A Case Study From Rochester, New York: The Impact Of Civic Journalism Projects On Voting Behavior in State-Wide Referendums

By James R. Bowers 
St. John Fisher College

with Blair Claflin 
The Des Moines Register (Formerly of The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle)

and Gary Walker 
WXXI Radio and Television

Paper prepared for presentation at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the New England Political Science Association, May 1-2, Worcester, MA

Introduction

The media generally are recognized as major environmental factors impacting “the fundamental ideas that people have about what the world of politics is really like” (Ranney 1983, 6). That media exercise this influence is not surprising in that “the combination of television, newspapers, radio, and magazines represent an extraordinary capacity to inform the public rapidly and in considerable depth about major political news” (Flannigan & Zingale 1994, 150-51). Since few individuals regularly experience government or politics first-hand, this capacity to inform also is the power to shape and define the political reality individuals come to know. This mediated political reality heavily influences what individuals both believe they ought to know, think, and discuss about public affairs and how they are to act and participate in public life (Bowers 1993).

Whenever the media report on public and political matters, they engage in a civic function important to the maintenance of a democratic and representative political system. However, the manner in which contemporary media carry out this civic function increasingly raises concerns. Yankelovich (1991, 29) writes that the news reported on by the media “is a highly refracted version of reality. The press magnifies certain aspects of politics and down plays others, which are often more central to the issue of governing.” This selective magnification is clearly evident in journalistic coverage of election campaigns. In presenting this coverage to the public, reporters are more inclined to focus on candidate credibility rather than on any serious comparison of the programmatic or philosophical differences between opposing candidates. In the process of doing so, critics maintain that journalists encourage the erosion of public life by sending “wrong messages” out into the greater community (Patterson 1993, 18). Critics argue that the result of these practices is that the projected political reality discourages citizen participation in public life. Participation in the mediate political world is replaced “by a kind of endless spectatorship” (Woodward 1997, 7) and a general disdain for government and politics.

Among professional journalists, there is a growing appreciation both of this criticism and that “the great majority of what Americans know and hate about politics, they get through journalists” (Merritt, Jr. 1994, 21). In accepting this “fact”, professional journalists also are owning up to their “own responsibility to democracy” and the maintenance of public life (Greider 1992, 304). Within the reporting media, this responsibility has manifest itself in the civic or public journalism movement.

The remainder of the article examines the potential impact civic journalism has for fostering greater citizen participation in public life. It does so by first presenting a brief overview of what civic journalism is. Second, a case study of civic journalism in Rochester, New York, is presented. The case study first details a short history of the civic journalism projects by a three-way media partnership consisting of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle[D&C], (Rochester’s daily newspaper), WXXI (Rochester’s public television and radio outlet), and WOKR-TV (Rochester’s number one commercial television station). It then describes and assesses the impact of their civic journalism project to stimulate voter awareness of and participation in the 1997 statewide constitutional convention ballot referendum. 

Defining Civic Journalism

Civic journalism rests on a proposition that public life and journalism are “codependent.” As David Merritt (1995a, 4-5), one of the principal founders of civic journalism, notes: “Public life needs the information and perspective that journalism can provide, and journalism needs a viable public life, because without [the latter] there is no need for journalism.” Given Merritt’s assessment, it is not an overstatement to suggest that civic journalism advocates assign the very survival and continued relevance of news institutions to involved citizens participating in public life who are in need of information drawn from the political and public affairs reporting of news organizations (Friedland 1996). Without this involvement and “if people are not attentive to public life, if they . . . retreat into only private concerns, they will have no need for journalists or journalism” (Merritt 1995a, 6).

The media’s recognition and advancement of this codependence between public life and journalism is the foundation upon which civic journalism is built. Advocates of civic journalism assert that media have a responsibility to reaffirm citizen participation in public life and to strengthen their community’s civic culture. By the latter term, these advocates mean “the forces that bind people to their community, draw them into politics and public affairs, and cause them to see ‘the system’ as theirs . . . rather than [as] the playground of insiders or political professionals” (Rosen and Merritt 1994, 4). Civic journalism proponents proclaim that media can advance public life and affirm a community’s civic culture by providing individuals meaningful information that is both relevant to their lives and fosters the ability and opportunity to participate meaningfully in public affairs (Merritt 1995a, 5; Charity 1995, 2). Thus, civic journalism can be seen as advancing a symbiotic or mutually beneficial relationship between the public and journalism where the current focus on just reporting the news is transformed to one where news organizations strive to facilitate people thinking about solutions to public problems (Hoyt 1995, 2) and about themselves as “citizens capable of action” (Merritt 1995b, 11).

