Civic Journalism: A Work in Progress (Only Available with Spanish Subtitles)
Through public listening, alternative framing, and tapping new voices, Steven A. Smith, former editor of the The Gazette, Colorado Springs, challenged his journalists to invent a better kind of journalism. Smith is now editor of the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon. 18 minutes, accompanied by a transcript. (See Ordering Publications page for mailing costs.)
Transcript
The Gazette in Colorado Springs is trying to do civic journalism from the “inside out ” – by creating what editor Steven A. Smith calls a civic culture in the newsroom.
Through public listening, alternative framing and tapping new voices, Smith is challenging his journalists to invent a better kind of journalism – a journalism that challenges readers to see things in new ways. It requires new tools, new reflexes, new routines.
Executive Producer: Edward M. Fouhy
Producer: Robin Smith, Video Action Fund
Time: 18 minutes
The Pew Center for Civic Journalism
1101 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 420
Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 331-3200
Funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts
(c)1998 Pew Center for Civic Journalism
The Tides Center, San Francisco
Civic Journalism: A Work In Progress
Changing A Newsroom’s Culture With…
- New Tools
- New Ideas
- New Voices
- New Reflexes
- New Routines
- New Attitudes
Foreword
The Gazette in Colorado Springs is one of many newspapers around the country that are trying to improve the way they cover their local communities.
Through public listening and community conversations, journalists in these newsrooms are bringing new voices, new ideas, new attitudes and new points of view to their coverage. Through better framing they are finding alternative ways of telling stories so that they are more relevant to readers.
In this video, Gazette editor Steven A. Smith explains how he is trying to create a civic culture in his newsroom. It requires reporters to break some bad habits and learn some new ones. It creates a different kind of journalism, one that requires new tools, new routines, and new reflexes.
– Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center for Civic Journalism
Script
Steven A. Smith, Editor: Most of us who got involved in this arena came to it through some transition in our professional lives. And for me that time came when I was working at the Wichita Eagle.
I found myself doing the same old stories, the same old projects that I had done at papers I had worked at in Oregon and Minnesota to no effect, just bouncing off readers’ brains like pebbles off the street.
It was thinking about the upcoming 1990 state elections in Kansas that caused us to do some different things. And they were so successful and resonated so well with readers that it brought me up short.
We found ourselves engaged in a kind of journalism we didn’t know much about, but we knew it was different – new tools, new reflexes, new routines.
Title Animation:
Civic Journalism: A Work in Progress
Smith: The Gazette is my opportunity to be the principal architect of a civic culture and see what would happen if I got to play around with these ideas in my own newsroom.
(Morning meeting) Smith: So, where did we miss? We’re being awfully self-congratulatory on a weekend I think was pretty crummy.
Bonnie Jo Mount, Photo Director: I can tell you. We reeked on our photo report on the Metro front today.
Smith: (voice-over) It’s been a roller coaster ride!
(Morning meeting) Mount: It was a challenging weekend. I’m guessing that the motorcycle rally fell through.
Smith: (v-o) The first idea is to change the culture within the newsroom.
Mount: I don’t have anything to say, except I hope we don’t have too many Metro fronts that look like today’s.
Smith: (v-o) In two years we have a newsroom that functions quite differently from the norm.
Joan Zales, Features Editor: I liked the frame for that. I thought it was a great idea to focus on, but there are two events in there.
Smith: (v-o) You can’t have a civic content unless the culture within the newsroom reflects the civic culture of the community, which is kind of messy, very democratic, noisy.
Zales: I don’t know if it was shortened . . . Steve, it could have been. . .
Smith: It felt like we lost the tail end of that.
John Wicklein, Writing/Reporting Coach: I thought the lead was rather pedestrian and that the lead was in the second graph.
Smith: (v-o) All of our news meetings take place out in the middle of the newsroom. There are lots of things that we do in this room that would seem a little bit, uh, skewed to someone who has operated in a traditional American metro newsroom.
