Foreword

THE PUBLIC CONCERNS THAT
drive issues in a community normally don’t arise at city hall or the courthouse. They bubble up from the rich and, to most journalists, dark and trackless swamp of public life. For the most part, they attract journalistic notice only when they near the point of getting on an official body’s agenda or in some other way come to general attention, such as in a public happening or, even, a public tragedy.

How an official body will react to those issues or events is often determined by what the members of that body hear and see and know from their own experiences and conversations with people.

Thus, in an important way, much of the public life of a community goes on beyond the normal field of view of journalists. We wind up merely reacting to the external signs and symptoms of the issues and the official handling of them rather than reporting them with the sort of authenticity that can earn respect and credibility from readers.

Concerned about this, I asked Richard Harwood if he thought a way could be devised to help journalists at The Wichita Eagle map that swamp. That is, could he suggest a systematic method that would allow us to know about the real issues that concern and affect people at a 

 much earlier point and thereby understand the dynamics of issues more fully, leading to better reporting.

At one level the answer is simple: Know your people and your place. But the size of most communities outstrips the ability of most newspaper staffs to know them well, even if we were not fully occupied by the demands of producing daily newspapers.

This book is the result of 18 months of work by The Harwood Group and a few members of The Eagle staff, aided by funding from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. It provides, I believe, a practical tool.

It is not a program that, with a little training, will wondrously produce more or better local news stories. Rather, it is a guide to the swamp that will enable willing journalists to learn systematically about their communities: To understand how, when and where issues arise; to identify and cultivate important nonofficial but authentic sources; to be ahead of the curve. The result will be deeper, richer, more authoritative and credible stories.

 

DAVIS “BUZZ” MERRITT

EDITOR, THE WICHITA EAGLE

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