Don’t Stop There! Five Adventures in Civic Journalism
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Engaging Journalists in Their Community
Maja Beckstrom sat in her usual spot in St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ on Sunday morning, Feb. 22, 1998. Normally, church is her respite from the daily newspaper wars. Beckstrom is a reporter at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the scrappy underdog in a battle with the bigger, richer paper across the river.
The gripping story of Cambodian refugee Pen Em, a single mother with no English skills facing welfare reform, led off the “Poverty Among Us” series.
On this particular Sunday, the Pioneer Press had launched a seven-month long series on welfare reform in Minnesota. Beckstrom had already started working on her contribution, a story about breaking the cycle of poverty for a third generation welfare recipient. But it would not run until April, and no one at her church had any idea that she was involved in the series.
So it was a surprise when a fellow church member stood and held the newspaper aloft and declared, “Everyone must read this. We all need to know about this.”
“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s great,'”recalls Beckstrom. It was exactly the kind of reaction the newspaper had been hoping for.
The series, “Poverty Among Us,” is the paper’s third civic journalism project. It is built atop the lessons of the first two and strives more than either of those previous efforts to engage readers directly in thoughtful, informed discussions of community issues.
As such, it may be the most cutting-edge civic journalism project yet in a market that is perhaps the most fertile in the country for this style of reporting.
The Pioneer Press started a book club to spur discussion of poverty while its series on welfare reform ran.
Beginning in 1995 with “Safer Cities,” an award-winning examination of the myths and realities of crime in the Twin Cities, the Pioneer Press has been trying to provide readers with new frames for viewing difficult issues and with the sense that control of these issues is within their own hands.
With the second project, “Across Generations,” the paper took a more direct approach to engaging readers — providing clip-and-mail pledge forms that could be redeemed for free “tool kits” to improve intergenerational understanding.
With “Poverty Among Us,” the paper secured community involvement beforethe series even started to run, by sending postcards to hundreds of non-profit organizations asking them to participate in discussion groups based on the articles that were to come.
For the Pioneer Press, this was a risky move. The paper is in that ever-rarer situation — a competitive market, where it battles for scoops and advertisers with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. To lay out its story budget for a major project on a topical issue was practically inviting the Star Tribune to swoop in and steal its thunder.
For project editor Kate Parry, the risk was worth the goal.
“Of the three (projects) we’ve done,” says Parry, “this is the most successful in terms of actually documenting that people have taken action as a result of the project.
Delia Morehead’s struggle to overcome fourth generation poverty, single motherhood and joblessness was one of the stories told in “Poverty Among Us.” Here, the 28-year-old helps one of her six children do homework. Photo: Joe Rossi/Pioneer Press
“With the others, we were ultimately frustrated because we felt it was high-quality journalism but we couldn’t gauge at the end if we’d hit the target.”
As “Poverty Among Us” was winding down in the summer of 1998, the Pioneer Presscould point to several signs of success:
- 27 community groups had held formal discussions, involving 1,500 Twin Cities citizens, using the series and additional materials the newspaper supplied.
- An estimated 1,000 readers participated in discussions of supplemental reading about poverty on their own and in book clubs sponsored by the newspaper and St. Paul public libraries.
- More readers and web browsers joined discussions of the series on the paper’s web site, though the level of discussion there was often disappointing.
- The enthusiastic community response has not been a complete surprise. Editors had learned through their first two projects that readers in the Twin Cities do respond.
“It’s very gratifying to do civic journalism here,” says Parry. “Some papers feel like they have to rally the community. Here, they’re ready to go, they just want a direction to go in. Civic journalism fits very well with the culture of this state.”
It is no surprise, then, that the Star Tribune also practices civic journalism.
The Minneapolis paper has run projects on education, lawmaking and election issues.
Parry thinks the competition is another reason civic journalism is flourishing in the Twin Cities. “It keeps things vibrant and keeps us open to experimentation,” she says. “We can’t become complacent. It’s important to us that readers feel we’re vital. When something new, like civic journalism, comes along, both newspapers jump in eagerly and the winners are readers in the Twin Cities.”
Merilee Davis was delighted to move, with her children, to decent affordable housing after a class action suit on behalf of St. Paul public housing residents resulted in better choices for low income families. Photo: Richard Marshall/Pioneer Press
One of those readers is Sarah Wiebe, public relations director for the St. Paul Salvation Army, which convened discussion groups about “Poverty Among Us.” “It was a wonderful project,” she says. “It’s encouraging to see journalism willing to take on a project like this and to want to hear what we’re saying, because, if we’re heard, all the better for the people who need our help.”
