A Study Conducted For:
The Pew Center for Civic Journalism
Conducted By:
Lewis A. Friedland, Professor
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sandy Nichols, Ph.D. Candidate
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Madison
September 2002
The first stirrings of civic journalism began more than a dozen years ago, in newspapers in Columbus, Georgia and Wichita, Kansas. Since then, the movement has grown and spread throughout the U.S. newspaper world. Scholars and practitioners alike have known that “hundreds of projects” have taken place across the country since then, but, how precisely how many, when, and where has not been known.
To remedy this gap, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism (Center) commissioned the Center for Communication and Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study the range and scope of civic journalism experiments undertaken by newsrooms across the country since the early 1990s. Our study attempts to provide a descriptive analysis of the reach of the movement based on the following questions:
- What newsrooms across the country have experimented with civic journalism practices?
- What exactly do editors and journalists in these newsrooms consider to be civic journalism?
- What are the types of community issues being addressed by these practitioners?
- How and to what extent are the tools and techniques of civic journalism being used?
- How did these tools and techniques change over time?
- What has been the effect of these experiments, the depth to which civic roots are established in local communities and any impact on public life that is realized?
To begin to answer these questions, we examined and coded material generated by newsrooms seeking funding from the Center for civic journalism experiments, competing for the Center’s Batten Awards for Excellence in Civic Journalism, and/or submitting examples of civic journalism for informal recognition, advice or assistance from the Center. As of the last date of data collection, the Center’s archive contained evidence of 651 journalism projects published between the years 1994 and 2002. Of this total, 121 projects were selected by the Center for funding, 466 cases were submitted for the Batten Award competition, and 109 projects were sent to the Center for informal recognition. The majority of our analysis is based on this database. However, for purposes of systematic evaluation of categorical trends of the movement, we used a reduced database containing only those cases published between 1995 and 2000, the first and last years of complete data at the time of our data collection. We rely on the primary dataset for our analysis in this report, unless we note otherwise. The complete data and methods are presented in detail in later in the report. This summary introduction presents and highlights our major findings:
1. Some form of civic journalism was practiced in at least a fifth of all American newspapers, in almost every state and in every region. This figure is the most conservative possible, and we believe the actual number may be closer to double.
2. There is a clear pattern of development in civic journalism content, as journalists learned in what appear to be phases. Civic journalism generally started with elections, moved fairly quickly to coverage of general community issues and problems, and then began to address specific community issues.
3. There is a parallel development of technique. Civic journalism coverage was “invented” through a series of practical experiments in the early 90s. It was extended through the attempt to develop daily and weekly routine from the mid-90s on. And with the advent of the Internet, new interactive approaches to civic news coverage emerged starting in the late 90s.
4. The goals of news organizations show a strong commitment to the traditional public news values of informing the public and, to a lesser extent, the civic and democratic values of problem-solving and increased deliberation.
5. New ways of reporting the news have emerged that help citizens deliberate on important problems, address and solve them, and increase their voices in the community and in the pages of the papers.
6. A substantial minority of papers, about 35%, continued their civic journalism involvements for three or more years, with almost 20% practicing for more than four years.
7. Finally, there is significant (but not conclusive) evidence of impact in communities where civic journalism is practiced. About a third of all cases showed some community/newspaper partnerships. More than half reported evidence of improved public deliberation. Other results included: use of projects by others, improved citizens skills, new civic organizations formed, and increased volunteerism.
Our report is presented here in two parts. The first section presents our executive summary containing a descriptive analysis of the movement and its evolutionary shifts over time. It is followed by an overview section in which we present our methodology and a comprehensive cross-sectional analysis of the data that describes the full scope and range of civic journalism projects contained in the Center’s archives.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Basic Numbers
We found a total of 322 media or civic organizations in the sample that took a lead role in the implementation of projects and their submittal to the Center. The vast majority of these organizations are represented by newspapers, with 310 primary organizations or 96% of the total cases. Based on the average number of U.S. newspapers from 1995-2000 of 1,505, this figure represents about a fifth of all newspapers.
