| This framework is about the principles and questions journalists will need to tap into civic life.
By engaging people differently, journalists can enhance their ability to learn from civic conversations and produce stories for readers that have greater context, meaning and perspective. This will require, for instance, asking different kinds of questions in civic spaces, listening for different kinds of responses, and then using these insights in framing and writing stories. Importantly, this framework applies not just to finding a communitys civic life, but to the conversations and interviews journalists do as they seek to engage people in their daily work. Key Factors for Engagement Meaningful Chaos: How People Form Relationships with Public Concerns,a report prepared by The Harwood Group for the Kettering Foundation, is a good starting point for understanding how and why people engage in public concerns and the implications for journalism. The report covers nine key factors that The Harwood Group has used in newsrooms across the country. Journalists can use these factors to understand: |
HOW PEOPLE THINK. Journalists can better understand and capture the full, rich and often complex way that people think about their communities, come to form their views on concerns, and use words and phrases to describe their views. HOW TO ENGAGE PEOPLE IN CONVERSATION. These factors, when carefully applied, can help journalists understand better the nature of civic conversations and to ask questions that will uncover key aspects of how people are thinking and why. IMPLICATIONS FOR JOURNALISM. By using these factors journalists can strengthen their stories. For instance, journalists will see the context in which a concern or event holds importance to people, peoples struggle with being ambivalent (so that an issue is not always framed at the extremes), the connections people make among their various concerns. On the surface the factors may appear to be rather simple, but as a journalist begins to watch for them in civic conversations and see them interact, their richness and complexity emerge as do the implications for journalism. |
 The Wichita ExperienceThere is often a presumption among civic leaders that people want to know when a shooting occurs in a neighborhood. But The Harwood Group found that the news story about Northeast that resonated more with people in Riverside and other Wichita neighborhoods was not about a shooting or a gang, but about a woman who couldn’t get pizza delivered to her block, so she got her neighbors together to clean up the block and to convince the pizza company to start delivering. This story is an example of how newspapers can bridge gaps among races, neighborhoods, income and education levels. |
VIEW THE GRID — KEY FACTORS FOR ENGAGING PEOPLE IN PUBLIC LIFE