“It’s good that they’re doing this,” adds Bob Walz of the St. Paul Council of Churches, another discussion group sponsor. “I think more community involvement, more two-way communication, is part of good journalism.”
Pioneer Press reader advocate Nancy Conner sees these kinds of comments as the pay-off for the paper reaching out more. “This is part of the whole evolution of the paper taking a formal approach to talking to citizens and making it a much more interactive place.”
Conner says more is being done on a daily basis to involve readers with the paper and still more will be done in the future. To understand where the paper is headed, it is useful to review where it has been.
Safer Cities
Fear of crime was a major factor in the construction of the housing development, Bearpath in an outer suburb of the Twin Cities. Minnesota’s first gated community. Photo: Chris Poludoroff/Pioneer Press
Kate Parry was puzzled whenever polling data came into the Pioneer Press at election time. Minnesotans’ perception of crime seemed all out of proportion with reality.
“Here they were, living in this relatively safe place, and they were scared to death about crime. I would wonder, ‘Where on earth is this coming from?'”
She’d squirreled away in her head an idea for a project that would either dispel myths about crime in the Twin Cities or get at facts that crime statistics weren’t showing.
She thought a carefully designed poll might transcend that visceral, knee-jerk reaction to crime (“Yes, I’m afraid.”) and uncover the nature of and reason for the fear. She envisioned a series that would empower readers to get past the fear and address the crime issue as a community.
“Safer Cities” was the Pioneer Press’s first civic journalism project. The ten-part series ran on Sundays in the fall of 1995, exploring the myths and realities of crime in the Twin Cities.
But a poll like that would cost a lot of money and so would the kind of reporting she had in mind. So the idea stayed just that — an idea.
Then in 1995, Knight-Ridder, which owns the Pioneer Press, began helping its papers apply for money from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism to mount special projects. Parry was able to get the money to turn her idea into action.
The resulting series, “Safer Cities,” won the Minnesota Associated Press Sweepstakes award and the Premack, Minnesota’s top public service journalism prize.
Within the paper, too, it was considered a model. Its team approach served as a guide after the series, when the paper reorganized all the reporters into teams. The paper also restructured its approach to daily crime reporting with the addition of a full-time public safety reporter who focuses on stories about average citizens attempting to bring crime under control.
But in the beginning, the project was controversial in the newsroom. Many media critics were firing away at civic journalism in periodicals and Parry says all those stories got posted on the newsroom bulletin boards. Among the articles that circulated in the Pioneer Press at the time was a Wall Street Journal story questioning whether newspapers should accept money from a foundation.
Editor Parry was puzzled by what seemed to be an exaggerated fear of crime in the Twin Cities. “Safer Cities” was able to penetrate the knee-jerk reaction to crime.
Reporter Ruben Rosario (who later became the public safety reporter) was one of those who had misgivings about taking Pew’s money. “The public more than ever needs to know that we are independent, that we are sifting through all kinds of information and providing analysis and interpretation with no strings attached, however well-meaning,” he says.
Reporter Richard Chin asked, “If the issue is important and worth covering, shouldn’t we be able to pay for it ourselves? Why do we have our hand out to this foundation?”
Parry says she had several discussions with reporters and they concluded they would be no more influenced by Pew’s money than by one of the paper’s advertisers. As Chin puts it, “I’m just the reporter — none of this money is coming directly to me. It was an interesting story and I don’t care whether the money came from an auto dealer or Pew.”
And, Parry adds, “There never have been any demands associated with that money.”
Looking at the Grays
Martin Paech, here with five of his seven children, built a 6-foot fence around his home in St. Paul’s Frogtown after vandals threw rocks through his windows three times. Photo: Chris Poludoroff/Pioneer Press
Much of the Pew money went toward the poll Parry had long coveted on public safety. The Wilder Research Center conducted the poll and the results were shared with KARE-TV, the Twin Cities NBC affiliate.
The poll found that a third of parents in the Twin Cities felt unsafe letting their children play alone on the sidewalk in front of their house. Half felt unsafe walking in their own neighborhood after dark. Five percent had been the victim of a robbery or attack but more than half had had a brush with less serious crime or knew someone who had.
Senior editor Dave Peters is in charge of polling for the Pioneer Press. He says he is a big believer in the value of polling “to get beyond anecdotes and what the experts are saying.” Public safety, he says, was an issue for which surveys were particularly useful in pinpointing how attitudes differ from place to place.