As the above description underscores, civic journalism is principally a public spirited orientation toward news reporting and community. Despite this general view, there is no real consensus regarding the precise and specific practices that make-up civic journalism (Corrigan 1997a). However, there is some shared agreement regarding how news reporting of political and public affairsgenerally needs to be adjusted for civic journalism to flourish and public life to be reinvigorated.

Perhaps most crucial to this adjustment is the call for journalists to become “fair-minded participants” in public life rather than detached observers (Merritt 1995a, 6). To accomplish this, civic journalism advocates assert that journalists need to lose their long ingrained value of objectivity and neutrality on questions pertaining to: the value of citizen participation in public affairs; the importance of genuine debate taking place between candidates and on public problems; and actions that enable a community to effective address its problem. For civic journalists, taking positions on these matters and acting to bring them about merely is distinguishing between “doing journalism and doing politics. Toward specific proposals, particular candidates, the political agenda of this party or that interest group, the journalist’s traditional pledge of neutrality remains intact” (Rosen 1994, 11). Thus civic journalism would be active only when public life and public discussion “need to be stimulated or improved.” Journalists would remain neutral “(but not indifferent) when the process of decision making is underway, when the community gets down to making specific choices” (Rosen 1994, 14).

The “advocacy” orientation of civic journalism appears to place it at odds with the conventional perspective on what is news. Conventional journalism practices emphasize “conflict, prominence and novelty as among the important criteria for determining what makes news. [Civic] journalism castigates these traditional attributes of news” (Corrigan 1997b). In their place, civic journalism favors newsrooms focusing on “stories of civic engagement, problem-solving, and [community] renewal” (Friedland 1996).

Civic journalism not only challenges conventional thinking about what news is, it also challenges the “angle” from which news stories ought to come. Civic journalism rejects the notion that the media are “the ‘voice of the people’ asking the questions that the common man needs to have answered” (Walker 1997, 39). Instead, civic journalism advocates maintain that journalists need to ground their reporting “in the concerns of ordinary people” (Charity 1995, 16) by “listening [directly] to the community” (Walker 1997, 44). Through such techniques as focus and discussion groups, community forums, and open-ended questionnaires, journalists can learn to rely less on local leaders and political experts and more on “ordinary citizens” to set the public agenda on what and how they report the news (Corrigan 1997b).

In effect, civic journalism substitutes “public listening” for elite listening for the purpose of ascertaining how public affairs reporting ought to unfold. For example, when covering an election or political campaign, rather than focusing on the “maneuvers of candidates or the machination of insiders” (Rosen 1994,9) civic journalists, relying on public listening techniques would try and discover what matters to potential voters in order to find out what the election or campaign is really about. Their election coverage would then center on voter identified concerns rather the “latest political dogfight” (Thames 1995, 2-3).

Ultimately, proponents of civic journalism sing its praises out of a recognition that “the local news media touch almost every part of the local community every day” of the year. Thus the local media become the means through which most members of a community come to know those parts of it with which they do not regularly interact (Friedland 1996). Since the community rarely comes together as a whole, a surrogate is needed to advance public life. Advocates of civic journalism maintain that the media can be that surrogate, thus becoming the “civic space” through which the community can have a conversation with itself” (Corrigan 1997b). 

A Case Study From Rochester, NY

The Beginning of Civic Journalism. Civic journalism became incorporated into the political and public affairs reporting of the Democrat and Chronicle, WXXI, and WOKR-TV in much the same way as it had begun elsewhere. It began as, and continues to be, a series of individual projects affecting political coverage. A wholesale reorientation of how the three partners conduct their routine newsroom business has not taken place. For example, at the D&C, in addition to traditional style coverage of candidate actions and campaign strategies, the paper has instituted a new commitment emphasizing issue coverage in its public affairs reporting. During each election cycle, the D&C now examines four or five community problems in depth. The paper then polls candidates on three or four questions regarding each issue.

