Pew Partnership for Civic Change – Opening Remarks
By Edward M. Fouhy
Founder
Pew Center for Civic Journalism
I welcome this opportunity to talk about civic or public or community journalism. So far we haven’t even all agreed on a name. Let’s just call it good journalism. Unfortunately it has been both praised and misunderstood for things it is not, rather than for what it is. One of its leading voices, Buzz Merritt, editor of the Wichita Eagle, says it has had journalism done to it.
It might be useful to lay out the premises on which civic journalism is based and proceed to a definition as a wayof starting our discussion.
The first premise is that journalism is in trouble. Real people talk about the news, not about journalism, but this is a tony crowd so let’s talk about journalism.
Fact # 1 — Newspaper circulation is sliding at an alarming rate — seven out of ten of the top newspapers reported a circulation decline in the latest reporting period, the third straight report of major circulation declines. Even our best newspapers, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, have lost circulation. Some newspapers have gone out of business entirely, casualties this year — New York Newsday, the Houston Post, the Baltimore Evening Sun, the Milwaukee Journal. In the five years from 1990-95, this country has seen 78 daily newspapers go out of business and average daily circulation has dropped by about five million copies.
Fact #2 — Fewer than a third of women aged 18-34, the demographic group advertisers want most, fewer than a third report reading a newspaper regularly.
Fact #3 — Fewer than half the adults in America would answer yes if asked if they had read a newspaper yesterday, according to a recent survey.
Fact #4 — 71% of Americans say that newspapers get in the way when it comes to solving the problems our country faces. What’s happened to the image of the newspaper as the paladin of the people crusading against crooked politicians and corrupt businessmen?
Broadcast News
What about broadcasting? For more than two decades the majority have said they get their news from television. Oh really? The audience for network newscasts, as a percentage of the population, has been flat since 1981. Sure, thirty million people a night gather around when Dan, Peter, and Tom are on the air, but they do not command the nation’s attention or set the agenda the way their predecessors, Cronkite, Chancellor, and Reynolds, did. And news is now available from CNN as well as many other sources around the clock.
Public television keeps alive the tradition of informed discussion and hard-hitting documentaries, but the deficit cutters on Capitol Hill threaten to stifle both.
Network magazine shows thrive on a formula of emotional morality plays and entertaining fluff. TV talk shows feature not news but salacious gossip, trailer-park freak shows, or political advocates passing themselves off as analysts and commentators or sometimes disguising themselves as journalists while they shout at one another.
Asked to name their favorite network for news, the largest percentage of Americans names CNN, but remarkably few seem to watch it.
Much-scorned local TV news has been the one growth area of American journalism for the last 15 years, but one need not spend much time watching it in the biggest cities to see how deeply infected with tabloid values it has become.
Declining Civil Society
The second premise on which civic journalism is based is that something is eating at the foundations of our society. Take nearly any objective yardstick and use it to measure where we used to be and where we are now as a society:
Illegitimate births up 16 and a half per cent from 1973 to 1992, more children are born out of wedlock in Washington, D .C., than are born to married couples, violent crime is up 500% since 1960, while personal income after inflation has been static for more than 20 years. More Americans than ever are living alone; even, as Harvard scholar Robert Putnam pointed out earlier this year, bowling alone, membership in leagues is down 40% since 1980. More people are living in walled communities out of fear of one another. And need I cite the startling difference in the way black and white Americans viewed the recent court jury verdict in Los Angeles? As the Kerner Commission wrote after cities erupted in flames in the summer of 1967, we are two societies, one black, one white.
So those are the twin premises on which we base our assertion that it’s time to take a hard look at journalistic practice — first, the news business is in trouble; second, we as a people, as members of a community, what some call the civil society, are threatened. And I believe those two things are linked. Tocqueville, the French statesman who was such a keen observer of American life, said it 160 years ago — you cannot have newspapers with-out democracy, you cannot have democracy without newspapers.
