TAPE 4: Tapping Your Community: What Don’t You Know?

TAPE 4: Tapping Your Community: What Don’t You Know?

TRT: 12:52

NARRATOR: Reporters and photographers often drove through this Tampa, Florida, neighborhood but rarely paid a visit. When they did, it was usually for a spot news story.

It’s like a lot of places journalists report about every day. Reporters know where these places are, but they don’t really know much about them.

This neighborhood, Tampa Heights, however, became an exception when journalists developed a systematic way to identify the people and places reporters could use to learn about the community and the concerns of its residents.

They uncovered its civic life, and they uncovered some good stories, too.

(MUSIC AND PRODUCTION OPEN)

TAPPING YOUR COMMUNITY: Discovering What You Don’t Know

RICHARD HARWOOD, PRESIDENT, THE HARWOOD INSTITUTE: What journalists think about, what other professionals think about, is that there’s an official realm, all the people with the titles, and there’s largely a private realm, people acting as individuals. And if you look at news pages or news coverage, broadcast or radio, you often find that we leave out all the things in between.

NARRATOR: Richard Harwood heads an organization that studies people and how they relate to their communities. He’s been a consultant for several newspapers, as well as for the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, where he has taught journalists techniques for tapping into community life.

RICHARD HARWOOD: When you bore down into society, you see your different layers at work. You see an official realm, you see a quasi-official realm, which is made up of the head of the hospital, the head of a neighborhood association, the head of the chamber of commerce, but you don’t stop there. You keep going and you keep boring and as you bore, you all of a sudden realize, “Oh my God, there’s a whole civic life.”

FANNIE FLONO, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER: Most reporters, when they talk about having connections with the community, is that they’ve identified two or three people who they say are the community leaders and they go to those people over and over again.

NARRATOR: Fannie Flono is Associate Editor of The Charlotte Observer.

FANNIE FLONO: And so what they wind up getting is not really a clear view of what the community is like, they get a clear view of what those two people think.

And I think that reporters who do that, who simply have a Rolodex with a certain number of names, never really understand what’s going on and they never really help the community understand what’s going on.

NARRATOR: Flono believes reporters must do more than build a Rolodex. They must build relationships with the communities they serve.

FANNIE FLONO: You’ve got to go into the community. You’ve got to go into places you haven’t gone. You’ve got to go into barbershops. You’ve got to go into grocery stores. You’ve got to go into malls. Go everywhere that people congregate and start asking questions. And the more questions you ask, the more and varied kinds of information you’re going to get that will help you shape a story that’s going to really be informative.

NARRATOR: As communities have grown larger and more diverse, the challenge of building relationships with readers and viewers is more difficult than ever.

In southern California, for example, the Orange County Register serves 36 communities ranging in size from 7,000 to 400,000.

Executive Editor Ken Brusic says that even though circulation remained strong, the newspaper needed to change to reflect the changes in its readership.

KEN BRUSIC, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: Rather than think of ourselves as a metropolitan newspaper, we really wanted to think of a different model and for us the model was really more of a weekly newspaper. And I like that model because in a weekly newspaper, the editors and the reporters are out on the streets they are seeing things and they are smelling things and they’re talking to people.

NARRATOR: Reporters were outfitted with laptop computers and cellular telephones and dispatched to bureaus in several of the communities. The most important tool they were given, however, was the encouragement to think differently about ways to approach their everyday work.

KEN BRUSIC:There is this kind of clich? that people are getting tired of the bad news that they read or see and what they really want is good news.

If you dig deeply enough and if you listen carefully enough you find people don’t want happy news, they want news they can do something with. They want news that talks to them, they want lessons that they can learn, lessons that they can apply to their lives.

What we’re looking for are hard hitting stories, but they are more real to people because you can believe them. Because the voices are authentic. What you are hearing rings true to you.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve got to spend a whole week to do a daily story. It means you need to think at the outset: Where do I need to go for the right kind of information?

NARRATOR: One way for a journalist to find where to go, where to get better sources and better information, is to build sort of a civic map. In its most basic form, a civic map simply identifies “third places,” such as parks or diners or other places, where citizens often gather to talk about their concerns and where reporters can go to start learning about a neighborhood.

A civic map also identifies people who may not carry a title but who know what’s going on in a community and can speak with authority about issues and events affecting its residents.

Sometimes they are citizens who have lots of contacts, so-called “civic bumble bees” or “connectors,” because they spread ideas, messages and social norms from one person or group to another.

Or they may be respected neighbors, co-workers or lay church leaders who’ve become the “catalysts” their fellow citizens look to get something accomplished or for their community expertise, historical perspective and wisdom.

A reporter who can find these “connectors” and “catalysts” can use them as sources to learn what’s really going on in a community.

A civic map can be as simple as a chart taped to the newsroom wall, or as complex as an Internet document with links to sources, history and issues of a particular area.

