The Maine Citizens’ Campaign

Don’t Stop There! Five Adventures in Civic Journalism

The Portland Newspapers
Maine Citizens’ Campaign: Making a Difference

Paul Williams would hesitate when people asked where he lived. Sanford, Maine. A textile mill town with no textile mill. The mill had taken its jobs to non-union shops in the South 40 years earlier but the town had never managed to reinvent itself. It seemed to prefer wallowing in failure to sprucing up and charging forward. So Williams, a high school science teacher, would hesitate.

In late 1995, Williams shared these thoughts with a group of fellow Sanford citizens convened by The Portland Newspapers as part of a project to improve election coverage. The citizens were going to be meeting for a year, discussing issues and interviewing candidates, so he thought he’d get his feelings out right up front.

Williams recalls the scene now, amused by the irony. The group ended up meeting for two and a half years. And it was through those meetings that Williams ended up joining the Sanford town meeting, then getting elected to the town warrant commission — along with two other members of the group, men and women who’d nodded so sympathetically at his embarrassment in 1995. They are now active and respected town leaders.

“It’s easy to sit back and complain,” says Williams, “but I thought ‘Why not get involved?’ I gained some courage to do that in the ‘Maine Citizens’ Campaign.’ It was a big step for me to get up and speak in public. This has been a real growth thing for me.”

Something’s Missing

The “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” was conceived, like so many other civic journalism projects, as an election year device to put more citizen voices in campaign coverage. Portland Newspapers editor Jeannine Guttman says she was experiencing a familiar dread as the 1996 elections loomed.

“Elections are reduced to a contest and the big issues are never discussed. It’s like a sporting event. There’s a winner; there’s a loser. And on election day, it’s over. There’s a disconnection between the public and what just happened. It’s not very satisfying for journalists or readers. It feels like something’s missing. I wondered ‘Is this what’s missing? Would this provide a complete story?'”

Guttman’s idea was to select a group of 70 citizens that represented a cross-section of Maine and let them interview candidates directly. But while these would be ordinary citizens, they would become highly informed on the issues. They would spend a whole year before the election, meeting in small groups, educating themselves and discussing what they learned before designing questions for the candidates.

Guttman had dabbled in this kind of approach before, convening reader roundtables to discuss issues of local importance. She thinks it works particularly well in Maine, with its tradition of town meetings. “People here are used to lots of democracy, they’re used to lots of conversation,” she says.

Capturing the Community

The planning was meticulous. Guttman and her staff poured over prior election results and demographic studies before choosing Sanford as their bellwether. Then they scrutinized Sanford, using available data. They also used funds from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism to conduct their own telephone survey, to pinpoint potential group members who would accurately reflect its social, political, economic and religious make-up.

“Elections are reduced to a contest and the big issues are never discussed. It’s like a sporting event. There’s a winner; there’s a loser. And on election day, it’s over. There’s a disconnection between the public and what just happened. It’s not very satisfying for journalists or readers. — Jeannine Guttman

Finally, they spent days on the phone, calling each person identified to persuade them to join the Campaign. Most were attracted right away. Others took more persuading. A few were simply not interested.

The staff was so concerned with representing the entire community that they felt they must also recruit someone without a phone, so they visited a local church meal kitchen and signed up an unemployed father of five receiving public assistance.

“Random selection was really important,” says reporter Mark Shanahan. “If you did get only those you could count on to get involved, the group would have been very different.”

After months of work, they got 40 Sanford residents to form the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign.” Guttman had also enlisted Maine Public Broadcasting and the local CBS affiliate, WGME-TV, as partners in convening the group and covering its activities. The broadcast news organizations also saw the group as a means for improving their election coverage.

And so, on Nov. 21, 1995, they met.

Why They Came

For Pam Windsor, mother of two, it was a night out. By her own description, she was “about as apolitical as you can get.” Paul Williams was a little nervous about being in a large group in such a public way. Bryan Jessup, a Unitarian minister, was thoroughly pleased to have the chance to talk to politicians about his personal passion, “to create an economy that is inclusive; to give everyone the chance to support a family.”

The Portland Newspapers, along with media partners WGME-TV and Maine Public Broadcasting, tried to reconnect citizens with the political process in the 1996 elections through the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign.” The first installment, one year before the election, explained the project.

Each had a different perspective, different expectations, but the citizens of the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” agreed to meet a total of 16 times — eight times all together in one room and eight times in smaller discussion groups.