The initial civic journalism-styled collaboration was undertaken among two of the three media partners during the 1993 Rochester Democratic mayoral primary. During that primary election, the Democrat and Chronicle joined with Rochester public radio and television station WXXI to carry out four nights of debates among the six Democratic candidates. Citizen-asked questions were an important component of these debates. Citizens were invited to query the candidates along with questions from reporters and the candidates themselves. Those representatives from WXXI and the D&C organizing the debates strongly believed that reporters would ask the standard “gotcha questions” and that the candidates would launch negative attacks on one another. Citizen-asked questions would be the “wild card” in the debate and lessen the candidates’s opportunity for giving predictable and scripted answers to all questions.

Residents throughout the city and the greater Rochester metropolitan area widely watched, listened to, and read about these debates. The debates seem to have had a dramatic effect on how the voting public perceived the competing candidates. Going into the debates, candidate and Rochester Urban League president William A. Johnson, Jr. was a long shot candidate with only an 11 percent standing in the opinion polls. But during the debates, he was able to sufficiently distinguish himself from the other five candidates and present himself as a clear alternative to the two front runners. His debate performance, public response to it, and editorial endorsements from what was then Rochester’s two daily newspapers (both owned by Gannett) and one weekly alternative paper culminated in a first place primary finish.

After their initial success of using citizen participation in the four nights of mayoral debates, both WXXI and the Democrat and Chronicle began to expand their use of voters to inform the kinds of questions asked of candidates. In the 1995 election for Monroe County Executive, the two media partners extensively used voters to help ask candidates questions in debate settings rather than the more traditional reporter-candidate format. They expanded this approach for their 1996 election coverage, creating what became known as the “Voice of the Voter” campaign. WXXI and the D&C relied upon “Voice of the Voter” participants for both citizen critiques of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions and campaign commercials. “Voice of the Voter” participants also queried local reporters covering the Republican and Democratic national conventions in San Diego and Chicago and Rochester area candidates campaigning for federal and state offices.

During 1995, the Democrat and Chronicle and WXXI extended their venture into civic journalism beyond campaign coverage. In that year, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism awarded them a $35,000 grant for a collaborative series on the condition of education in Rochester. The series, called “Grading Our Schools,” was an effort by the two partners to gauge community satisfaction with public education in Monroe County. Their interest in this area stemmed from a series of nationally acclaimed educational reforms designed to raise student standardized test scores that had been initiated by the Rochester City School District in 1987. A significant component of these reforms were substantial salary increases for Rochester teachers. These increases intended to attract the “best and brightest” teachers to the city school district. Salary increases in the city precipitated similar increases in the surrounding towns and suburbs.

With almost 10 years having elapsed since the reforms were first proposed, WXXI and the D&C were interested in whether the public perceived that the increased money on teacher salaries had been well spent. To find out, the media partners commissioned poll of 768 individuals. Based on the poll results, the collaboration produced about 70 stories printed in the Democrat and Chronicleand Times Union. On television, three one-half-hour WXXI REPORTS, WXXI’s weekly news magazine, were produced as companion broadcasts. The centerpiece of the effort were two live interactive Town Meetings, each meeting was two hours long. Each Town Meeting featured a city and suburban site, which interacted with the other site. Each broadcast included live “flash polls” involving several hot-button issues such as “should public school students were uniforms?” The results of the flash polls were given during the live programs. Given the self-generated coverage, the “Grading Our Schools” project made a “big splash” throughout the Monroe County community. However, the public dialogue generated from it was very broad and unfocused, and no resulting direct community action appears to have resulted from it.

In 1996 the media partnership was expanded to include WOKR-TV, the number one rated commercial station in Rochester. The first venture of this three way partnership was a project directed at youth violence entitled “Make Us Safe.” In this project, the partners conducted and reported on a survey of 1,771 teenagers from throughout Monroe County. The poll found that about one-third of the survey respondents feared violence would shorten their lives. The poll also found that a core group of about 10 percent of the County’s youth were most at risk of committing violent crime. This appeared due, in part, to the absence of a strong parental figure.