Definition
Now as to the term: civic journalism, the definition that we at the Pew Center — professionals all, have arrived at as we have observed the various experiments around the country — civic journalism is first an idea, a work in progress, an evolving theory, but at its base it is this — providing people with the news and information they need to allow them to behave like citizens, to make the decisions they are called upon to make in a democratic society. From this conviction stems the thought that one obligation of journalists is to find not only the problems of our democracy but also to suggest that there are solutions.
Civic journalism is an effort to reconnect with the real concerns that viewers and readers have about the issues in their lives they care most about, not in a way that panders to them, but in a way that treat them as citizens with the responsibilities of self-government.
It takes the traditional five w’s of journalism — who, what, when, where, why, and expands them a bit to ask why is this story important to me and to the community in which I live?
Tools
Civic journalists start with an effort to learn what is on the community’s agenda. They use the techniques of the market researchers — focus groups, survey research or polls. And they go beyond those tools to use living room conversations and town hall meetings. I was in Cincinnati last week for a town hall meeting and while some of the issues that were raised were familiar to the journalists conducting it, most were not.
We at the Pew Center recently commissioned a research firm to help us learn about the issues that are on people’s minds as the election campaign begins. And the answers that have come back after listening to fifteen focus groups in 12 cities in four states this fall are remarkably alike. They are, in no particular order — jobs and the economy, education, and crime and families and values, much the same as the issues that were high on the public agenda two years ago. No surprises. What is different is the sense of anxiety people feel about their lives. Four years ago we saw anger at the state of the economy, and eventually it was focused on President Bush. Now there is a real sense of not being in control and how that will effect the election is not yet clear.
When you ask citizens to talk about their lives, people say how worried they are about whether they will have a job tomorrow in an economy that is clearly in turmoil, and in a business world enthralled with downsizing. People talk about losing out to a lower wage worker in a foreign country or to someone hired under an affirmative action quota, or just getting the boot to boost a company’s stock price.
They worry about the values their kids are getting in school and from the tube. Because typically both parents work — they have to in order to sustain a middle-class life style — they haven’t the time to spend with their kids, imbuing them with their values. They can’t be at home to supervise their TV viewing habits. And let’s not kid ourselves — television is where kids today are getting most of their values and their picture of the adult world. God help us.
Threats to Print and Broadcast journalism
Civic journalists are trying to plug back into their communities, to cross the gap that has opened and widened between the news media and their constituents — their readers and viewers. Civic journalists understand that technology threatens to make the mainstream media — newspapers and broadcasting — less relevant because it offers such a wide variety of choices. Soon the technology will become cheap enough and simple enough so that anyone may drop out of our larger society and retreat into the narrow slivers of self-interest that are the antithesis of the broad-based community the mass media have fostered and that democracy requires if it is to survive.
Harder to Do
Plugging into the community is hard. It’s much harder journalism than dealing with the same old sources, the experts, the media-savvy advocates of the same old tired points of view, the self-serving talking heads, known derisively in the television world as the Rolodex commandos, always available for the interview, always ready with conventional wisdom or a cynical one-liner.
You know how hard it is? The other night Washington’s local public television station broadcast a one-hour documentary about four self-help organizations that flourish in Anacostia, the most devastated community in the District of Columbia. The program was the product of the reporting of a skilled and highly experienced network camera crew and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who worked for a year — a year — to find the stories, plug into the community, and do the hard reporting that this kind of journalism demands.
At a time when newsrooms everywhere are under tremendous pressures to reduce costs, to shrink newshole, to cram ever more stories into thirty-minute news programs that are actually little more than 10 minutes of news after commercials, weather, and sports, that sort of deep, thoughtful reporting that goes beyond the formulas is becoming rarer, especially at smaller, struggling news operations throughout the country. And even at some bigger newspapers hobbled by the bean counters at their chain’s corporate headquarters.