In small groups, the citizens discussed the issues they had zeroed in on as the most important — education, health care, welfare reform, abortion — using study guides provided by The Portland Newspapers, which publishes the Portland Press Herald and the Maine Sunday Telegram.

Sometimes there was tension. After all, they were discussing the very subjects good citizens are advised not to discuss in polite company. And they were specifically put together to reflect differing viewpoints. So when a conservative member of the group griped about welfare fraud, welfare recipient Danny Lavigne responded with a list of the nutritious foods public money buys for his children.

Even the tension, though, contributed to the bonding process taking place. For Windsor, the night out was becoming something more important. “It was so nice just being able to get together with a group of people and talk things through. This was such a nice group of people.”

Another young mother, Robin Gardner agrees. “I got so much insight just listening to other people and their opinions, being able to see other people’s sides of things. Issues became clearer. It didn’t always make them easier.”

“I’m quite proud of my group,” says Bruce Goodwin of his smaller discussion circle. “We had the largest contingent of members who continued to meet. They learned a lot. They became more aware of how things work. Quite a number have become involved in town government.”

Another citizen, Nancy Titcomb, also describes a sense of cohesiveness. “Those smaller meetings got to be the friends you look for when you arrive at the big meeting. You sat together.”

What Citizens Asked

The big meetings were the main events. With Maine Public Radio (MPR) news anchor Irwin Gratz and WGME-TV anchor Felicia Knight as moderators, the citizens gathered to interview candidates. MPR and WGME covered these sessions, along with the newspaper, and broadcast reports.

The “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” was conceived in a presidential election year with a Democratic incumbent and half a dozen Republicans hoping to unseat him. Guttman had hoped to get most of the Republicans, perhaps even the President, to appear before the citizen panel. She succeeded in landing only Richard Lugar among all the presidential candidates. He agreed to come after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary and a week before the Yankee Day primary, which was likely to be his last hurrah.

The meeting was a revelation for Guttman. “I could just imagine a room of reporters, and I would have been there as a former political reporter, and we would have all said ‘When are you getting out of the race?’ and ‘What’s your strategy for the rest of New England? What states do you need to win?’ The really disturbing thing is that’s our story, as journalists.

David Rodgers/Maine Sunday Telegram Robert Ege, a facilitator, writes out a question for three GOP Senate candidates: Would the candidates be willing to work with a Democratic or an independent president?

“But the citizens wanted another story. The citizens were very interested in his ideas on public policy matters and they really cared what he had to say. They asked just issues. That’s all they cared about.”

The citizens continued to surprise Guttman as they met with the Republican and Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate seat and the House of Representatives.

The citizens were a revelation to the candidates as well. Republican Susan Collins, ultimately the winner of the Senate election, recalls her interviews with the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” as refreshingly different.

“Not once did anyone ask me how much money I’d raised or where did the polls stand. They were interested in our values, in what we stood for, and they were interested in our positions on the issues.”

But perhaps no one was more surprised by the citizens than the citizens themselves. “I never thought I would be able to ask questions of someone running for Senate or Congress, from other parties, gathered all in one place,” says Joan Bourlessas, a store manager from Sanford.

“It was wonderful to feel the candidates listened to us and answered us and when it came time to vote, you felt you knew who you were voting for,” adds group member Titcomb.

Seamstress Cathy Dudley delighted in trying to level the space between the citizens and the politicians. “I told Senator Lugar ‘Take your hands out of your pockets. Relax!’ ” she recalls. “He was uptight. I wanted him to know he could talk to us and not be nervous.”

John Ewing/Maine Sunday Telegram The “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” listens to candidates for the U.S. Senate the week before the 1996 elections.

Accountant Rich Ganong remembers a lot of the candidates squirming when they realized what a different experience it was to be interviewed by non-journalists. “We were able to get them away from people who could feed them sound bites. If we weren’t happy with their answers, we got to pressure them for more.”

The citizens were not always happy with the answers. Unemployed dad Lavigne asked Lugar what the federal government would do to help struggling families. Lugar responded “not much,” explaining that his preference was to make government smaller.

Lavigne appreciated the honesty. “He didn’t dance around and I liked that,” he said.

“We didn’t want to hear the same old things they always said,” explains Ganong. “It was better to get an honest answer than to get glossed over.”

And all their questions, their thoughts, their names were reported in the paper. Their voices were on the radio. The television cameras recorded their moment. Their neighbors would compliment them. Their co-workers joked or sparred with them but with obvious respect.