To dramatize this issue, the partners again used a two week media blitz. Poll based stories appeared daily in the paper, weekly on public television and daily on commercial TV and on Public Radio. The first week of stories focused on youth violence problems based on the poll results and culminated with a one hour documentary. The documentary was based on the poll results and was illustrated by community stories and on a youth summit held at WXXI to give voice to the poll responses. The program aired on the one year anniversary of the stabbing death of a 13-year-old Rochester girl at the hands of her 12-year-old classmate. The second week focused on solutions again with poll based daily stories in the paper, on commercial TV and on Public Radio. The partners ended this project by convening a round-table discussion on youth violence. Participants in the round-table included community leaders, youth experts, teenagers, and parents.

The “Make Us Safe” project was more successful than its predecessor. Public awareness and concern over youth violence appears to have increased. In reaction to this heightened awareness, both the Rochester city government and the city school district announced new initiatives aimed at combating youth violence. Both the city government and the school district pinned the potential success of these new initiatives on the greater community awareness of the issue.

Civic Journalism and the “ConCon” Referendum. The New York State Constitution requires that every 20 years a referendum be held asking voters to decide whether the State should hold a new constitutional convention. Nineteen Ninety-seven was such a year. However, the initial push for a constitutional convention began during the 1994 gubernatorial campaign when Governor Mario Cuomo endorsed the idea as a way to achieving institutional and process reforms in how New York State government carried out its official business.

During the ensuing three years leading up to the November 1997 election, the positions of both convention supporters and opponents hardened and became predictable. Supporters argued that voting for a constitutional convention was the best hope for breathing life into such proposed reforms as term limits, campaign reforms, and mandated sanctions against the state legislature for failing to pass the state’s budget on time. (The New York State Legislature has not approved a state budget by the constitutionally required April 1 deadline since 1984.)

Opponents of a state constitutional convention included most key legislative leaders, welfare rights advocates, labor unions, and (surprisingly) the New York State League of Women Voters. Many of these opponents raised fears that, contrary to the procedural reforms supporters were stressing, an open convention would place existing constitutional safeguards for the poor, the environment, and public employees pension funds at risk. Other opponents, such as the League of Women Voters, expressed concerns that the same interests and political leaders who now ran the state would dominate the convention and thwart any real reform. Still others questioned the wisdom of the state spending over $60 million on the convention just to propose a new constitution that probably would be defeated when put forth to the voters.

Aware of the hardening positions of the opposing camps, the three media partners met in early Spring 1997 to discuss how they should cover the arcane topic of a constitutional convention. They agreed that they did not want the debate on the convention to be driven by 30-second campaign commercials for and against it. To reduce the probability of this happening in the six county Rochester metropolitan area, the partners decided that they must take the initiative to first discover and then provide the type of information citizens wanted and needed to both meaningfully participate in the referendum discussion and make informed choices regarding their vote on it.

The approach that they developed drew heavily from their prior experiences with their “Grading Our Schools” and “Make Us Safe” projects. Specifically, the partners first met with readers, viewers, and listeners to determine what citizens believed they needed to know to cast an informed vote.

To that end, in May 1997 the partners, particularly the D&C and WXXI, began to run in-depth feature stories that addressed their readers and viewers questions. The stories were presented in a clear, concise, and easy to digest manner. The media partners took care to ensure that the stories were balanced in their presentation of the pros and cons of holding a state constitutional convention.

In addition to its regular new features about the convention debate, the D&C also began a weekly feature entitled “The Constitutional Question.” In this feature, the paper concisely answered questions asked by members of the Voice of the Voter group that had been brought together to inform the paper on its 1996 election coverage. WXXI-TV started a parallel feature called “The Constitutional Minute” that played between its prime-time shows. Again, Voice of the Voter participants asked questions that were then researched and answered by a good-government group that had taken a neutral stance on the convention.

The partners’ effort to promote informed participation in the public debate over a state constitutional convention went beyond the reporting of feature stories on the issue. They also produced an online constitutional convention web page that included copies of completed news stories, opinion pieces, and an interactive feature allowing individuals accessing the site to leave questions that they wanted answered.

Finally, to give their viewers, listeners, and readers a chance to participate in the actual debate on the convention referendum, the partners also held three community forums/town-hall meetings between August and November 1997. A town-meeting held on August 26, 1997 drew almost 200 persons to a local college to hear a panel of “experts” debate the pros and cons of convention. The town meeting was taped and made available for rebroadcast on public radio stations throughout the state. A second public event convened a group of voters to question former Associated Press reporter and Middle East hostage Terry Anderson, a vocal convention supporter, and Jane Thompson, leader of Citizens Against a Constitutional Convention. WXXI-TV then used the Anderson-Thompson forum as the basis for a 60 minute documentary on the constitutional convention debate that aired on public television stations throughout New York State the week before the election.

