In this part of the mapping work, you will identify the sources, conversations and civic places you need to tap into civic life. There are three key parts to this work.
1. Getting started.
Resources on the community exist right in the newsroom. It is essential to start with them.
2. Going out into the community.
There are community leaders and citizens who can offer many insights on the area or topic you are going to map. They will lead you to sources, conversations and civic spaces.
3. Keeping it going.
Don’t try to do everything at once; instead, start small and build as the work unfolds.
On the following pages are a series of steps for tapping into your community’s civic life. At first, take the time to follow all these steps; they will help make the process go faster.
When using this section, be sure to refer to the Civic Frameworks section.
“One of the best stories we’ve done came out of our civic mapping work. There was a flare-up last year in a community covered by a reporter we sent to a civic mapping seminar. There were flyers going up in the town saying there was going to be a white supremacist rally. Aimee Green, the reporter, used her sources and the civic mapping method to talk to everyday folks about it. The typical approach would have been to talk to town leaders and ask what they thought about the rally, possibly the organizers. But she went into coffee shops. She ended up talking at great length to a lot of people, including some teenagers who we eventually realized were at the heart of all of this. She reached down and talked to everyday people in a way that she hadn’t been doing before.”
– Jack Keith
Central Team Leader and Editor, The News Tribune, Tacoma, WA
Key points to guide your work
- Create a map.
Throughout this workbook, the term “mapping” is used. The idea is that a newsroom can create a road map for how different areas of a community’s civic life work and how journalists can tap into those areas.
- Dig deep.
This initiative is much like a long-term investigative effort where journalists constantly need to keep digging to discover what is really going on and what it means. For instance, it will not be enough just to find civic conversations and spaces. Journalists also must keep asking whether they are the “right” ones to tap.
- Engage in conversation.
The ability of newsrooms to engage in focused conversations will greatly affect their success. Give-and-take conversations are needed to sort out what the newsroom is finding and then to think about what it means and to apply it to journalism. A conversation is when people make sense of things together, rather than someone “reporting” back on what they have found or simply listening and taking notes.
- Build as you go.
News organizations should constantly pull together what is being learned in this work. Don’t leave all the heavy lifting until the end. By then, many journalists may have become lost in a sea of infor-mation, wondering what this initiative has to do with journalism.
- Put new insights to use.
From the start, newsrooms should try to apply their new-found insights and ideas to daily journalism. This will help people see the practicality of this work.
- Remember, this is ambiguous and messy work.
At times people will say, “It’s not clear what we’re getting here” or “Where are we going with this?” If that doesn’t happen, the work probably isn’t going deep enough. Keep reminding everyone that it is, indeed, a messy process to figure out the civic life of a community.
>> Changing Your Work Reflexes <<
You cannot tap into the entire civic life of your community in one fell swoop; there simply is too much to do – and you will never get to your journalism work. But over time, if you do this work consistently, your efforts will become a reflex, or second nature, and it will change the way you and others in the newsroom practice journalism. At that point, tapping into your community’s civic life and capturing what you are learning becomes just another part of your job and something that takes place on an ongoing basis.
When the team running the Civic Mapping Seminar in Denver announced at the first session that all participants would be required to go into the field and interview people, I posed the semi-rhetorical question: “Has anyone investigated if it was legal for an editor to actually go out of the office?”
Talk to people face to face?
What madness were these people engaged in?
There were calls to make.
Stories to log.
Personnel decisions to act on.
There was work to do.
Yet within a few minutes, talking with my contact in our mapping area, there strolled by a kid pushing a “helados,” your basic ice cream cart that was unique to that neighborhood and a couple other Latino neighborhoods. You would not see such a sight in Cherry Creek or certainly in the suburbs.
Then came a story idea about a park that has been the center of controversy over what it should be named. Then one about a new school that was in the works – the result of a private effort that had yielded a chunk of money already. Then a story about a movement to unseat a school board member who, some say, was not representing the Latino community that put her there.
All these stories were not yet on the traditional radar screens of government agencies, subcommittees and boards. But they were on the radar screens of the community.
Now they are on the minds of hundreds of thousands of Denver Post readers. And that was just the first day.
– Frank Scandale
Assistant Managing Editor/News, The Denver Post
Reprinted from Civic Catalyst, Summer 1999