Terri Fleming, Managing Editor: Maybe there’s a giving story that talks about – this is a real old-fashioned idea, so I’m just putting this out there to make it better.
Fleming: The biggest difference is that we are talking about journalism more – we talk about the craft that we practice, the job that we do. We talk about it more, period. And we talk about it in a much different way.
Cliff Foster, City Editor: . . . trying to get depth and sophistication on deadline.
Smith: (v-o) We opened up our decision-making process, not just to the room, but to the community.
Smith: What’s our coverage set-up for the Hillside neighborhood group at the White House this week? Rose is going. . .
Rosemary Harris, Columnist: It’s tomorrow. I’m leaving today.
Smith: (v-o) The idea was to immediately bring new voices, new ideas, new attitudes, new points of view to the table.
Harris: It will probably, I hope, be more people sharing ideas, people across the country – this leadership class of civic neighborhood revival . . .
Harris: The story that you seek should be one that rings true for people. Neighbors talking to neighbors. People chatting at club meetings. People talking at the 7-11 or the Loaf and Jug convenience store. Those are just as legitimate spaces in which to seek out the news and to cover it as a City Council meeting.
Fleming: People don’t live their lives in City Council chambers. Not only do we have a responsibility to be watchdog and investigative journalists, but we also have to be looking below that surface level. That’s hard because it forces us to stop and think in all new and different ways.
Smith: That’s Step One – changing the culture within the room. Step Two is to establish a good vocabulary that describes what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.
Dennis Huspeni, City Reporter: Give me two sentences on what’s the essence of this story.
Victor Greto, Research Center Manager: It’s about pressure, perhaps, exerted on the giver, how the giver feels about that and how they give.
Smith: (v-o) We’ve developed a handbook that helps us do this on a daily basis.
Foster: All right then, as the book mentions, what do you put in this story?
Smith: Language is probably the number one barrier for explaining all this. Use the term civic journalism in certain quarters and you can feel the lead screens just drop down in front of folks. The idea is to just constantly reinforce the direction we want to go, using the vocabulary we’ve developed.
Jeff Thomas, Business Editor: We would use the graphics – not only charts and numbers, but maybe even some photo elements . . . maybe some snippets of history, maybe some other kind of visual clues that essentially break the story down into the same chapters.
Smith: (v-o) I think sometimes if you don’t use the language, you start talking about it in terms of just “good, old-fashioned journalism.” It takes the steam out of the argument.
Smith: Did anybody else see something that drove us below the surface, alternative framing, something that challenged readers to see an issue from a different spot?
Susan Edmondson, Entertainment Editor: The shroud. The couple researching the shroud. It was a fascinating topic and it was the first lifestyle religion story I’ve read all the way through and I was really into it.
Smith: (v-o) Reinforcement and reward is an issue. You have to change the reward systems. What it takes to get on page one has changed.
Fleming: Let me give you an example. Two young boys were shot in cold blood walking home from a video arcade. Just the outright shock value of the killings tore the southern parts of the city up. The families of the two boys were very close and they decided to have a double funeral and we chose to do two things with the funeral.
We covered it in our standard approach in which we recounted what the minister had to say and what the other speakers had to say – and kind of the mood and the feeling – but we also ran as our A-1 coverage a column by D’Arcy Fallon, who is a mother, losing a child kind of thing. A great deal of power in that column. And in retrospect we agreed that the column could have been our lead story.
Smith: We had some terrific writing all month – some terrific pieces of work.
Smith: (v-o) We evaluate people now on their ability to produce civic journalism. But we haven’t crossed all the speed bumps yet – from the old culture to a totally civic culture. We’re still very much a work in progress.
Animation:
Change the Culture
Use Civic Language
Change the Reward System
Those are the three internal steps. Then you have to start building bridges to the community, and that takes a little bit longer.