Six days before the November election, the three media partners sponsored an old-fashioned soapbox forum. This event, aired live on WXXI-AM, gave individuals 90 seconds to speak for or against the convention. More than 25 speakers addressed the issue. Most of those who spoke were neither elected officials nor associated with any special interest group.

In addition to their efforts to educate and inform citizens in the six county Rochester metropolitan area, the Democrat and Chronicle, WXXI, and WOKR-TV also tried to encourage their media counterparts in other locales throughout the state to join with or emulate their civic journalism project on the convention referendum. At the start of the convention referendum project, the three media partners had very ambitious goals. They were going to take civic journalism to television and radio stations and newspapers throughout New York. But the skepticism toward civic journalism that many professional journalists continue to hold, resulted in only minimal, piece-meal success in expanding their project state-wide. Most media outlets throughout the state continued to cover the convention referendum in a very traditional way, i.e., without first approaching readers, viewers, and listeners to ascertain issues important to them or including them in town meetings and forums about the proposed constitutional convention.

Even the Democrat and Chronicle‘s sister Gannett papers in Binghamton, Elmira, Utica, and Westchester did not actively join the three partners’ convention referendum project. These papers did run most of the stories produced by the D&C. But unlike the front-page status the Democrat and Chronicle assigned to these stories, the other Gannett papers did not play them as prominently. In addition while some of the D&C’s sister papers assigned their own reporters to follow the convention referendum issue, none did so in the same manner as was being done in Rochester.

Thus while the Democrat and Chronicle, WXXI, and WOKR-TV incorporated such practices in their coverage of the constitutional convention referendum, other media outlets throughout the state continued to cover the convention referendum in a manner little different than any other political or public affairs story. Accordingly, only individuals living in the six county Rochester metropolitan area served by the three media partners regularly were exposed to sustained civic journalism-styled coverage of this issue.

Impact and Analysis. The heart of civic journalism is a commitment on the part of journalists practicing it to boost public life by better informing community members and encouraging their civic participation. Ideally then to assess the impact of civic journalism on public life both intended outcomes ought to be tested for and measured. Accordingly, to suggest that the civic journalism techniques employed by the three media partners in their reporting on the state constitutional convention referendum had any impact on individuals living in the six county Rochester metropolitan area, it ought establish that individuals living there and presumably exposed to these techniques were both better informed about the referendum than were others in the state not so exposed and that they participated in the referendum election at a higher rate. Unfortunately, data exist only for assessing the participatory goal of the partners civic journalism project on the constitutional referendum. Thus the analysis below focuses only on whether individuals residing in the six county Rochester metropolitan area participated in the convention referendum at levels higher than persons residing in the rest of New York.

For the purpose of comparing levels of participation in the convention referendum election, the media partners’ failure to export their project throughout the state actually is an asset. It allows some logical inferences to be drawn about the impact of their civic journalism project on levels of participation. Simply stated, if the overall level of participation in the convention referendum election can be shown to be higher in the six county Rochester metropolitan area than it was elsewhere in the state, the partners’ civic journalism project reasonably can be assumed to be at least among the factors that explain this difference.

Data adapted from election returns provided by the New York State Board of Elections document that individuals residing in the six county Rochester metropolitan area serviced by the three media partners did participate in the constitutional convention referendum at rates higher than other regions of the state. All six counties had levels of voter participation in the referendum election higher than either the remainder of the upstate region or New York City. The increased level of participation ranged from 16 percent for Wayne County to seven percent for Orleans County. Overall, the six county area serviced by the media partners had a rate of participation 11 percent higher than the remainder of the upstate region and 46 percent higher than New York City. Eighty-two percent of individuals from the six county area voting in the 1997 general election also voted on the convention referendum. This compares to 71 percent participation in the remainder of the upstate region and 36 percent participation in New York City. (See Table 1.) 