“There is a real geographic component to how safe or unsafe you feel,” explains Peters. “We were able to oversample in several areas so we could tell how where you live influences your opinion. The strength of that poll was being able to say that people in the suburbs feel this way and people in the city feel that way.”
Another technique was to ask not just one question about attitudes toward crime but a series of questions designed, in Peters’ words, “to go beyond black and white and look at the grays, where most people’s opinions fall.”
David Iverson sits in an ambulance after six young men beat him and stole $20 in St. Paul in 1995. “They came up and said, ‘What’s up?’ The next thing I knew three of them were punching me.” Ginger Pinson/Pioneer Press
There was a series of questions, for instance, about reducing crime that spoke volumes about gender differences. Women were far more likely than men to think strict gun control would decrease crime while men were much more likely to think crime would decrease if everyone owned a gun. And men were twice as likely to own a gun to protect themselves.
Peters believes “Safer Cities” used polling more effectively than either of the following two series because the survey was conducted very early in the project. “If you’re really interested in what people are saying,” says Peters, “you get the polling results in hand early on and let that determine what kinds of stories you’re going to do.”
With “Safer Cities,” he says, “the poll results not only drove our coverage but we were able to use the data throughout the series more effectively. We could say with confidence, ‘This is what people think about this issue.’ Sound data informed those stories.”
The poll also provided a ready-made database of ordinary citizens who could serve as sources for the project’s reporters.
Working in Teams
Poll results in hand, Parry assembled a team of reporters, photographers and editors to produce the project. “Safer Cities” was to run on 10 consecutive Sundays. But it was not immediately clear how to divide the story into 10 segments.
“There is a real geographic component to how safe or unsafe you feel,” says Pioneer Press polling editor, Dave Peters.
Parry invited the team for a brainstorming session at her home. By the end of the day, the team had created a story budget for the whole series. The topics included race and crime; the impact of drugs on crime; special risks for women, for the elderly and for children; safety at home, on the job, in streets; and the role the media plays in perceptions about crime.
Back in the newsroom, Parry had the reporters pack up their desks and move so the four of them could sit together.
Parry says she had been careful to tap a team of reporters who were diverse both in gender and race. It turned out she had also constructed a team, right down to the copy editors, with a congenial “chemistry.”
Reporter Maria Douglas Reeves says working with the “Safer Cities” team “was probably the most rewarding professional experience I’ve had. What I liked about it was our ‘teamness,’ the camaraderie we built.”
Indeed, Parry says, when the series ended, the reporters felt sad they had to move their desks apart. She says they found a lot of ideas came out when they could bounce things off each other spontaneously, look up from their writing and think out loud and get instant feedback.
The paper learned from their experience. “We’ve reorganized the whole newsroom into teams and clusters,” says Parry, “and that largely came out of that project.”
“Safer Cities” reported on whether women are more at risk of violence. Here a police officer photographs Barbie Robinson as nurse Suzanne Flandrick exposes Robinson’s arm, scratched and bruised by her boyfriend. Photo: Ginger Pinson/Pioneer Press
After four months of work, “Safer Cities” hit the front page with a detailed account of what the poll showed and the repercussions of crime fears in the community — razor wire fences, gun ownership and walled communities. But it also told of groups going the opposite way to fight crime — becoming more involved in the community to keep it safe. A risk quiz asked readers “Who is more dangerous to you, a murderer or yourself?” The surprise answer: yourself. Minnesota’s suicide rate is four times higher than its murder rate.
The next installment featured examples from other cities of programs that have successfully combated crime. The expeditions to other cities prompted reporter Chin to suggest he “travel” to Frogtown, a dicey neighborhood just a few miles from downtown St. Paul that nonetheless remains as unknown to middle-class reporters as many more-remote locations.
Chin rented an apartment for one month and wrote his story in diary form:
Sept. 2: 12:50 a.m.
The cops have all gone and things are quiet now. There were eight squad cars in all, with as many cops and one police dog. What preceded their arrival was an hour of yelling, threats, cursing, breaking glass and fighting in the street below my window.
After it was over, my neighbor, L.A., told me it was a fight between his uncle and his brother over a woman.
The story ran with poll results showing how “feeling safe at home” varies by neighborhood. A third of Frogtown residents felt unsafe in their homes, compared with 13 percent who felt that way in the suburbs.