As the year wound down, some of the citizens began to wonder: How could they give it all up?

My Dinner with Citizens

While the citizens were becoming engaged, the politicians gaining insight, and Guttman getting the human voices she had sought for her paper’s election coverage, the actual journalism product being generated was getting mixed reviews. The broadcast partners were, by and large, not happy with what was going on the air. And reporter Shanahan was frustrated.

Shanahan likens the experience of covering the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” to My Dinner With Andre, a movie about two men talking. “There was no sort of obvious nut graph, no news hook,” he says. “There was just a bunch of people having a conversation, and I was supposed to transcribe it in some kind of compelling way. My editors will tell you, sometimes I succeeded; sometimes I didn’t.”

Reporter Mark Shanahan struggled to cover the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” in a compelling way. He compared his stories to the movie My Dinner with Andre.

His editor will tell you that Shanahan became a remarkably deft listener and writer while covering the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign.” And Guttman and Shanahan agree that he improved as a reporter in ways that will help him even with more traditional stories. (Shanahan went on to cover the Portland City Council)

But Shanahan’s newfound skill did not come easily, according to Guttman. “Early on, the citizens would say to him, ‘Mark, were you at the same meeting I was at? It didn’t sound like the same meeting in your story. You wrote that I said this but you missed everything I said leading up to it, which was more important.’

“Mark was still thinking in sound bites and reporting sound bites but they weren’t talking in sound bites. They were struggling and learning from each other and, until we got that part of the reporting down, we missed a lot of the energy and magic of what was happening.”

Shanahan, says Guttman, “had to do a lot of soul searching about his reporting and his writing and I think he is a very courageous person for being willing to do that.”

By his own judgment, Shanahan’s stories succeeded “when you got the sense in a story that there was some learning going on and it was through conversation with each other, around an issue.”

Take, for instance, the story about the large group meeting one week after the election to assess the results. Using his ear for dialogue, Shanahan shows how different people can be affected in profoundly different ways by the same experience:

Colette Farland-Vogt wondered about the 93.7 million Americans who didn’t vote.

“I’m curious,” she said. “The ones who voted — are we better off financially, spiritually, emotionally? Do we have more hope? I’d like to know.”

Bruno Sumislaski was quick to answer.

“I didn’t vote,” the 49-year-old postal clerk said. “I have never voted and I have been through this roundtable for a year.”

The statement astounded Nancy Titcomb.

“It didn’t inspire you to vote?” she asked, incredulous.

“No,” Sumislaski answered. “The candidates have not changed in the 20 years I’ve been watching.”

(Caroline) Stewart shifted in her seat.

“But if you don’t vote, then they aren’t going to change,” she said. “You have the power to change that by your vote. If everyone said what you said . . .”

Sumislaski tried to explain.

“I haven’t found a candidate or an issue,” he said.

“Then you need to run yourself, I guess,” Stewart said.

Sumislaski smiled, too, but he was adamant.

“I haven’t found a candidate or an issue that I’m willing to back,” he said.

Yet, while his stories began to succeed as small portraits of ordinary citizens wrestling with large issues, Shanahan is still not sure they had the impact that he would have liked — particularly given the effort the project took. Shanahan often had to set up tables, make coffee, buy food for the group, then take notes and write the story. And the stories he came up with, well, Shanahan says, “They were readable but they don’t really tell you much. If you pick up the Sunday paper to read 60 inches, is this what you’re going to read? I don’t know.”

Doug Jones/Maine Sunday Telegram Candidates for U.S. Senate in the 1996 Maine Democratic primary listen to members of the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” talk about the issues in Sanford.

Maine Public Radio news director Andrea DeLeon similarly feels listeners were generally uninterested in the radio broadcasts of the meetings. “We did not get any feedback, not a single call,” says DeLeon. She attributes that to the way the network packaged the meetings — as half-hour programs with very little editing. “They became kind of anonymous voices. They were difficult to listen to. On TV it might have worked, but on the radio it was kind of disjointed just to hear the audio track without the visual cues.”

WGME-TV packaged the meetings in smaller bits for the nightly news but even there, news director Lois Czerniak says, “It didn’t lend itself to thrilling journalism. It was people sitting around talking.”

Both DeLeon and Czerniak say the project worked best for them when they used the citizens as part of routine election coverage, as a ready-made group to consult for voter opinions on issues coming out of the campaign. But that lesson was late in coming.