These numbers need to be understood in context. As noted above, the case population divides into three categories: projects funded by the Center; projects submitted for the Batten Award; and project submitted for recognition or advice to the Center. With the partial exception of a minority of the Batten Award submissions, which may have been entered solely to compete for prizes (discussed in section two), these projects constitute the solid core of civic journalism practice in the United States during this period. For this reason, we believe the figures significantly undercount the actual extent of civic journalism practice during this period. A 1997 survey of journalists for ASNE found levels of support for civic journalism practices (without naming them as such) ranging from 68 to 96%. And a 1997 APME survey that asked news executives explicit questions about civic journalism found support for civic journalism by 56%.1 While it is impossible to estimate precise figures for newspapers that have practiced civic journalism from these studies, both suggest that the numbers of those that have at least tried civic journalism are higher than the 20% of our population of active, self-identified civic journalism newspapers.
Our study, then, represents the heart of civic journalism, and suggests the range of best practices among those news organizations that have explicitly practiced it.
The projects were published by organizations located in 220 U.S. cities and in all but three U.S. states (Hawaii, Nevada and Wyoming). The four most prominently represented regions are the South Atlantic States, with 19% of the cases, the Pacific States, with 16%, and East North Central states, with 13%, and Middle Atlantic states, with 11%. The remaining regions each represent less than 10% of the cases.
A large majority of the projects, or nearly 75%, were published by news organizations with circulations of 250,000 or less. In fact, nearly 45% of them were published by small to mid-sized organizations with circulations of 100,000 or less. Only 41 projects, or 7% of the sample, were published by organizations with circulations over 500,000.
However, a disproportionate share of cases were published by primary news organizations in major metropolitan areas. In fact, 45% of the cases were published by organizations serving major metropolitan areas, with another 40% of the cases published by organizations serving populations outside major metropolitan areas. The cases published by organizations with statewide, multiple state or national distributions, including both newspapers and magazines, represent just over 5% of the total. The remaining cases involved primary organizations that serve niche markets with either an ethnic, special interest group, university or alternative audience. Several projects were produced by news services for distribution to their participating organizations.
Development of Civic Journalism Content 2
We found several broad patterns in the data that show the trajectory of civic journalism over six years of the study. Many early experiments began with attempts to develop civic election coverage. This was true of almost all of the major innovating newsrooms and almost all newsrooms that were new to civic journalism. The pattern of election coverage was cyclical, but began tapering off after 1996. There was a broad middle period in which community projects dominated, at first taking the form of large projects addressing community vision or major community problems, like Charlotte’s “Taking Back Our Neighborhoods.” By 1998 community projects began to address specific issues like race, immigration and youth. In the late nineties, projects began to shift toward mapping communities to understand their diversity and integrating new technologies to expand community connection, as news organizations set new priorities for experimentation. To measure the degree to which these projects established civic roots in the community, they were given a civic index rating: high (4); moderate (3); low (2); very low (1); and none (0). Details of the index are explained in the Civic Index section of the Coding Guide, attached as Appendix A to this report.
Elections
The invention of civic journalism began with election coverage in projects like Wichita’s “Your Vote Counts, “Charlotte’s 1992 “Citizen’s Agenda” project, and Madison’s “We the People Wisconsin.” These early projects addressed the role of the press in democracy, but also had to invent the new civic coverage, developing a wide variety of now-familiar techniques like citizens’ agendas, polling, focus groups and comprehensive analyses of issues and candidates. The new coverage spread rapidly, with new organizations joining annually, but naturally peaking during bi-annual election cycles.
After early election successes, newspapers began to look for ways to deepen their coverage. For example, the Wichita “People Project,” which was pivotal in the shift to community-wide coverage, began as an attempt to dig more deeply into citizens’ issues during an election year. The Maine Citizens Campaign, which began in 1995 but continued through 2000, engaged 90 citizens in continuing discussions of issues they identified as important in the ’96 presidential campaign and expanding deliberations through public forums.
Civic election coverage peaked in 1996 at 25 projects, or nearly half of all election projects in this sample, with the Center funding only six of them, suggesting that election coverage had its own momentum by that point. There was an early focus on partnerships among newspapers and broadcasters, a pattern that began to decline after 1996. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Citizen Voices ’96,” one of the breakthrough projects this year, sponsored a series of deliberative forums with attendance solicited and selected by the editorial board of the paper as an “experiment in political conversation.” The Charlotte Observer’s “Your Voice, Your Vote” project expanded to collaborate on public coverage of the 1996 elections with other news organizations statewide. By 1997, the number of elections projects began to decline, not just cyclically but continuing steadily through the present. Still, significant electoral projects in Maine, Philadelphia, Madison, Charlotte, and elsewhere continued, as did innovation, like the Rochester, New York coverage of a proposed state constitutional convention.