Chin says it was a great experience, as a reporter, to get so close to the community he wrote about, but he’s not sure a month was enough to really penetrate the neighborhood.
“I concluded it wasn’t as bad as a lot of people think or feel it is,” says Chin, “but I got letters saying, ‘You’re slumming it for a month. If you were there longer, you’d have a worse opinion of it.’ And it’s hard to defend myself against someone who’s been living there for 12 years. I just got a snapshot sort of impression.”
The series was rich in the stories of ordinary people. Kay Harvey, in writing about fear of crime among the elderly, found a single woman who seemed to tell the whole story:
She says she’s not afraid.
But in the winter of her life, Helen Rudman is hardly at peace with her world. The 82-year-old great-grandmother is so unnerved that she sits up all night in a wooden rocking chair, her dog, Radar, sprawled at her feet. Between catnaps they listen together for passers-by at the street corner outside and keep a vigilant eye on the living room’s side door.
That is the door where a pair of teen-age boys appeared two years ago on Christmas Eve, pointed a gun and shot Helen in the head.
“I was in my chair,” she recalls. “I got up and said, ‘Please go away.’ And bam, that was it.”
Her life exploded and split in that moment, sending her down two emotional paths that converged only so briefly. One led to her stunning example of kindly forgiveness for a 12-year-old boy who admitted his role in the shooting. In a courtroom and later in mediation, the old woman and the boy talked, hugged and cried together.
By giving him a second chance, he told her, she had turned his life around. She is still going down the other road. The days are long for an old woman alone whose health is fading.
But not as long as the nights.
“I’m up all night observing everything,” she says. “It gets to be 3, 4, 5 o’clock. I wait for the next day to begin.”
Since being shot, Helen Rudman has spent nights sitting up in a rocking chair, listening for anything amiss. Photo: Ginger Pinson/Pioneer Press
Reader reaction to the series was overwhelmingly positive and had an impact that outlasted the 10-week project. It convinced editors to make police reporter Rosario a public safety columnist. “We needed to start writing in a more sophisticated, intelligent, broader-based way about crime issues,” says Rosario. “I try to highlight issues people are not fully aware of and bring those issues a human voice.”
Over at KARE-TV, the project didn’t go over nearly as well. Both the newspaper’s editors and the station’s news director agree the partnership was a poor match. “It was much more of a print project than a broadcast project,” says KARE’s Tom Lindner. “Whether they admit it or not, they bring us in for the publicity: ‘I want everyone who’s not reading me to know what I’m doing’ and the way you do that is to be on television. I don’t mind being used if it’s for a good cause.”
“People talk about civic journalism as a way to get citizens to engage in their com-munity. I think it gets journalists to engage in their ommunity.”
— Kate Parry
Still, Lindner is pleased with the six stories KARE ran on the polling data. He chose not to delve into the issues the way the Pioneer Press did. “You don’t have to be equal partners to gain from this experience,” says Lindner. “You take the portion that seems to make sense for you because, if you can’t make good TV, you’ll fail. Your staff will be bored, and no one will watch it.”
When the project was over, the whole team had a big dinner at Parry’s house to celebrate. “We agreed it was the hardest work we’d done in our lives,” says Parry. “It consumed us because we care so much about it. Most of the time, journalists think up a story and write it and they really don’t know how people feel about it. But we had gotten so close to our sources — we were out there chatting it up regularly. And the reporters all felt so idealistic that they were doing a good thing for the Twin Cities, and they felt proud of that.
“People think journalists are cynical and always looking for the negative. The truth is they’re the most idealistic people I know. You talk to them about these issues and they go misty-eyed. They care about this community.
“People talk about civic journalism as a way to get citizens to engage in their community. I think it gets journalists to engage in their community.”
Across Generations
The ink was barely dry on the “Safer Cities” reprints when the Pioneer Press began planning its second civic journalism project. Editors wanted to build on what they learned from “Safer Cities” by taking on a more challenging topic and doing more to involve readers. Lots of papers, after all, had done successful crime series. The Pioneer Press should be, true to its name, exploring new frontiers.
It was then-managing editor Ken Doctor — a cerebral sort, say reporters — who came up with the idea for a series that would explore intergenerational tensions and ways to solve them.
Even Doctor, though, thought the topic might be a bit esoteric for a newspaper series. So he invited reporters to a brown bag lunch to discuss the possibilities.