Czerniak says she will use what she learned from the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” in future projects, but DeLeon says she is hesitant to get involved in any more projects involving large groups of citizens. “I’ve not yet found a way to turn it into compelling radio,” she says.

Moving to Phase II

Members of the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” were ordinary voters who became highly informed on the issues during a year of meeting in small study groups before they began to interview candidates directly.

Sanford citizen Andrea Boland was hoping from an early point in the project that the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” would continue meeting past the election. “We had some really good materials to study from and it was kind of a tease. You’d get into a topic and it was so interesting. Then, next meeting, it was on to something else.”

She knew others agreed. So, as the project was winding down, Boland suggested the group stay together and focus on one issue. The citizens had some good ideas on a couple of topics: Welfare reform, campaign finance reform, education. “Just take a project,” she told the group at what was to have been its final meeting in October 1996. “Come up with some ideas and see if we could do something locally to put them into practice. Do a report or do some action project or do both.”

Editor Guttman was listening with interest. On the one hand, she was anxious for the project to end. It had been a lot of hard work and, like most journalists, she was ready to go on to the next story. “We have short attention spans,” she concedes. “We like a diversity of experiences and of stories.”

On the other hand, Guttman felt a sense of responsibility. She had brought these citizens together for a year and let them talk about problems. How could she walk away the minute they wanted to work on solutions?

After brief deliberation, the paper agreed to help the group keep going for a second year. Says Guttman, “We felt committed, that we started this process, we had to see it to its conclusion.”

But things would change.

Creating Distance

The public broadcasting partners wanted out as soon as the election was wrapped up. In fact, they were surprised Guttman would even consider continuing to sponsor the group since the citizens were talking about shifting into an action phase. Public radio’s DeLeon says, “There are many special interest groups and this looked like it was going to be the birth of another one. We would not provide the Sportsmen’s Alliance of Maine with a venue and a coffee urn and broadcast their meetings. We didn’t want to have that role.”

WGME-TV agreed to continue covering the group but its reporters attended meetings infrequently. The station’s main coverage of Phase Two was a half-hour documentary aired on the group’s second anniversary.

The “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” surprised the candidates, the newspaper editor and, perhaps more than anyone, the citizens themselves, with their seriousness about the issues.

“It was not our role to keep shoving them forward,” adds WGME’s Czerniak. “We got them started and we told them ‘let’s see where you can run with it.’ “

Guttman was disappointed when her partners pulled back but she did recognize that there was a risk to continuing. Indeed, if the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” became another special interest group, it could have created an ethical dilemma for the newspaper. So Guttman began to create a little distance.

There would be no materials distributed, no meetings planned six months in advance, no known guest speakers, no high profile moderators. Phase two would be largely citizen-driven. But Guttman did feel the citizens needed some assistance to continue. Using $25,000 in new funds from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, she hired a community coordinator to be the paper’s liaison with the group and she hired facilitators to run the meetings from the Roundtable Center. The Roundtable is a non-profit group that helps church and civic groups set up “study circles,” small discussion groups that search for solutions to public issues, such as alcoholism and voter apathy.

Then Guttman stepped back to watch what would happen. “It was like watching any news story,” she says. “That’s the wonderful thing about news. You don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the story of Sanford.”

Year Two Begins

Not all of the citizens were eager to continue. About 20 people — half the original group — dropped out after the 1996 election. And at least half the remaining members say they stayed because they thought the media partners wanted them to. They had no real agenda.

John Ewing/Maine Sunday Telegram Andrea Boland talks with fellow Sanford citizens at a meeting of the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign.”

Many had agreed in a general way that they would like to work on an educational project. Some wanted to form a town watch. Some thought they would like to build a solid, enduring structure such as a teen center or a cultural arts space. Others felt they should remain a political discussion group to provide citizen views to public officials or to monitor whether the newly elected politicians lived up to the things they’d told the group during the campaign.

They spent the first meeting trying to decide what to do. They came up with a list of 30 ideas but couldn’t agree on the best. So they spent the second meeting trying to decide. Then the third. A few more members dropped out.

Finally, they decided they had to come up with a mission statement and they developed an enchantingly simple one: “To talk politics, educate ourselves, and do something.”

It gave the group a direction to go in. They’d spent a year talking politics. The next step seemed to be to learn about local government.

Using the model the paper had established in year one, the citizens invited a series of Sanford officials and civic leaders to appear before them and answer questions.

