Study released by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and The Record newspaper of Hackensack, N.J.
Summary and Key Findings
The Research
Lessons Learned, by Glenn Ritt
Press Release
In-depth issues coverage fails to counter multimillion-dollar TV ad campaigns
Washington, D.C., May 21, 1997 – The Pew Center for Civic Journalism and The Record newspaper of Hackensack, N.J., today released a study showing that nine weeks and 54 full pages of issues-based coverage in the 1996 New Jersey Senate race failed to break through the noise of that heated, television-saturated campaign.
“The Record’s public journalism was challenged by the environment around it: While ‘Campaign Central’ was attempting to frame the Senate race as a constructive debate, the candidates were spending more than $17 million on television commercials that made it seems like a showdown in a sandbox,” the report concluded.
>One in five Record readers said they noticed the “Campaign Central” pages, which appeared every day but Saturday inside the paper’s front section. That is about the same number of readers normally drawn to political stories. The research included pre- and post-election telephone surveys and focus groups.
The focus groups, in particular, left Record editors “feeling stunned and somewhat shaken,” said the report. “The frames through which respondents viewed the campaigns seemed to have been shaped mostly by the candidates’ commercials.”
Much more helpful to citizens, the researchers found, was a Voter’s Guide published the Sunday before the election that distilled the narrative issues stories into quick issues charts.
“The study humbly underscores the challenge of reaching time-pressed readers receiving political messages so many ways in so short a time,” said Glenn Ritt, The Record’s vice president of news and information who had supervised the research as the paper’s editor. “It also suggests that all journalism faces difficulty connecting with an electorate so disenchanted with national politics.”
He added, however, that The Record’s experience “has given us true insight not only into how to package for an election campaign, but how to package more effectively for the future of a newspaper.”
“We fully realize that some civic journalism experiments will fall short of expectations,” said Ed Fouhy, executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. “And while questions may be raised about the interpretation of the data, we feel the findings should become part of the learning process about how the media can connect with citizens.
The research sought to measure the impact of the “Campaign Central” pages on the hotly contested race between Democrat Robert G. Torricelli and Republican Dick Zimmer. The civic journalism coverage, which began on Labor Day, was in addition to more conventional horse-race campaign journalism elsewhere in the newspaper.
“Campaign Central” coverage sought to emphasize issues rather than campaign strategy, tried to give voice to citizen concerns, tried to supply more detailed information about the candidates, and to provide public forums and other opportunities for citizens to participate.
Among the research findings:
- Campaign Central was not successful in penetrating the consciousness of Record readers. Only 19 percent could remember reading “Campaign Central” vs. 43 percent who remembered the Voter’s Guide.
- New Jerseyans paid just a modest amount of attention to the Senate campaign through their newspapers. The research found that 44 percent of Record readers said television was their most important source of campaign news.
- Forty-two percent of Record readers could name neither Senate candidate after the election.
- Record readers did not end the campaign appreciably more knowledgeable than readers of other New Jersey papers although more of them said they felt better informed. (Record readers, for instance, were about 10 percentage points more likely than readers of other Jersey newspapers to say they thought they knew where the candidates stood on the issues at the end of the campaign.)
- Record readers were no different from readers of other papers in voting in and talking about the election.
“The results suggest there are significant limits — at least in the short term — to the ability of journalists to reconnect citizens with democratic institutions solely by altering the way they write about them,” the study said.
Among the questions raised by researchers David Blomquist, of The Record, and Cliff Zukin, of Rutgers University, were:
- Was The Record’s experiment too short-lived to produce significant results?
- Was The Record’s public journalism coverage “blunted” by the continuation of conventional campaign stories elsewhere in the paper?
- Was the “Campaign Central” effort drowned out by competing messages from other media?
- Can public journalism alone overcome negative messages about the democratic process from the candidates and the political parties?
“Despite public journalism’s innovations in style and emphasis, the essential information citizens wanted was still too difficult to find, understand and act upon,” the study said.
“The enthusiastic reception for the Voter’s Guide” suggests one reason why so many people read past most of The Record’s public journalism: They may no longer have the time or inclination to absorb as much information in paragraph form.”
“A challenge for public journalists will be to address the demand for accessible, credible, and compact information about the workings of democracy without reducing it to vapid or simplistic ‘News McNuggets.'”
For a copy of the research, please call the Pew Center 202-331-3200.