“The ideas were just flowing,” according to Parry. “Reporters were talking about things they’d noticed in the community, stories we hadn’t gotten to, connections between things. We couldn’t stop the ideas. It touched a nerve in the newsroom. It’s kind of an instinct when you see that much reaction in a room that you have something.”
The brainstorming so energized Brett Benson, a copy editor on “Safer Cities,” he asked to be involved in “Across Generations.” His enthusiasm landed him the job of project editor.
The Pioneer Press wanted to tackle a more challenging subject with its second civic journalism project. “Across Generations.”
“Everyone in the room was able to say, ‘Yeah, I can relate to the intergenerational tug of war over health care funding because, let me tell you about my story.’ And then they’d talk about their grandmother. So everybody in that room got engaged in what is really a heady, philosophical — existential, even — topic, by filtering it through their own lives. So that was clear evidence to me that we’d hit on something that would work with readers… It was easy to hang real people and real emotions around the issues.”
As it turned out, it was not as easy as Benson expected. Reporters and editors say it was hard to figure out how to break the issue down into manageable chunks. And they suspect readership was low. Benson laments that he did not get the response he had hoped for.
And yet, the series was compelling enough to prompt the Pioneer Press to assign two reporters to cover generational issues. And reporter Chin says he found it much more satisfying than “Safer Cities.”
“The stories were not as sexy as crime stories,” says Chin, “but there was more opportunity to write something original. This was not ground that had been gone over 100 different times before.”
Editors began the project using the tools that had proved successful in “Safer Cities” and letting go of the things that didn’t work. They obtained money from the Pew Center to conduct the nuanced polling that could pinpoint different generations’ attitudes toward one another. But they decided not to work with KARE.
Benson assembled a team of reporters, editors and photographers, some of whom had worked on “Safer Cities.” But this time the team included a community outreach coordinator, Nancy Conner.
A Reader Advocate
Conner took on the title of “reader advocate” when the newsroom was reorganized into teams. Under the new team system, there was no city editor, per se, no central desk for readers to call and complain or give opinions or add insights.
“We needed a way to get good feedback on our efforts to serve the community,” says Conner. So she proposed creating the reader advocate’s job and agreed to do it.
It was her job to involve readers in “Across Generations.” But first, the team had to decide what the series would cover.
Heidi Miller sobs in a University of Minnesota hospital room after her great grandaunt Ruth Kelly died at age 89. Richard Marshall/Pioneer Press
Heidi Miller sobs in a University of Minnesota hospital room after her great grandaunt Ruth Kelly died at age 89. The story of Kelly and her struggle to live independently was powerfully told as part of the “Across Generations” series. Richard Marshall/Pioneer Press
Reporter Harvey says it wasn’t easy. “We spent four or five days trying to carve it up and figure out what the issues were,” she recalls. “Every topic area seemed to bleed into another topic area. When you talk about health care, it bleeds into housing; when you talk about schools, it bleeds into family and taxes. It was a lot harder to define.”
Benson says the team ultimately came up with segments by looking for those places where the generations seemed to be pulling apart: Social security, housing, health care, dissolution of the family, disaffected youth, differing outlooks on religion, education, personal safety.
And yet, Benson says, he didn’t want to write about conflict. “What we tried to do was look at key issues and approach them from the perspective of how can we find common ground that will help us solve these issues.”
“Across Generations” tried to get readers involved by offering tool kits to those who pledged to participate in an activity that would draw different generations closer together. The paper gave away 2,000 tool kits.
So reporter Rick Shefchik wrote about a family-mentoring program that brings different generations together. Ellen Tomson wrote about a family that defied the odds to hold onto its farm. Linda Fullerton wrote about a Jewish couple, raised in secular homes, now observing religious traditions with their child.
Conner took one installment to print essays and photos from readers about an older person who’d played an important role in their life.
“I can’t let the opportunity presented by ‘Across Generations’ pass without honoring my friend Del Horley, whom I met when he was 67 and I was 13,” wrote 52-year-old James Hulbert. “Thirty years after his death, he is with me still, insulating me from some of the madness around me and helping me find the strength to hear the Canadian geese overhead and admire the beauty of the crystalline sundogs in the morning air.”
With every installment, the paper included a list of resources and places readers could volunteer, under the exhortation, “Do something!” Throughout the series, the paper ran a clip-and-mail “pledge” coupon that could be redeemed for a free “intergenerational tool kit.” Benson says the idea was adapted from the Akron Beacon Journal project on race relations.