The election projects as a whole scored high on our civic index. Of the 55 total election projects, over 58% were highly civic and 30% were moderately civic. The remaining 12% fell between low and very low, with none receiving a zero rating.
Community
The community category breaks down into two phases and two types of coverage. The first phase featured major community-wide deliberations on public problems. The second tended to focus on specific issues, particularly those concerning race and diversity, immigration and youth. These lines are not sharp, as large community projects have continued to the present and specific issues were present in the early years of the movement.
Perhaps the archetypical large community project is Charlotte’s “Taking Back Our Neighborhoods,” which began in 1994 as an investigative story and continued into 1997 as a community action project. While focused on the specific issue of crime, the project sought to bring the entire community together to find and implement solutions, and succeeded remarkably. The Binghamton Press and 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. And the Philadelphia Daily News began “Rethinking Philadelphia” in 1997 (continuing today), which has focused broadly on the quality of life, economic development, schools, as well as on specific neighborhood issues. The community category, with 61 projects, also rated quite well on the civic index. Nearly 64% of them rated either high or moderate on the index, with only 8% falling between very low to none.
Race, Diversity, Family and Youth
As early as 1995, papers began to explore new community issues in new ways. That year there were 16 projects concerning diversity, including 10 on race relations. Among them was “America Coming Together” by the Akron Beacon Journal, which began as “A Question of Color” in 1994 and has continued ever since. The number of diversity projects dropped during 1996 and 1997, but a few strong projects like the Bronx Journal’s “Eyes on the Bronx” were developed. The year 1998 saw a surge of race and diversity projects, including “The New City: La Nueva Ciudad,” at the San Francisco Examiner, an early use of civic mapping to explore urban racial and ethnic change. This trend continued with diversity category dominating in years 1998 through 2000. With an overall total of 79 projects, they scored well on the civic index. Although not as highly civic as elections and community projects, over 46% of the diversity projects received high to moderate ratings, with about 54% rating from low to no civic elements.
Family and youth stories represent another strong trend in the community category. All totaled, there were 56 youth projects, many of which were from the perspective of young people themselves. In 1995, there were 12 projects on youth, including Tallahassee Democrat’s “Baby’s a momma, Daddy’s gone,” which examined the cycle of teen pregnancy and community wide solutions. The Syracuse Herald American’s “Through the Eyes of Children” and Detroit Free Press’s “Listening to the Children” were the early projects emphasizing the voice of a community’s youth. The number remained steady in 1996, with 13 projects, exemplified by Democrat and Chronicle/Times Union’s “Make Us Safe: Teens Talk About Violence,” a multi-media effort to listen to youth about their personal experiences of violence. In 1997 and 1998, youth projects substantially drop, with only four and six respectively, but rise again in 1999 to 14 projects, including the Minneapolis’s Star Tribune series on “Teen Drinking.” Overall, youth projects were evenly spread between high, moderate, low and very low on the civic index, with only two cases showing no civic elements. In the wake of the school shootings in Columbine and elsewhere, there was a short-lived trend of projects examining the incidence of school violence in 1998 that continued into 1999, when one-third of the cases in this category focused on issues of school safety.
In sum, we see a rather clear trajectory throughout a decade of practice. Beginning with the problems of democracy and the press, expressed initially in the elections of 1988, 1990, and 1992, organizations move to broader coverage of the issues that trouble citizens in their own communities, looking for ways to extend a citizens’ agenda to community and public problem-solving. As these new tools are forged, news organizations begin to apply them to community problems that are specific and difficult: race and diversity, youth, and so on. This last phase of learning also extended the search for new techniques of mapping issues and actors in community life, as we see below.
Development of Technique 3
Just as there was cycle of learning in civic content, we saw a parallel cycle of learning and development of new technique and craft. The first need, as we have noted, was to invent civic journalism. Shortly thereafter, by 1995, newspapers began to recognize the need to incorporate the new techniques into their daily work. This, in turn, led to the development of civic mapping techniques, and, eventually, the use of new interactive tools, including the Internet.
The Charlotte Observer was a pioneer in daily integration. Its “Civic journalism: Doing it Daily” project began in 1995, and remains one of the most successful models of integrating civic reporting throughout its daily newsgathering. The Virginian Pilot’s “Doing public journalism,” particularly its thrice-weekly public life, education, and public safety pages, ran for almost four years, starting in 1997. Probably no other paper achieved as high a level of consistent civic coverage week in and week out.