Genevieve Anton, Denver Bureau Reporter: We’ve got some serious problems in this state. We’ve got $8 billion minimum to fix our highways and to relieve all this crowding and congestion. We’ve got schools that are about to file a lawsuit against us because we aren’t paying for their construction. We’ve got ceilings falling down in Leadville. We’ve got prisons that are bursting out of the seams and we just keep throwing money and building more prisons – we’ve got four going up this year. I mean these are huge things and they might not be something people are talking about in the coffee shop, but they certainly affect their lives and there’s something that I think we need to say. These are big issues.
Smith: There’s a way to bring these two thoughts together, because they are not at all mutually exclusive . . . There is a way to bring people to the table, present these issues to folks and have them tell us what elements of those issues puzzle them, where their disconnects are, what kind of questions they have.
Smith: Community conversations, facilitated focus groups, public listening, which can be a one-on-one experience, a reporter speaking to somebody in the community in a way that causes them to talk about issues much more deeply and personally.
Harris: I think one of the challenges is one that we made for ourselves. Just the very fact that as journalists we have been so separate from our communities, from the people that we cover. Civic journalism really reverses that.
Harris: I’m glad you are going to share that because I think people need to hear that personal point of view.
Woman: It’s real!
Harris: The Gazette’s partnership with the Hillside neighborhood began with a very troubling incident. We wrote a prominent feature story about a new player in the Hillside community – an ex-boxer who had relocated to Colorado Springs, went to Hillside, saw a need and wanted to fill it. And that something he wanted to do was to put up a boxing gym.
But when he looked out the windows of his boxing gym, he saw something different than the people of Hillside, who were struggling with their identity, their public image, their image of themselves in this town saw. He saw what he described as “the killing fields” of Colorado Springs.
The people of Hillside were, rightfully so, outraged by his perception of their community as a newcomer, and by The Gazette’s prominent display of his quote in the story, and the story itself. They came to the newspaper and said we must sit down and talk or this will get ugly.
You have to get close to people to know what they are feeling. You can’t just parachute in, to understand the breadth and width of a community or an issue or subject or the many different takes that individuals might have on it. You have to feel it. And that’s different from what we were taught in journalism school. You were never supposed to feel it.
Smith: (v-o) We’re all struggling to find the line. In my early years in this business, those lines were drawn real firmly on the floor.
Huspeni: Basically I’m here covering the event. Rose is involved with the event as an emcee. She had a very good point that she brought up and ordinarily, were she not an employee of the newspaper, I would quote her immediately.
Smith: We’re all nervous about it and we keep our antennae up. And we look for those problems that could lead to concerns of conflict of interest. That could damage our credibility.
Fleming: I don’t think you can shift an organization in its scope and its point of view – to broaden its point of view – without forcing some people to do things differently. It’s not a softening, it’s an effort at opening up our perspective and seeing all the different variations of the truth that are out there and trying to capture a larger percentage than we are now.
Smith: My fundamental goal here has been to not do civic journalism on a project level but to do it as a part of what we do every day: new tools, new reflexes, new routines. You have to be able to do certain things very efficiently in order to get this newspaper out on time and meet your production deadlines. That’s a big, heavy train hurtling down the tracks every night.
Mount: This feels the same as what we talked about in the brainstorming session – the frame isn’t clear to me. It seems that there’s a lot of stuff there.
Smith: (v-o) The mother’s milk of reporting is the conflict frame that says to a reporter on a controversial issue: if you write A and you write Z and present that to readers, that frame of reference – that conflict frame – that readers will sometimes, somehow, find the true middle ground on their own. Sometimes it’s an appropriate frame. But at The Gazette, we are trying not to use that frame reflexively.
Mount: As far as some of the terms we use in civic journalism – essence, below the surface – I think that’s something photojournalists have always done. We did a package on welfare reform and looked at the lives of different kinds of people. That was a way of looking at the middle ground, not just taking the extreme, the worst-case welfare scenario.
Smith: (v-o) We talk about framing pretty much all the time. But I think what is a little bit different here is that we’ve taken some of these framing concepts and techniques and tried to apply them in other parts of the organization. Sports. Arts and Entertainment.