The “Across Generations” coupon stated, “I understand the necessity of connecting generations and reversing the isolation and separation that are growing among members of all generations. I pledge to take this action to begin building connections between the generations.” Then there was room for the respondent to fill in an action. The paper also ran suggestions for action, such as organizing an intergenerational neighborhood party; “adopting” a grandparent or grandchild; creating a family history book, video or tape; or volunteering with members of a different generation.
The “tool kit” was a folder with a list of ideas for undertaking successfully any of those actions.
While Benson was pleased with the series, he was disappointed with reader response. Benson says the paper gave away about 2,000 tool kits but most went in bulk to agencies holding conferences. “What we didn’t get,” he says, “was a groundswell of people filling out pledge cards.
Poverty Among Us
When Pen Em traverses the summit at Mt. Airy Homes, she does not pause to admire the imposing view… Em’s is a tightly focused world, with little time for contemplation. With knitted cap pulled over her ears and bare hands drawn into her sleeves, the Cambodian immigrant hurries to the far side of the hill to buy milk at the only store within easy walking distance of the housing project.
Breathless from the climb, the 47-year-old woman pauses just long enough to repeat her habitual complaint: “I feel like I shoulder the mountain alone,” she says in Khmer.
With the stirring story of Cambodian refugee Pen Em, the Pioneer Press began its most recent civic journalism project on Feb. 22, 1998. “Poverty Among Us” grew out of the paper’s routine coverage of social welfare issues. Reporter Lynda McDonnell had worked hard to keep her stories about the beat on a human level. And when she saw the sweeping changes Minnesota was about to make in the name of welfare reform, she knew there would be complicated human consequences.
Parry, now a veteran of civic journalism projects, worked with McDonnell to design a project that would tell those stories in all their richness and complexity. But this project would do more.
This time around, the stories were not an end in themselves — but the basis for a community-wide conversation about their larger meaning.
Welfare was virtually gone — voters had seen to that. But poverty was not. And there was no indication the community had prepared itself for how to address poverty in the post-welfare age.
The Pioneer Press — having tested the civic journalism waters with its first two projects — was about to plunge into the deep end. The paper itself would lead that conversation, would make sure that it happened, not merely trust that the command of its stories would compel conversation. The paper would enlist community groups to meet on the topic, would send them questions to stimulate discussion, guides for how to conduct the discussions. If necessary, it would send money for child care and translators.
As planning proceeded, other parts of the paper got involved. Editorial writer Glenda Holste suggested a book club for readers interested in exploring the topic more deeply. “It’s another entry point to the conversation. It gives a broad range of options and it was strictly experimental,” she said. She worked with St. Paul public libraries to develop a reading list.
Benson, meanwhile, had gone on to become senior editor for the paper’s web site, Pioneerplanet.com. He recognized on-line journalism and civic journalism as a natural fit. “If you distill civic journalism down to a handful of precepts — engaging the community, engaging in solutions, making connections, interactivity, all of those things — on-line can do at least as well as a newspaper, if not better.
“It just made sense” to put the project on line and establish chat rooms and bulletin boards to give citizens another channel for holding conversations, he said.
This time, the paper’s owner, Knight Ridder, had established its own civic journalism fund and gave the Pioneer Press the biggest chunk of money of any of its papers for 1998.
Marty Claus, Knight Ridder’s vice-president of news, says the project was attractive because of all the different elements working together. She also credits Parry, whom, in Claus’s words, “gets it.” What particularly impressed Claus, she said, was Parry’s vision of “Poverty Among Us” as not just a project but a sea change in the way the paper covers poverty: Rather than being finite, it is going to need a lot of work for a long time and a lot of smart people thinking of solutions.
“It just rang true to me,” says Claus, “everything Kate was saying about this being an enabler. They seemed to be trying to give, not just information, but tools to people.” Among the items Knight Ridder funded were two community coordinators. They, along with reader advocate Conner, would handle the community conversation portion of the project. Parry and her reporters could focus on the journalism.
A Different Approach
This time, Parry did not assemble a team, but made McDonnell the lead reporter and pulled in other reporters whose beats overlapped with the themes of the series. Education reporter Theresa Monsour wrote about the impact of poverty on schools. Pat Burson was pulled from the neighborhoods team to write about affordable housing. Tom Collins revisited a subject he’d worked on years earlier: deadbeat dads and the impact of child support income on a family living on the edge. And Maja Beckstrom explored the factors that work against self-sufficiency.
“It spreads the concept beyond these little bitty corps of reporters who have worked on projects before,” says Parry, adding that it also helps to get more citizen voices in the daily paper.