Interactive journalism was a small segment of our data (24 cases overall, most since 1998), but it grew quickly. We defined this area primarily as the use of new tools and technologies to improve the connection between news organizations and citizens. In 1998, with the growth of the Internet, we started to see online projects emerge. The first to use web-based technology to empower citizens was the “New Hampshire Tax Challenge” led by New Hampshire Public Radio, including the Nashua 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, to see how different tax proposals would affect their individual tax bills, and to complement on-air reports and public forums. This technique reached a new level of refinement in 2001 with the Everett (Washington) Herald’s “Waterfront Renaissance” project, which used a “Sim City” approach to build clickable maps online for residents’ visions about the city’s waterfront renovation, give citizens a voice in development of the waterfront, and create a interactive map to help citizens create a community vision of the future.
In 1999, Alabama’s Anniston Star undertook the first civic mapping project, “Setting the Agenda,” which created a database of community leaders in the newsroom as a resource to stimulate dialogue between public officials and citizens. This proved particularly effective in organizing community forums of opinion leaders and elected officials to give lawmakers a sense of what county residents want the state government to do. By 2000, there were four more civic mapping projects, including a “Cyber Mapping” project in Anniston, and other online projects (13 total), including “Handle Extra,” an ongoing weekly civic journalism section of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. We also saw renewed interest in comprehensive election coverage using new interactive tools, including Wisconsin Public Television’s “Web TV-2000 Elections.”
Civic mapping continues to grow and develop, with new projects in Madison, Wisconsin and elsewhere. And there is an unsurprisingly high and growing interest in how new web-based tools of reporting and data gathering can be integrated with new forms of citizen-interaction in both special projects and daily work.
Commitment to Public and Civic Values
Our study found evidence of strong commitment to the traditional public values of journalism. Nearly 56% of the projects were designed to primarily inform the public and raise awareness, goals shared by civic journalism and more traditional news organizations. Projects coded this way might, however, have involved other explicit goals, for instance to give citizens a voice on the issues or survey public opinion, but they were designed primarily to give citizens information on project-related issues. This finding, on the strength of traditional goals, is ambiguous. On the one hand, it suggests that even when relatively committed news organizations experimented with civic practices at a high level, they sought to frame their work in traditional terms. On the other hand, it suggests that the incompatibility between civic and traditional journalism, claimed by some critics, was not really there: the vast majority of civic journalism’s most experienced practitioners felt comfortable with both sets of values.
The next highest category, 15% of this sample, is represented by those projects in which the primary goal was to conduct an investigation. Although these investigative projects represent a significant number of the overall total in this study, they are not likely to rate high on the civic index. This can be explained by the higher percentage of these projects that were entered into Batten Award competition. As part of the Batten Award entries, they tried to embrace the label “civic journalism,” although more often they described themselves as “public service” projects. There were, however, important examples of specific civic journalism investigation, for example the Asbury Park Press “House of Cards,” which focused on both real estate fraud and civic action to expose and correct it, or the Portland Newspapers’“The Deadliest Drug: Maine’s Addiction to Alcohol,” which investigated the sources of alcoholism and possible solutions.
The third largest goal category, improve civic life in a community, is represented by nearly 15%. Here, organizations intentionally set out to play a role in, for instance, improving the electoral process, engaging citizens in public deliberations, and/or bridging the gap between citizens and their elected officials. Four percent were designed specifically to provide citizens with the means of expressing their opinions in a community’s problem-solving efforts. The remaining goals are less evident, each found in less than 2% of the cases.
There are no clear conclusions to be drawn from the coding of values and goals, other than that civic journalism is clearly seen as compatible with the traditional journalism goals of informing the public by its leading practitioners.
New Ways of Covering the News
Beyond changes in the substance and orientation of coverage, we also found evidence of a series of changes in the way that stories were covered. These can be divided into changes in the way that stories were reported, the development of new techniques for citizen interaction, and changes in how stories were framed and written.
We found strong evidence that public deliberative events were held outside the newsroom to facilitate community conversations. We included any type of forum held to facilitate public conversations with and among citizens, civic leaders and/or public officials, including roundtable discussions, town hall meetings, task force groups, specific-action groups, informal neighborhood discussion groups, etc. Of the 617 cases with available data to evaluate public deliberative events, slightly more than 48%, or 295 cases, convened and/or covered some form of public conversation.
