Free Press’s “Listening to the Children.” The number remained steady in 1996 with 13 projects, then dropped in 1997 and 1998, with four and six respectively, but rose again in 1999 to 14 projects, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune series “Teen Drinking.”
Overall, youth projects were evenly spread between very high, high, moderate and low on the civic index, with only two cases showing no civic elements. The study also examined several other community life trends, including health, education, poverty, crime and safety and economic development stories.
Interactive Journalism
Interactive journalism was a small but rapidly growing segment of our data (28 cases overall, most since 1998). Included here was the use of new tools and technologies to improve the connection between news organizations and citizens. The three main areas were the incorporation of civic practices into daily journalism, development of civic mapping techniques and use of such new interactive tools as the Internet.
The exemplars of daily work were clearly The Virginian-Pilot’s thrice-weekly public life, education and public safety pages, which ran for almost four years.
In 1998, online projects emerged. The first to use Web-based technology to empower citizens was the “New Hampshire Tax Challenge” led by New Hampshire Public Radio, including Nashua’s Telegraph and a broad civic coalition. The project created an online tax calculator to give citizens an idea of what might happen to their taxes under various scenarios for a broad-based tax.
This technique reached a new level of refinement in 2001 with the Everett (WA) Herald’s “Waterfront Renaissance” project, which used a “Sim City” approach to build interactive maps online that gave citizens a voice in future waterfront development.
Conclusion
While the Pew Center’s archive is substantial, it is only a partial record of the movement and does not contain a number of other cases of civic journalism.
The Pew Center played a unique role in civic journalism’s growth and development: a researcher of new tendencies and demands from the field; an incubator of new ideas and experiments; a roving classroom, through workshops and teaching tools; a research sponsor; and a publisher and disseminator. The data reflect this rich and continuing dialogue between the Center and the field itself.
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More Research
“Opinion without Polls: Finding a Link Between Corporate Culture and Public Journalism”
David Loomis and Philip Meyer, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Vol. 12 No. 3, 2000.
Through examining the annual reports of publicly held media companies over a 27-year period, the study concludes that companies that joined the early adopters of public journalism were more likely to reflect a greater concern for their newsroom’s social responsibility over profitability.
“General News, A Civic Journalism Project and Indices of Social Capital”
Rene Q. Chen, Esther Thorson, Doyle Yoon, University of Missouri-Columbia. Ekaterina Ognianova, Forrester Research, Boston, MA. To be presented to the Mass Communication Division of the International Communication Association, Seoul, July 2002.
As Binghamton, NY, experienced a severe economic downturn in the early and mid-’90s, the newspaper took on a multi-year experiment in civic journalism. The study measures the community’s general news and civic journalism consumption, voting and organizational participation. It concludes that civic journalism can have a direct influence on civic participation.