“Reporters who’ve worked on civic journalism projects continue to experiment with ways to get very close to their subjects. You might have a reporter who spent hours on the phone with experts, then as an afterthought talked to people. Reporters from these projects tend to talk to people first, then experts. They are more experimental with how they do their job.”
The series did not run on consecutive Sundays. The stories were published, one a month, from February through August.
Each installment included a child’s view of the issue being explored. There were also discussion questions and — for segments in which a struggling family was profiled — a section called “Do the Math,” in which readers were invited to try to make ends meet on the family’s monthly budget.
The discussion groups began shortly after the first part of the series. They varied widely in size, in duration, in setting, in who attended, in what was discussed, in almost every way.
The Ramsey Action Program, a social service agency, held just one discussion group but it was the largest, drawing about 80 people. Director Ike Welborn says the group included people with low incomes who could speak with authority on the issues of employment, affordable housing, child care.
“We have discussions and how many times do we have the wrong people at the table?” he says. “With ‘Poverty Among Us,’ the right people were at the table, the people most affected were there, and if their concerns are really addressed, there’s a great opportunity here to make a difference.”
The St. Paul Council of Churches was one of the most organized discussion groups, taking the Pioneer Press‘s idea and going well beyond what the paper envisioned. Bob Walz, director of congregations and community, hired a facilitator and invited guest speakers to provide additional depth to some of the discussions. For instance, the Minnesota Director of Child Support attended the group’s discussion after the segment on child support. Walz says the group even put together its own discussion manual.
“What we did was to try to look at our faith tradition around the table — we had Jews, Muslims, different Christian groups — and we looked at what churches were doing in response to these issues,” Walz says. “It just happens that our mission and this series fit well so we put some resources into it to make it work.”
Walz says, however, some groups were not interested in his invitation to join. “Their position was ‘Why discuss this stuff? What’s the point? We want to see action.’ “
On-line Chat Rooms
After each discussion, the groups were asked to summarize the conversation and send the summary to the Pioneer Press. These were published a week before the next installment was to run.
The summaries were also posted on the paper’s website. In addition, Benson set up two other areas for discussions of “Poverty Among Us.” One was a chat room intended just for discussion groups so they could build on one another’s experience and engage in an even higher level of discourse. The other chat room enabled even the most casual readers to offer their opinions and join the conversation.
Unfortunately, casual readers began entering the discussion groups’ chat room and posting extremist remarks. When the community coordinators tried to direct browsers to the correct chat area, they complained that was censorship.
Benson says he is not satisfied with the on-line portion of the project — not just because of the chat room snafu. That, he says, is a common problem.
Benson says he is more troubled by what he calls “shovelware,” simply moving the newspaper’s stories onto the web site without taking advantage of the web’s special features.
“I wish we could have had the capacity to go out and shoot video of some of the people that McDonnell interviewed. Or at least get audio,” he says.
Still, Benson says, merely having the full series on line was a great service. “With these types of series,” he says, “there’s a problem for readers of ‘I didn’t read last month’s so am I going to read this month’s?’ That’s always an obstacle when you’re going to do a long series.” For “Poverty Among Us,” the web site served as an instant archive.
As the project was winding down in July 1998, the community involvement piece was revving up. Reader advocate, Conner, and her community coordinators, Pat Peterson and Maia Werner, held a series of community forums. For these gatherings, though, the goal went beyond conversation.
Members of the discussion groups that had been meeting through the year were invited to come together to look for solutions and to create a vision that could be used as a tool to end poverty — and then to use it.
Thus, the Pioneer Press was taking civic journalism yet another step further — handing the project off to the community.
Handing Off the Project
Peterson says the need to build in a hand-off emerged as the project progressed. “We raised all this awareness and we’ve gotten all these people involved,” she says. “We have to give them something to assure that it will continue when our involvement ends.”
Peterson’s idea was to create a vision statement: A list of conditions they’d like to see existing in the year 2005, such as “People with children have quality, affordable child care close to home and work.” She believed a vision statement with a high constituency could be used as a lobbying tool.
Anti-poverty groups, she says, could urge lawmakers and community leaders to take the action needed to make the vision a reality. Peterson also says groups providing the services could use the vision statement as a fundraising tool. Indeed, United Way was planning to include it in its annual fund drive.
“We have to figure out a way to stay with it, otherwise we do what people believe newspapers do — run around and look for problems and highlight them and walk away.”