In addition, small group interviews, or focus groups, were used in 56 cases, or almost 10%, of the 601 cases with available evidence for evaluation. A vast majority of these projects used between one and five focus groups to gather information from citizens and gauge public sentiment relevant to the project. This relatively low percentage suggests that focus groups were one tool in a broad toolkit for covering citizens, in contrast to charges of some critics that civic journalism was “focus group driven.”
We also found evidence that surveys were used in projects. Of the 617 cases with sufficient evidence to determine whether survey techniques were employed, nearly 33%, or 203 cases, used some form of public opinion data. About 22% of the cases with sufficient evidence to evaluate the type of method used a scientific method with random and representative samples. Additionally, about 11% used some form of informal (non-scientific) surveys, either surveying readers (usually through mail-in coupons) or citizens (usually through “person on the street” interviews).
Perhaps more significant than the use of new techniques for reporting on citizens’ voices was the way these voices were incorporated into the writing of stories. Ninety-six percent of the projects showed some evidence of explanatory framing in which the story is presented to readers in ways to increase readers’ relationship to and understanding of the issues. As opposed to the traditional conflict frame, which tends to narrow the story to two or more opposing viewpoints, the explanatory frame explores an issue, in all its depth and complexity, to provide readers with the information necessary to thoroughly grasp the issue’s scope, relevance and potential impact on their community and personal lives.
Sixty-three percent of the cases showed some evidence of a problem-solving frame, one that engages the reader in the process of identifying potential solutions to the issues being explored and, perhaps, participating in the implementation of solutions. The solutions are usually drawn from either the news organization’s research, the citizens themselves or from other communities with experience in addressing a similar problem.
Over three-quarters, or 78% of the 608 cases with sufficient evidence to evaluate this variable, provided some form of possible solutions to the problems addressed by the project. Thirty-two percent of the cases offered solutions that combined a citizen perspective with that of an official perspective. Another 29% emphasized the solutions offered by citizens, while another 19% placed an emphasis on the official point of view. A total of 127 cases, or about 21% of these cases made no effort to offer possible solutions to the public.
A fairly equal balance between relying on citizens and officials for information and quotes represent the most prevalent type of sourcing in the sample. Forty-seven percent of the 586 cases with sufficient evidence to evaluate this variable relied on both citizens and officials as sources of information and expertise. The number of cases that relied upon citizens as primary sources and those that relied most heavily on the official point of view are equally represented, each with about one-quarter of the cases.
In addition to soliciting citizen voices, a total of 512 cases, or about 85% of the 603 cases with sufficient information to evaluate this variable, published citizens’ perspectives on the issues in the print or online phases of the project. We measured here the degree to which citizen voices were used to express a citizen perspective on the issues in the publication, either print or online, of the projects. Each case was evaluated for evidence of efforts to encourage feedback from readers on the issue and the project itself at the end of the project during the publication phase. This measure represents invitations for readers to communicate with the editors and journalists working on a project. Of the 578 cases with sufficient evidence for analysis of this variable, we found that 47%, or 272 cases, actively solicited feedback from readers via the newspaper, magazine or Web site.
The findings in this category are among the most unequivocal and important in our research. Civic journalism clearly extended the reach of journalism, incorporating new voices of citizens that simply would not have been otherwise heard. These voices were both captured by new ways of reporting, and actually incorporated into stories. Further, citizens were encouraged to respond to the new reporting.
Beyond the incorporation of citizen voices, there was a clear frame shift. Research by Iyengar and others4 has clearly shown that how news is framed, whether it employs a frame that emphasizes conflict between two sides or explains issues in greater complexity, has a strong effect on whether citizens are more or less likely to become civically engaged. The clear shift to explanatory frames is perhaps one of civic journalism’s most important, if still under-explored, achievements.
Commitment Over Time
We expected that the majority of our cases would show a low level of involvement in civic journalism, two years or less. A typical case in this class would have tried one or two projects during our time frame, evidence of experiment but not significant commitment. If an organization was involved in civic journalism for less than two years, the case was coded for a “low” level of involvement. A “medium” level was used when a case was published by an organization with three to four years of experience. Lastly, a “high” level was used if the primary organization showed evidence of five years or longer. The data in this area were surprising.
Using our larger database of 651 cases (the percentages using the more restricted 603 case database are essentially the same), we found that 193 organizations, or 65% of all 322 organizations practiced civic journalism for two years or less. This is consistent with our expectation. Most of our cases involved news organizations experimenting with a project or two, the incorporation of new ideas or techniques, or in the case of the Batten awards, seeking recognition.
What did surprise us somewhat was that 46 organizations, or 15% practiced civic journalism from three to four years, while a remarkable 20%, or 56 organizations, practiced civic journalism for four years or more. This latter figure is quite unexpected. This shows a very high level of commitment from about 4% of all U.S. newspapers, with strong commitment from an additional 3%. While it would take us too far a field here to conclusively analyze these questions, we want to note that this figure of 7% of strong and very strong adopters may be sufficient to sustain the diffusion of new practice, as civic journalism loses the incubator of the Pew Center. Whether this constitutes a critical mass remains an open question.
The relationship between length of practice by a news organization and number of cases of civic journalism generated is, not surprisingly, inverse. Only 35.7% of cases were published by organizations with a low level of involvement, 19% by organizations showing a medium level. And fully 45.3% of the 651 cases in the database, or 295 cases, were published by primary organizations with a high level of involvement in experimenting with civic journalism practices.
We further found that a majority of the cases were published by primary organizations working alone. Of the 646 cases with sufficient evidence for evaluation of organizational partnerships, slightly less than two-thirds, or 415 cases, showed no evidence of working in collaboration with other organizations. It is also important to note that a vast majority of those 415 cases without partnership arrangements were primarily represented by those projects submitted to the Center for the annual Batten Award competitions. In fact, 78% of these cases were Batten entries and with no funding support from the Center. In other words, those projects on the journalism “prize circuit” tended to involve media organizations working alone.
In sum, a larger number of news organizations than expected had a medium to high level of involvement with civic journalism, about 7% of all U.S. newspapers over our investigation period. A large proportion of the civic journalism published, 45%, came from these papers.
Impact on Communities and Public Life
One of the most important issues in our research was whether, how, and to what extent the civic journalism projects had impact on their communities. This was a difficult measure to develop, for two reasons. First, most of the evidence in this area was based on self-reports, and so was inevitably somewhat biased towards the good. Second, the measures themselves were necessarily indirect. We could not independently evaluate community impact. However, the overall results are consistent with in-depth case research reported on eight communities in several studies.5
Still, to develop the broadest and most independent measure possible, we evaluated each case for ways in which the project impacted and changed community life. With very few exceptions, there was evidence of more than one type of outcome found for each case. Details of our method are discussed in the next section. Each variable was analyzed according to the total number of cases with sufficient data available for analysis.
The most prominent outcome was an improvement in a community’s public deliberative process. About 53% of the cases with sufficient evidence, or 297 projects, demonstrated some success in directly impacting the deliberative process by convening events, or indirectly impacting the process by providing the impetus, and perhaps necessary tools, for citizens to organize public deliberative events themselves.
The use of the project by other organizations, such as media or other institutions, represents the next most prominent outcome and was found in 220 cases, or about 43% of the total cases with sufficient evidence. These cases contained evidence that other media organizations used the project in some way, either by using the material to supplement their own print or broadcast coverage of the issues, or as a guide in the design of their own civic journalism projects. Some cases contained evidence that other institutions, most commonly the educational system, used the material as instructional material in classrooms.
Improving the skills of citizens, found in 209 cases or 40% of the cases with sufficient evidence, was measured by data indicating that citizens were more able to perform the duties of citizenship, i.e. more informed to vote, to participate in a debate between candidates, to challenge the position of leaders, to engage in public deliberations, to actively work to change community life.
A positive reader response was found in 192 cases, or 40% of the cases with sufficient evidence. This outcome variable was measured by data indicating that readers, through phone calls or letters to the organizations, approved of the project and appreciated the efforts of the primary organizations.
Changing public policy, found in 179 cases or 37% of the total cases with sufficient evidence, was measured by claims that the project directly influenced the implementation of, or change to, a policy that impacts the community.
Influencing the formation of new organizations, found in 126 cases or 26% of the cases with sufficient evidence, was measured by claims that people, including public officials, civic leaders and/or citizens, collectively organized to solve problems and improve public life.