Barbara Reichert, Sports Editor: Sports is real event coverage. Real go out and cover a game kind of thing. When we introduced civic journalism, the old guard said, “Wait a minute, I don’t know if I can buy into this.” Or “I don’t know if I understand the concept well enough. And maybe some of those other jobs out there are interesting or maybe it is time for me to move on.”
Smith: I love talking about sports in civic terms. If you weren’t up in the press box observing the action but you were down on the field, as a referee, still neutral – referees are neutral just like reporters, with no stake in the outcome – but if you were on the field as a referee running back and forth, up and down, side to side, interacting with the players, how might your view of the game be different from that of the reporter in the press box?
Reichert: Now we like to tell more stories, more people stories, as opposed to stats, stats, stats. We have one reporter who’s very good at what he does, but he’s a numbers guy. Sometimes you’ve got to ask him, “Tell me a story about that guy. Make me care about this person as opposed to what he’s accomplished through numbers.”
Smith: In the Springs, religion is big news. Traditional, conflict-based, dispassionate-observer coverage of the religious community is coverage that offends religious people.
Michele Ames, Religion Writer: This could be a think piece on parents, what do single parents do – it could be a lot of things.
Smith: So there are four potential directions the story could go.
Smith: (v-o) The challenge in our religion coverage is to reframe our coverage of the religious community in a way that properly and accurately reflects the fullness of their lives.
Ames: I think that this story could be interesting in that I can guarantee – I can almost guarantee you that when I go interview these families and ask them the same questions, they’re not going to be polarized. They’re going to be saying, “How am I going to get money for my child’s college fund?” and “I can’t get him picked up from school on time.”
Smith: What you are talking about then is – you’re really not building these stories around family week in a sense – you are using these families as third places, which is terrific.
Smith: We do talk more than they talk in most newsrooms, but we talk about journalism. I don’t believe that we can be a better paper unless we critique ourselves every day. A fundamental lesson I think editors discover when they get into this business of civic journalism, is that they have to let go. You can’t be Captain Kirk driving the Starship Enterprise if your goal is to be the editor of a civic newspaper. You can drive the culture, you can push the standards, you can teach, coach, and mentor as much as you need to.
Smith: In my time here at The Gazette – it’s now going on two years, one month or two months – there’s only one story we’ve published twice in its entirety. It was so good the first time, and the snow storm wiped it out and we just had to run it a second time. So (presenting an award) Lou Gonzales, for her piece on why folks in Colorado should care about the Hong Kong stock market. I got more positive feedback on that one story . . .
Smith: (v-o) I tell our young reporters: invent your own journalism, that we are not going to give you the templates anymore. Experiment, break the rules, try something different.
Reichert: In here, if you want to have a voice, you are welcome to have that voice. I’m always fascinated when I see a 22-year-old entertainment reporter turn to the editor of this newspaper and go, “I think you’re wrong.” And I think, “My God, would I have ever said that at age 22? I hope I would have. I wouldn’t have the guts to do that.” But the culture here is to do that.
Fleming: This is an evolutionary process. It’s an education process. You’ve got to work at it. You can’t just decide it’s going to be something your newsroom is going to absorb passively. It’s hard work.
Smith: When I look out at my newsroom today, I see 130 dedicated professional journalists, struggling mightily to learn new ways of doing things that they learned once before – and learned well. I see a lot of confusion, I see discord, contentiousness. I see energy, excitement, enthusiasm. I see a work in progress, I see a daily paper that sometimes fails to meet my expectations, frustratingly so. Some days we really hit it and it’s a home run. And I sit back and smile, and clip the story for the archives, and then try to do it again the next day.
Title Animation:
Civic Journalism: A Work in Progress
Executive Producer: Edward M. Fouhy
Producer: Robin Smith, Video Action Fund
The Pew Center for Civic Journalism
1101 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 420
Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 331-3200
Funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts