| INTRODUCTION PAGE 1 | |
|
This workbook is about how journalists can tap into their community’s civic life to report first, and best, what is happening in the community, and to do it with authenticity. Venturing into a community’s civic life will produce new story ideas, but that is just for openers. As noted on the inside front cover, it can also strengthen and enrich a newspaper’s ability to:
Another New Program? Some editors and reporters may harbor the uneasy feeling that this workbook is another gut-wrenching newsroom change program. |
It is not; in fact, just the opposite is true. Many newspapers will want to keep a tight focus on their efforts to venture into the community by working with a small group within the newsroom and expanding their newsroom efforts only as it makes sense.
For example, a newspaper may want a single department or reporting team to begin this work on its own. Initially, that group may look at one neighborhood or just a piece of it. Then, if appropriate, it will be possible to figure out how to seed the idea of tapping into a community’s civic life throughout the newsroom. What Civic Life Offers Journalists often tell The Harwood Group, “We keep reporting on the same folks and institutions.” Then they ask, “How can we get beyond the usual voices and superficial man-on-the-street interviews?” Often at the heart of these comments is the sense that a newspaper’s coverage is focused largely on official events, personalities, and issues or on the gripes, tragedies and human interest stories of individuals in the community. Journalists believe that the community itself — its civic life — is missing from newspaper coverage. In newsroom conversations, journalists often say, “We need to expand our coverage, but how?” One answer is to tap into a community’s civic life, which lies in between the official world of politics and institutions and people’s private lives. |
Get the story first.
The Wichita Experience
| Swamp training was in full swing at The Wichita Eagle in June 1995.
About that time, there came Country Place Estates. The residents of that neighborhood fairly affluent households with $100,000-plus annual incomes came up with a plan to install gates at the only entrance to the area and to photograph everyone who came and went. This despite the fact that the street was public. Maybe it was our swamp discussions that made me wonder what those people were really thinking. Certainly it was our swamp discussions that made me spend an afternoon knocking on peoples doors in Country Place. Before that afternoon, my inclination probably would have been to clobber Country Place. |
What a bunch of elitists, I would have been thinking.
But after sitting in their homes, seeing their faces, listening to them talk, I understood a great deal more. That empathy did not stop the story from posing the question about whether these folks were trying to wall out the rest of the world. But it did, I think, make the story a little better by broadening my thinking. And based on letters I received afterwards from Country Place, I believe it made these folks feel they had been treated fairly by the newspaper. -JIM CROSS EAGLE REPORTER |