The remaining outcomes, each of which is found in less than 20% of the cases, represent claims of improving volunteer efforts (17%); claims of influencing the amount of public money dedicated to address a specific issue (11%); claims of influencing the amount of private money donated toward causes (9%); claims of influence over investigations undertaken to further address the issues (5%); and claims of initiating citizen letter or telephone campaigns organized to influence some aspect of public life.
In sum, although based on self-reports and therefore limited, our data demonstrates evidence of a positive impact of civic journalism on public deliberation, improved civic skills, changed public policy, and the formation of new community organizations, as well as increased volunteerism. This evidence is consistent with other case-based qualitative research conducted by Friedland and others.
Summary
Civic journalism of some kind has been practiced in at least 322 newspapers, one fifth of all newspapers in the U.S. This is a very conservative estimate, based only on those news organizations that have submitted their work to the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, the most solid core of self-identified civic journalism practitioners. We believe the actual number of those who have experimented with civic journalism practices in some form or another to be somewhere between one-third and one-half.
Civic journalism has developed in a clear pattern. Early on, newspapers focused on the relation of the press to democracy, which led to a focus on elections. In the beginning, this forced them to invent the techniques of civic journalism, including citizens’ agendas, issues grids, and other ways of getting citizen voices into the paper. After they learned how to do this, they naturally moved on to look at broader, more daily ways that civic as well as public life could be better addressed. Large community wide problems were addressed, with the search for new citizen solutions. As the larger community-wide deliberations and problem solving efforts worked, newspapers began to refocus attention on specific issues, particularly about who was included or excluded in the “civic map” of coverage. This led to attention to how racial and ethnic diversity could be systematically incorporated into coverage, and to attention to the problems of young people and students, among others.
These developments in content also pushed new technique forward. Community problem solving led naturally to a concern with daily reporting, and how the daily routine could be reorganized to incorporate new civic journalism practices. A concern with diversity led to the exploration of civic mapping. And more conversation with the community opened newspapers to the ideas of interactivity, which meant that as new technologies like the Web developed, there was a civic context to deploy them.
The core goals of news organizations remained well within the traditional frame of informing the public. But new, explicitly civic goals did become a part of the repertoire of a significant minority.
There was particularly impressive progress in reframing coverage, as civic news organizations shifted in large numbers to emphasize explanatory over conflict frames in their coverage of public and civic life. This is particularly important, as research shows that explanatory frames have a greater potential for mobilizing citizens; conflict frames have the opposite effect. While the majority of civic journalism news organizations, about 65%, have practiced for two years or less, 15% have done civic journalism for three to four years, and 20% for four or more years. The latter two categories taken together represent about 7% of all newspapers in the U.S. This number suggests a potential critical mass of civic newspapers in the United States, although whether this number is enough to continue diffusion of civic journalism within the journalism community remains uncertain.
Finally, there is clear evidence in our data, which must be qualified, however, because it is based on self-reports, that the practice of civic journalism has increased public deliberation, civic problem solving, volunteerism, and changed public policy. This evidence is supported by other, case-based research and suggests the first quantitative support for these previous qualitative findings. The evidence of both findings is consistent and points in the same direction: civic journalism has been a success in the communities where it has been practiced with any consistency, even over relatively short periods of time.
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1 Voakes, P. (1997). The Newspaper Journalists of the ’90s. Washington, D.C.: American Society of Newspaper Editors. Lindenmann, W. K. (1997). Views of Print and Broadcast Media Executives Toward Journalism Education. New York: Virginia Commonwealth University and Associated Press Managing Editors.
2 The analysis in this section, Development of Civic Journalism Content, is based on the reduced dataset of 603 cases, published between 1995 and 2000.
3 The analysis in this section, Development of Technique, is based on the reduced dataset of 603 cases, published between 1995 and 2000.
4 Iyengar, S., & McGuire, W. J. (1993). Explorations in political psychology. Durham: Duke University Press. Iyengar, Shanto. Is Anyone Responsible: How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991. Iyengar, Shanto, and Donald R. Kinder. News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987.
5 Sirianni, C. J., & Friedland, L. A. (2001). Civic Innovation in America: Community Empowerment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; Thorson, E., Friedland, L. A., & Chaffee, S. H. (1996). Evaluation of Civic Journalism Projects. Philadelphia: Pew Charitable Trusts; Friedland, L. A. (2003 (forthcoming)). Learning Public Journalism. Dayton, Ohio: Kettering Foundation.