— Vicki Gowler
The vision statement was part of a spiral-bound “Community Action Pack” the paper put out in October. It also included contact numbers for more than 60 organizations fighting poverty, a guide for setting up your own volunteer organization and lists of actions that individuals and groups could take to address poverty issues.
With just a small notice about the “Pack” that ran with the final installment, the paper received 40 requests for it. “That might not sound like a huge number,” says Conner, “but the fact that so many individuals and new groups now want to do something directly to fight poverty says they truly see things differently now.”
It also became clear that a very important part of the ultimate success of “Poverty Among Us” would be an ongoing commitment from the paper to cover poverty issues and the community’s efforts to deal with them.
Lynn Shellenberger of “Sister to Sister,” a support group for low-income women which held discussion groups, says, “If a series like this just goes away, it was nice while it lasted but Joe Public thinks, ‘Oh, the problem must have gone away. I don’t hear about it any more.’ It needs to continue. We need to hear more horror stories and we need to hear more success stories.”
Pioneer Press managing editor Vicki Gowler was already thinking about that. “We have to figure out a way to stay with it, otherwise we do what people believe newspapers do — run around and look for problems and highlight them and walk away.”
So just before the final installment, Gowler, Conner and Parry invited the Pioneer Press staff to a brown bag lunch to discuss the best way for the paper to remain, in Gowler’s words, “a committed observer” on the issue of poverty.
A dozen reporters and editors crowded into a conference room to toss around ideas. Should there be a poverty beat reporter? Or should each reporter commit to doing stories about poverty where it touches their beat? Do readers recognize poverty stories when they’re not part of a project? What would be topics for continuing coverage? How could we cover them creatively?
“The way we’ve been doing it in the past won’t work anymore,” Parry commented. “We’re like the social service agencies (grappling with welfare reform). We’re going to have to retool.”
As consensus was growing around assigning a full-time reporter to the issue, Gowler reminded the group that the position would have to come from somewhere else in the newsroom. “It depends on what we might be willing not to cover.”
Not all the issues could be worked out over a lunch hour but Parry says the lunch accomplished its purpose. “It’s very important to have (reporters and editors) feel part of all of it. It’s the power of consensus building.”
And, in a way, it mirrored what the paper was trying to do in the community — create a conversation about what needs to happen. As Gowler puts it, “You have to have an ongoing conversation when you’re trying to change things.”
What Next
There are no plans yet underway for another big project at the Pioneer Press, but Parry says she is certain of one thing. “The things we’ve learned in these projects will continue to show up in the paper. They’ll show up in projects. And they show up in daily journalism.”
Indeed, in many ways — visible and subtle — the daily paper shows how a civic approach is becoming more mainstream in the newsroom.
On most days of the week, there’s at least one story with an icon of a little key in a box marked “solutions” or “seeking solutions.”
Gowler says the solutions key was created in response to reader complaints that the paper focuses only on problems and not on solutions. The box makes it easy for readers to see information that can help them respond to a story.
Gowler says there was a lot of newsroom debate about starting the feature. Reporters didn’t want to seem to be advocating a particular solution. Gowler says that’s why any solution that might prove partisan or controversial is headed “seeking solutions.” But often, solutions are not ideological. For instance, with an August 1998 story about an explosion in Minnesota’s yellow-jacket population, the key sat over a list of tricks for keeping the bees at bay.
The paper is also running more boxes with phone numbers readers can contact if they have a special interest in the story. Stories also now include the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of reporters to make the paper more accessible and allow more contact with readers.
Gowler says she is trying to instill civic journalism values more directly in the paper’s younger, newer hires. For instance, the Pioneer Press recently began “community editions” for outlying suburbs. Gowler says she told her community reporters to make a conscious effort to get into the community and find what civic journalists call the “third places” — the coffee shop, the park, the spots in a particular community where people are talking about what is most important to them. She wants her reporters to use these third places, not just the usual official sources, to develop stories.
Suburban editor Don Wyatt says that’s a real challenge in the suburbs, where things are so spread out. One technique he’s used to guide his reporters is to have them write neighborhood profiles, in which they ask ordinary residents basic questions about where they live.
Wyatt had them do his neighborhood first to see if they could capture it accurately. “I had neighbors coming over saying, ‘Wow, I never thought about this,’ or ‘Oh, I forgot about that’ — all that stuff that sort of defines our neighborhood. So we’re building credibility and the longer we’re in there, the more it will pay off.”