Town manager Jack Webb was among those who willingly obliged. He’d been following the group’s progress in the paper and he was happy to see citizens getting involved. But he had no expectations that they were going to initiate major civic projects. “They were a very good discussion group,” says Webb. “It left you with a warm feeling, watching them work together. But I don’t think they were an action group.”

For the citizens, the interviews were an interesting exercise but only forestalled the decision on what form “do something” might take. When they ran out of town officials to interview, in May 1997, they were back at an impasse. A few more members dropped out.

“We had no focus that second year,” says Titcomb, who dropped out eventually. “Members lost patience with all the talking.”

“We were just spinning our wheels,” is how Bourlessas describes year two. Another member uses the phrase, “treading water.”

Attendance was dropping steadily but the remaining members were adamant that they should not recruit new members. After working together for nearly two years, ironing out their differences, learning to respect each other’s opinions, they did not want to start over with a new group. So they went on grappling for a reason to be.

Year Three Sputters

At this point, the broad outline of the group’s history takes on the look of a failed experiment. The members never did find a cause that everyone could support.

Guttman was getting anxious to end the newspaper’s sponsorship of the group when she was invited to be part of an experiment in “handing off” civic journalism projects to their community, with funds from the Pew Partnership for Civic Change.

Guttman helped the Roundtable Center, which had been providing facilitators throughout Phase Two, apply for a grant from the Partnership to take over the group.

The Roundtable Center specializes in organizing study circles, so it seemed logical to point the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” in that direction. Roundtable Director Kate O’Neil managed to convince the members they should devote their energy to forming new study circles aimed at broadening the base of Sanford citizens interested in improving the community.

Few of the remaining members were interested in study circles but O’Neil was persistent. She seemed to be the only one attending the meetings with a clear and focused idea of what the group should do. O’Neil admits to feeling awkward about her role. “The (Sanford citizens) did not own this community change initiative. It came from outside. It seemed like it was going to fit and work, but if things don’t come from inside the group, the chance of success is greatly diminished.”

More members dropped out. But this time, there was resentment. “Rather than the Roundtable adjusting to us, they saw us as people they could use,” says Boland, who quit the group in protest. “People lost faith in themselves. They succumbed to a fear of failure and that was catalyzed by the Roundtable.”

Even some of those who stayed were disappointed at the new direction. Bourlessas says, “We got sidetracked. The Roundtable just seemed to have a different agenda.”

Individual Accomplishments

Those broad outlines, however, ignore the individual growth and change that was taking place within the members’ lives as a result of their involvement with the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign.” During that second year, Paul Williams and Pam Windsor, resolutely uninvolved in Sanford before, learned so much about town government, they were inspired to sign up for the town meeting. From there, they got elected to the town warrant committee, which oversees the budget.

Titcomb turned her desire to help children into an after-school homework club at her local elementary school. Dudley started town watches in three neighborhoods.

Jessup, the minister, led a protest against new food stamp regulations in the welfare reform bill and convinced the Maine Secretary of Human Services to get an exemption for Sanford.

“I was emboldened by having had the opportunity to speak directly to people running for political office,” says Jessup. “I think that this whole process of the ‘Maine Citizens’ Campaign’ has allowed a number of citizens to find our voices.”

And even beyond these visible accomplishments, the citizens report personal changes. “We learned an awful lot,” says Goodwin. “I met people of such diverse backgrounds, people you never knew. I learned to respect their opinions. I learned to listen.”

“It just created an awareness in the area,” adds Robin Gardner. “People read about what we were doing. We could have had an effect we don’t even know about.”

Accountant Ganong, an entrenched conservative, says he learned “the guys on the other side aren’t the demons my side makes ’em out to be.

“I’m adamantly pro-life and one woman was adamantly pro-choice and we were able to carry on a conversation without yelling or insulting each other. And she’s a really nice person which completely blew me away.”

That’s not to say there is no disappointment. Ganong says he feels “let down” now that the group has ended. “I wanted to be able to accomplish something. I wanted to have an impact. It’s depressing that we couldn’t get there.”

Still, he adds, “We’ll always be able to say ‘hey, guys, we gave it a shot,’ which is better than sitting there and complaining.”

Lessons Learned

The citizens do concede there are things they wish they had done differently. Nearly unanimously, those who dropped out and those who stayed say they wish they had settled on a project faster. They took their time waiting for a consensus to build, feeling that they had no deadline. Had they realized what the delay would do to the group, they say they would have moved faster and taken action sooner.