Table 1
Levels of Participation in Convention Referendum Election

Source: Table compiled from data provided by the New York State Board of Elections. 
Total Vote = total number of votes cast in county 
Total Participation = the sum of persons casting yes and no votes on referendum 
Percentage of Participation = sum of persons voting on referendum divided by the total number of persons voting in an area 
 

In addition, once individuals in the six county area voted on the constitutional convention referendum, they remained to also vote at higher levels than the rest of the state on other ballot referendums. Seventy-seven percent of the voters in the six county Rochester area participating in the November 1997 general election also voted on the referendums pertaining to limited changes in court jurisdictions, and preferential treatment of veterans in civil service hiring. Eighty percent of those voters remained to participate in the third referendum on a school building bond act. The remainder of the upstate region participated in these three referendum at levels of 65, 69, and 71 percent respectively. Overall, on two of the three referendums, the six county area serviced by the media partners’ civic journalism project had increased rates of participation over the remainder of the upstate region nearly as large as that for the constitutional convention referendum. (See Table 2.) This pattern of participation across the referendums suggests that the civic journalism project directed at the constitutional convention referendum may have had a residual or indirect effect on the levels of voter participation concerning the other ballot propositions. 

Table 2
Levels of Voter Participation

Source: Table compiled from data provided by the New York State Board of Elections. 
TV: Total Vote 
TP: Total Participation in Referendum 
%Part: Percentage of voter participation in referendum 

A further observation that can be made concerns the convention referendum yes/no vote totals in the six county Rochester metropolitan. Generally, voters in the six counties serviced by the three media partners were more inclined to vote in favor of a state constitutional convention than were voters in the remainder of the upstate area or New York City. Voting returns in all six of these counties were more in favor of a constitutional convention than were the voters in the rest of the upstate counties. Four of the six counties recorded favorable votes seven to 15 percent higher than the total percent for the remainder of upstate. Overall the combined six county “yes vote” was twelve percent higher than the remainder of upstate New York. (See Table 3.)

This same pattern of greater support for the constitutional referendum also generally holds when comparing the six county Rochester metropolitan area to New York City. Four of the six counties recorded favorable votes four to 12 percent higher than “the Big Apple.” Overall, the combined six county “yes vote”on the constitutional convention referendum was nine percent higher than the favorable vote coming out of New York City. (See Table 3.)

A special observation needs to be made about Monroe County’s level of support for the convention referendum. Monroe County is the most populated of the six counties in the Rochester metropolitan area. It also is the center of the three media partners’ service area.

It literally was the “eye of the storm” in regards to the partners’ coverage of the convention referendum. For example, all of the media sponsored town meetings took place in Monroe County. Living in the center of civic journalism project appears to have had an additional impact on the citizens of Monroe County. Of these individuals who voted on the constitutional referendum, 49.9 percent favored it.(See Table 3.)

The disparity in the “yes” vote in the media partners’ general service area and in Monroe County in particular does not appear to have been the result of any press bias in favor of a constitutional convention. In fact, the Democrat and Chronicle‘s editorials actually came out against passge of the convention referendum. Rather than media bias then, the “yes” vote disparity found in the six county Rochester metropolitan area appears to have more to do with how individuals reacted to receiving a broad range of information expressing both favorable and unfavorable opinions on the convention referendum. This interpretation is born out in state wide polling information collected for the three media partners by Zogby International of Utica, New York. According to Zogby, his survey found that the more people knew and understood about the convention, “the more they tended to support it.” Thus the “yes” vote disparity in the six county region and Monroe County in particular can be understood as a manifestation of Zogby’s poll findings.

Only rural Sullivan County in far downstate New York equaled Monroe County’s favorable vote on the proposed constitutional convention. With 63 percent participation in the referendum election 49.9 percent of those residents voting favored calling a state constitutional convention. However, unlike those living in Monroe County, Sullivan county residents were not exposed to any civic journalism-styled reporting about the proposed constitutional convention. Rather, according to one Sullivan County election commissioner, the highly favorable referendum vote appears to have resulted from a steady stream of county charter revision referendums that predisposed the residents of this rural downstate county toward structural changes in how they are governed. For example, before the referendum votes, Sullivan County had just replaced its board of supervisors with an elected county legislature. 

Table 3
Percentage of Vote Favoring a State Constitutional Convention

Source: Table compiled from data provided by the New York State Board of Elections. 