Issues of Interest
Civic journalists broaden their agenda from the usual overwhelming focus on political and governmental news to aggressively ferret out issues of interest to citizens who are not members of the elite. That means things like the education of their children, the security of themselves and their families, and the economic future they face. That means covering an agenda that is set more by citizens, by the people, and less by those who would manipulate them. That means, for journalists, thinking about the news not only from the standpoint of conventional journalistic practice but taking it a step further and thinking about a subject from the standpoint of the public and the public interest.
Charlotte
Take an example: in looking at the agenda of issues of concern to the people of Charlotte, North Carolina, the Charlotte Observer and their broadcast partners in radio and television, took on crime and decided to cover it not using the body bag approach, but instead looking at the neighborhoods where crime is way above the city-wide average. They selected nine neighborhoods and went into them one at a time, using lots of leg work, reporting resources and holding town meetings in each. Then they broadcast special reports on the neighborhood on the same day the newspaper did a full report. They call this process media blitz day. It’s not just, “Oh look at how awful things are” -reporting. It’s looking at specific possible causes of crime, such as lack of recreation facilities for young people, or crack houses where drug sales are carried out and other crime occur. And it means looking at solutions not just problems — and telling people how they can get involved.
This kind of journalism, they learned in Charlotte, leads to a great outpouring of civic energy and that must be harnessed so it doesn’t turn into more frustration, greater cynicism. Harnessing that energy is not what journalists are good at, we have found. Many of our partnerships have also found this to be true and have hired — sometimes with our help — community coordinators who know how to connect people to organizations where they can channel that energy, organizations which are used to finding solutions and are fostering an approach to solutions.
Wisconsin
Another example: the debate over land use in Wisconsin, the rights of property holders versus the rights of other citizens, between those who would control growth and those who would use the land for their own private gain. In many places that’s a formula for the kind of conflict-driven news coverage that I believe has done so much to alienate citizens from one another. But the coalition of one Madison newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal, the CBS affiliate, WISC-TV, and the public radio and television networks that serve the state don’t behave that way. They go out and d o the hard reporting it takes to find out what the real, not imagined, parameters of the argument are. They listen to people, even convene town meetings where the issue can be debated and discussed, then they print and broadcast what they find, and tell their listeners and viewers and readers about one another’s coverage.
Finally, they convene representatives of the public with the officials who are responsible for the land use policies, and they put their conversation on television. And you know what? People watch. People watch because they are hungry for the information that affects their lives, they watch in numbers large enough to beat the entertainment offerings on the other network-affiliated stations. In Wisconsin they call it the “We The People” partnership because the partners have the idea that the news media have a stake in democracy and that people who behave like citizens need what they are selling — news and information necessary to make public decisions.
Journalism Values
What civic journalism does is inspire journalists to return to their principles, to remember why they have constitutional protection, what their important values are, and to reassert those values– What values? Objectivity, accuracy, independence — they are the principles of traditional journalism most of them hold dear. Civic journalism builds on these values, innovates in their application and seeks ways to reinvigorate them. It does not seek to supplant them with some new or trendy formula. It is a reaffirmation of traditional principles.
How does this differ from what you may be used to seeing and reading? The first habit many journalists follow when framing a story is to find conflict. Conflict is the chief ingredient of so much news coverage. Republicans versus Democrats, Dole versus Clinton, Serbs against Croats. Conflict is an element in drama. Shakespeare’s plays all are based on conflict. Some journalists feel they have to dramatize the news. Do they? Why not just tell it straight?
Another journalistic habit is there are two sides to every story. I used to think so, now I don’t. I see many sides to most stories and I instinctively reject the attempt to force every story into a dramatic framework where there are only two sides, two extremes with only the experts from the most extreme points of view allowed on the air and into print, there to repeat their tired points of view. Take abortion, the flash point of American politics for two decades. Much of journalism requires that we define it in bumper-sticker terms — pro life or pro choice. When there is a TV debate about the subject, we invite the people who espouse those extreme viewpoints and no one else. This despite the fact that even a superficial glance at poll data reveals the vast majority of Americans are deeply troubled about abortion and reject both those points of view.