Guttman says she, too, learned some lessons from the project. First and foremost, that when convening groups, you should build in an action phase. She concedes this can create a discomfort zone for news organizations and there are situations where it may not be appropriate. But she has already put this first lesson into practice in the paper’s most recent project — a series on alcohol abuse in Maine.

In that series, she had not convened a citizens group but community leaders requested that the paper help them start “study circles” on the issue, copying the model they learned from the paper’s earlier civic journalism efforts. Guttman agreed and included an action phase for the groups, reasoning, “I don’t think anyone would object to solutions to the carnage of alcohol abuse. I just can’t imagine that that would be seen as journalistically unethical.”

Another important lesson, Guttman says, is that the paper should have decided either to disengage and let the citizens continue on their own if they wanted, or to take a stronger hand in staying involved and give the citizens firmer direction. The middle ground she took proved less than satisfactory.

Guttman confesses to feeling disappointed that the group ended without some tangible accomplishment. But she says that’s just the traditional journalist in her talking — the one looking for stories about legislation getting drafted or a teen center being built. The civic journalist in her has no regrets.

“It was just a really terrific example of what a group of people can do when they get together and put their mind to it and say ‘yeah, I want my voice to count for something. I live here and this is what I want to happen.’ Their lives have changed dramatically. They’ve done amazing things.”

And, Guttman says, the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” succeeded in its original purpose of improving the paper’s campaign coverage. “It transcended that little town. Hopefully the project told a tale that others took a lesson from.” Stories from the second phase of the group came even closer to the kind of storytelling she was looking for, she says, bringing citizen voices into the paper regularly. “We had started to tell a story,” says Guttman. “We couldn’t just end in the middle.”

A New Newsroom Job

One of the unexpected results of the project is the creation of a new staff position at The Portland Newspapers known as “community coordinator.” Jessica Tomlinson was hired as a part-time consultant when the project entered phase two. She had a strong background in the theory of civic journalism, having been a research assistant for another civic journalism effort, The Project on Public Life and the Press. But she had no practical experience as a journalist.

She provided all the logistical and administrative support the group needed: Making sure they had a meeting place, that the facilitator would be there, that there was food. She helped them decide whom to invite, what questions to ask.

And she became the sounding board for the citizens. When they were not happy with how things were going, when they wanted to try something new, when they just wanted to rehash the last meeting, they called Jessica.

Guttman, meanwhile, was finding other things for Tomlinson to do too — chief among them planning the paper’s next election project, a book of citizens’ issues to guide the governor’s race in the fall of 1998. Guttman and the paper’s publisher decided they could keep Tomlinson busy as a full-time employee.

“I see it as a natural part of our evolution,” says Guttman. “I wanted to bring citizen voices into the paper in a way that is more routine than doing these large projects. Having Jessica in the newsroom gives us more agility. Now, when we see a story that needs community input, she can set it up for us.

“And it tells the staff we’re serious. This isn’t some flash in the pan fad we’re going through.”

But hiring Tomlinson was not a simple task. This was a brand new designation for an editorial employee.

The Newspaper Guild questioned the need for a “community coordinator.” Was she a public editor — a job classification that already existed but referred to someone with major editorial duties? Or did she, perhaps, belong in marketing?

Tomlinson says it took months to devise a job description that satisfied the union that she belonged on the editorial side but was doing a job that did not already exist. The community coordinator at The Portland Newspapers is defined as “a person… who can foster public relationships between the community and the newspaper.” Responsibilities include holding town meetings to gather feedback from the public, communicating with other media, helping the staff learn to “see and report in new ways,” and working with civic organizations to advance public life.

Tomlinson says she’s found few papers have a similar position and she acknowledges it’s controversial, even in her own newsroom. “It’s a little more ‘out there’ than what traditional journalists are comfortable with,” she says. But she believes she played a vital role for the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign.” The involvement of the newspaper was very important to the citizens — it gave them instant credibility. And she became the person at the paper they could talk to, who would listen and treat their concerns seriously — something she believes no reporter or editor could have done.

Making a Difference

The “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” invited all 40 original members to its final meeting on March 10 and 15 of them came. It was like old times. They sat around and talked politics and issues.

There was general agreement that the “Maine Citizens’ Campaign” had been a wonderful event in their lives, that the experience had convinced them that they, each one, could make a difference.

The conversation ineluctably turned to what they, as citizens, could do to improve their community. And, again, Paul Williams shared his feelings about Sanford.

“I care about Sanford now,” he said. “I care what happens here. I look around this place and it feels like home. That’s a big deal.”