The pattern of voting on the state constitutional convention referendum detailed above strongly suggests that any explanation of voting behavior for that election needs to consider the impact of the civic journalism project carried out by the Democrat and Chronicle, WXXI, and WOKR-TV. However, it is possible that the pattern of voting behavior found in the 1997 referendums election merely reflects a historic tendency of the six county Rochester metropolitan area to demonstrate higher levels of voting participation on referendum than the rest of New York State. Table 4 documents that this is not the case. Rather, it clearly demonstrates that levels of voter participation in referendum elections for the six county area are usually close to those for the remainder of the upstate region and New York City. This pattern holds for five of the six election years prior to 1997. Only in 1991 did the level of participation in a referendum election for the six county Rochester metropolitan area show any sizable difference from the remainder of upstate. (See Table 4.) Thus the recent historical pattern for the six county Rochester metropolitan area appears to converge with the rest of upstate New York rather than diverge. That such a pattern exists heightens the probability that the civic journalism project conducted by the three media partners had a positive effect in increasing voter participation in the 1997 state constitutional convention referendum election. 

Table 4
Absolute and Average Levels of Voter Participation in Statewide Referendum Elections 1990-1997

Source: Table complied from data provided for the New York State Board of Elections. 
* Only 1 referendum that year 
** Average based on 3 referendums 
*** Average based on 4 referendums 
There were no ballot referendums in 1994. 

Conclusions

Much of the redesign in political and public affairs reporting engineered by practitioners of civic journalism has centered around campaigns and elections. After more than a five year struggle for acceptance and incorporation into the nation’s newsrooms, an impressive number of media outlets in many middle size cities now are experimenting with and rediscovering their communities through civic journalism-inspired political and public affairs reporting. Despite its use in these newsrooms, critics of civic journalism insist that there remains “little evidence that [civic journalism] projects have any real impact on elections [and campaigns]” (Corrigan 1997a). However, the impact that the Rochester-based media partners’ civic journalism project had on levels of voter participation in the New York State constitutional convention referendum should give opponents pause to reconsider their “no impact” criticism.

Not finding seeable or measurable impact from civic journalism projects directed at campaigns and elections for public office is not surprising. Noris it any reason for practitioners and advocates of civic journalism to become doubtful or defensive. In campaigns and elections for public office, individuals acquire “useful” information from, and base their decision to vote or participate on, a variety of political factors such as partisanship, ideology, incumbency, the presence or absence of strong challengers, and negative campaigning. These additional informational cues and determinants of participation compete with and mitigate the influence of election-directed civic journalism projects.

In referendum elections, though, most additional informational cues and determinants of participation are absent, or, at least, present in an altered form. For example, in the case of the New York State constitutional convention referendum there were no clear partisan or ideological differences between supporters and opponents of the referendum. For the most part, there were no other strong alternative informational cues and determinants of participation competing with and mitigating the influence of the three partners’ civic journalism project on the convention referendum. Absent the usual political determinants such as strong partisan cues, individuals in the six county Rochester metropolitan area were more susceptible to the three partners’ civic journalism project. It was the only well organized effort to inform their thinking about the constitutional referendum to which they were regularly exposed and something to which other state residents were not.

From practitioners and advocates of civic journalism, this conclusion is important. It suggests that while redesigning their regular political and public affairs coverage of campaigns and elections is not without merit, the success of civic journalism and its contribution to a community’s public life is likely to be on those public issues where traditional cues and determinants of political behavior are less in play. Thus concentrating efforts on public issues such as these could produce a clear track record of success and go a long way toward silencing critics. It is important to acknowledge, though, that establishing the direct impact of many types of civic journalism projects will remain difficult to do. Few public issues or processes have the same measurable, patternable, and easily collectable dimensions of public participation as does voting. Without such data or pre- and post-project analysis of individual attitudes and behavior, assessing the impact of many types of civic journalism projects will remain difficult. This, for example, is the very situation that the Democrat and Chronicle and WXXI experience in evaluating the impact of their two earlier projects, “Grading Our Schools” and “Make Us Safe,” Addionally, it is important to emphasize that even if there were no assessment issues surrounding its impact, the practice of civic journalism cannot be expected in a only a few years to turn around the decline in public life that has taken a generation to accomplish. Nevertheless, the three media partners’ project on the New York State constitutional convention referendum demonstrates that in some special category of public issues that decline, at least, can be halted temporarily. 

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