More important than the form is the process that helps journalists find new sources who can speak with some knowledge and authority about certain issues in their lives.

STEVE KAYLOR, PUBLIC LIFE TEAM LEADER, TAMPA TRIBUNE: I think we felt like we weren’t getting as much information out of our communities and our neighborhoods.

NARRATOR: Steve Kaylor is the Public Life Team Leader of the Tampa Tribune.

STEVE KAYLOR: We were covering them but I don’t think like we felt we were covering them the right way, getting the right types of stories out of them. And so we were looking for a new tool.

NARRATOR: One of those neighborhoods, Tampa Heights, stood in the path of a downtown redevelopment project.

The newspaper followed the project’s planning as part of its city hall coverage. The stories, however, focused on process rather than people and editors suspected they were not getting the entire story.

STEVE KAYLOR: We were waiting until things were done. We didn’t know what was happening until somebody told us at a city meeting somewhere what was going on.

NARRATOR: To find out what was really happening, Tribune reporters had to first find a way to tap into the Tampa Heights community.

Government reporter Ken Koehn was assigned the task and began contacting sources who knew something about the area.

Those sources provided more names, as well as the locations of “third places” where residents often gathered.

Using the list of contacts and neighborhood gathering spots as a guide, Koehn began canvassing the community and introducing himself to its residents [GET INTO THE COMMUNITY].

KEN KOEHN: Once I got into the neighborhood and started attending parties and going to people’s homes, somebody called me and said, “Hey, do you realize they’re going to move some of these people over there.” And I said, “no.” So that got me into the documents over at city hall. Uncovered some where they discussed that.

And we were doing a story on how the city might relocate some people to build town homes and retail shops along the river and the city had thought the civic association had informed all these people about it and these people never went to the civic association meetings. So we realized there were a lot of long-time families who cared passionately about their homes and their yards over there even though the city had kind of blighted the neighborhood and written it off as all dilapidated shacks. The residents themselves certainly didn’t feel that way about it.

As a result of that (story), people who never attended civic association meetings and weren’t really involved in anything civicly at all who lived in that redevelopment area started coming to city council meetings. They started getting up and speaking. The council asked the administration to go out and do some door to door. The things the neighbors believe they should have done to start with.

There’s still a little uneasiness but they feel like they’re a little more a part of the process now and they actually have the city coming to them as a result of us just engaging them in a front-yard discussion.

NARRATOR: The Tribune empowered citizens and uncovered better stories because it invested the time and effort to learn about the civic life of Tampa Heights.

STEVE KAYLOR: The investment paid off because (Ken) had a starting point that we didn’t have before.

He had story ideas that we didn’t have before.

He had sources that we didn’t have before.

And after that, that initial investment, it’s like money in the bank. At that point it started drawing interest and it started building upon itself and it was just a downhill run from there to keep up with Ken and his story ideas.

NARRATOR: Here in Tampa, the joint ownership of the Tribune and WFLA-TV prompted the two news organizations, and their online service, to work as partners on mapping Tampa Heights.

Assistant News Director Deb Halpern says the project not only improved the coverage of downtown redevelopment issues, the mapping effort led reporters to other stories the TV station would never have known about.

DEB HALPERN, ASSISTANT NEWS DIRECTOR, WFLA-TV, TAMPA:I think the preconceived notions I had were that this was only going to be relevant to project journalism.

Part of that is true, that this will work better on projects, but that what you learn in doing that project can then translate into your daily journalism.

For example, we discovered that there was a real fear about drugs in the Tampa Heights neighborhood. And it was a fear that I had never really seen expressed in this way before. Where people were literally not only afraid to talk to police, in a lot of ways they were afraid to talk to us. So we decided to do story about drug crime in Tampa Heights.

We do something, a project called crime tracker where we take crime data and pinpoint it, geo-code it, on a map. So we took drug crime in Tampa Heights, pinpointed where it was happening in the neighborhood, and then went out to do some surveillance to see if what the neighbors were telling us was true. And what we found was that there was a great deal of drug crime happening within a block of an elementary school.

NARRATOR: One way any news organization can learn more about its community is to build into weekly work schedules the time for reporters to talk to people without having to produce a story [BUILD IN REPORTING TIME].

DEB HALPERN: Say you think you really should be doing more on growth. And you allow that one reporter one day a month to go out and see what the issues are in the neighborhoods that are most affected by growth, meet with developers who can tell him what growth is like from their perspective. [FIND THE REAL ISSUES] And through just sitting down and having conversations I can guarantee this reporter will come back with some of the best enterprise stories you’re going to have on your air. Because you’re allowing him the time to figure out what the issues really are.

What sets television stations apart from each other is enterprise reporting. And that’s really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about getting stories that no one else has. And I think it’s worth the commitment. And depending on the size of your staff, you can either commit to it a lot or a little. It’s one of those great things where they always say “you can’t be a little bit pregnant.” Well, you can do a little bit of civic mapping.