What It Isn’t
Let’s talk for a moment about what civic journalism is not–
It is not boosterism, it is quite the contrary, an effort to take an unflinching look at the hard realities of community life while suggesting that there are solutions as well as problems.
It is not editors sitting on community boards or anchormen narrating chamber of commerce promotional videos. But it also is not sterile detachment from the life of the community, a detachment so remote as to be mistaken for indifference or even hostility.
It is above all else not an abandoning of the journalistic ideal of objectivity. We know of no serious effort at civic journalism underway anywhere in the country today that in any way fails to honor the principle of objectivity. Bill Kovach, at the Nieman Foundation, says objectivity is the organizing principle of journalism. He is right.
Finally it is not a newspaper or media partnership imposing its own agenda on its community. It begins with an organized effort to find the issues that are important to readers and proceeds from that starting point. It is the Boston Globe, WABU-TV and radio station WBUR covering the New Hampshire primary from the point of view of the citizens of a typical town not in the terms of so much traditional political coverage — who’s up, who’s down? Who’s ahead in the candidate horse race? What are the tactics? Who are the insiders?
It is the Rochester Democrat seeking citizen input in the problem of poor schools. It is the San Jose Mercury giving citizens a look at how special-interest bills get signed into law.
Summary
Let me summarize what our approach is before going further —
Civic journalism is an effort to give people the information they need in order to behave as citizens in a self-governing society. It is providing news that serves the information needs of readers and viewers and listeners. It is not using the news media as a propaganda arm of some enterprise, no matter how highly principled. And, equally, it is not using the news media to titillate and entertain.
Second, it is an alliance of news organizations — ideally the three principal ones — newspapers, television and radio. When people talk about how they satisfy their information needs they talk about the news. “I saw it on the news,” they say. Many times, of course, they don’t remember where they saw it; maybe the read it in the newspaper or heard it on the radio driving home, or maybe they saw the ten o’clock news before falling asleep. People rarely remember the source, because they use all three media and now many are tapping into on-line sources too. So civic journalism isn’t just newspapers, it’s not just TV.
Furthermore, when people both see and hear a news story it takes on added impact for them because they instinctively know newspapers and broadcasters are competing for the same advertising dollars, so when they see them cooperating on a public agenda of issues they understand this is something different. This is something important.
Not Public Relations
Finally it’s important to remember that this is not a public relations technique for you. This is a different way for journalists to think about the news. Can you help them to do that? Yes, I think you can. You can encourage the editors and news directors in your city to look into the growing national movement called civic journalism or public or community journalism — it goes by all three names — and more importantly you can reward them when they begin to practice civic journalism.
Summary
So what are we saying? That civic journalism can solve the problems facing the country or the state or the city? No, of course not. The problems we face have very deep roots and journalists are held in extremely low regard at the moment.
What we do say is that by listening to the citizen’s voice, and by using that voice as the organizing principle of some stories — not all — but some stories, it is possible to begin to overcome the sense of alienation and powerlessness which many Americans feel.
Let me conclude by going back to the beginning of my remarks:
I believe both journalism and democracy are in trouble.
The two are synergistic, and therefore it is not a coincidence both are in trouble at the same time. Further, I think there is very little time to set things right. Technology won’t wait and the changes new communications technologies will bring are as deep and as unpredictable and as far reaching as the changes in society brought on by the industrial revolution 150 years ago.
Near the end of his life the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Life is painting a picture not doing a sum.” I believe that the marketing people, who have come to play such an important and destructive role in too many newsrooms, have convinced too many newsmen that life is doing a sum. Civic journalists say it’s time for journalists to do what they do best and that is to paint a picture, a picture that is rich and textured and brilliantly colored. Journalism that makes a difference.
I would be happy to take your questions.