(Read excerpts of this speech in the Fall 1999 issue of Civic Catalyst.)
Keynote speech by Chris Peck
Editor, The Spokesman-Review
Spokane, WA
Pew Center for Civic Journalism Luncheon
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
82nd National Convention, New Orleans
August 6, 1999
Foreword
By Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center for Civic Journalism
Every year, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism invites journalists who are at the cutting edge of newsroom experimentation to speak to journalism educators. Our hope is to trigger new thinking that will help develop fresh and useful training for tomorrow’s journalists and to shine a light on opportunities for new research that could help improve journalism.
This year, we were honored to hear from Chris Peck, editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. Peck has encouraged his newsroom to be a laboratory for new ideas. He has shown a willingness to embrace change and to think about new ways of carrying out old tasks. And many of the ideas born in his newsroom have been cloned at other news organizations.
In 1993, Peck launched the “Pizza Papers,” which gathered groups of people to talk about community issues over pizza – paid for by the paper. The discussion groups then reported back their talks.
The following year, he created the first “interactive editors,” to solicit reader contributions, plan forums and respond to complaints as part of an editorial board renaissance.
In 1996, he helped to launch the Journalism Values Institute, as chair of the Ethics and Values Committee at the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
In 1998, The Spokesman-Review won the Batten Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism as part of a multi-media collaboration that looked at runaway prison costs.
This year, the paper has embarked on an ambitious civic mapping project that seeks to chart how decisions and influences in the lives of young people determine whether they will become productive adults — or wind up in prison.
We are pleased to give his thinking a broader audience and hope that it will help to continue the growing conversations about future challenges and opportunities for the profession.
“Civic Journalism: The Savior of Newspapers in the 21st Century?”
By Chris Peck
Editor, The Spokesman-Review
Spokane, WA
Thank you for that warm introduction. Once I sit down, I hope you won’t look back on this moment as a bit of irrational exuberance expressed for someone who has come here today to prophe-size about how to save the newspaper industry.
History has not been kind to others who put forward such formulas. Jesus was crucified. Here in New Orleans, I don’t want to imagine the fate of running back Ricky Williams if he doesn’t lead the Saints to football glory this NFL season.
Many proponents of civic journalism have been condemned to a hot place by the high priests of traditional newspaper theology in recent years. And I’m not talking about New Orleans in August.
I will never forget the program I moderated at the American Society of Newspaper Editors between New York University Professor Jay Rosen and Len Downie Jr. of The Washington Post. After Jay had given his academic and historic perspective on why, for the good of society, newspapers should be better connected to their communities and help rebuild public life, Downie cleared his throat and thundered something like, “I see no reason for public journalism. I have never voted in an election. I don’t think journalists have any business being part of the communities they cover.”
The applause from the senior editors of America’s top newspapers was loud and long. I’ll be buying Jay dinner for the next 10 years trying to ease the pain of that moment.
That experience stands in stark contrast to my earliest recollection of newspapers and journalism. In 1960, when I was 10 years old, I spent election night of the historic John F. Kennedy-Richard Nixon presidential race in the office of my father’s small-town daily in Riverton, Wyoming.
As results clattered across The Associated Press teletype, citizens of the little town trickled into the front office. Republicans and Democrats, young and old, they came down to the paper to mingle, talk politics, be seen on election night. For the record, Wyoming’s three electoral votes pushed Kennedy over the top.
My recollections of those times remind me that in this country many successful newspapers have long embraced the idea that they are entwined and interdependent with the communities they serve and do not simply strive to be distant, independent and apart.
Next week, I’m going to Wyoming to celebrate my father’s 50th year as a small-town publisher. Through all those years, readers expected that little hometown paper to be a major player in every civic event, every development initiative, every discussion about what was best, or worst, for the town. Sometimes, people grew exasperated with my father for stories that challenged or chastised. These moments were largely accepted, I believe, because the paper was embraced as a kind of candid friend or cousin in the family.
Now, it would be both na•ve and unfair for me to suggest that the small-town model of newspapering I have described is the only successful model. Many newspapers have made a lot of money in recent years by following prosperity to the suburbs and building around a post-Watergate model of American newspapering staffed by detached, often cynical reporters. The Washington Post Co. is worth billions of dollars today and Len Downie’s voting record hasn’t stopped the Post from regularly winning Pulitzer prizes and being listed among the top five newspapers in this country.
So, any prophecy about the future of the Post, or many of the other 1,500 or so profitable dailies in America today surely must be taken with a saltshaker of skepticism.
Indeed, this is one of civic journalism’s major challenges: Why listen to calls for change when things are going so well? This year, newspapers of 20,000 circulation and up will earn a profit of at least 20 percent, and often much more. As John Cotter notes in his book, Leading Change, “Complacency is the most powerful barrier to change.”
Well, get out the kindling because, at the risk of being burned at the stake, I’m going to spend the next few minutes pointing out three clouds on the horizon of newspapers that could rain hard on this parade of success. Then, I hope to make the case that much of what newspapers have learned in a decade of experiments with civic journalism offers a pathway to survival and renewed prosperity in the 21st Century.
Like any good post-Watergate reporter, let me first begin by sounding the alarm.
Three, dark clouds are building on the horizon of American newspapers today. Any or all could blow up into the kind of social tornado that wreaks havoc on landscapes that only days before looked prosperous, safe, and whole.
Dark Cloud # 1
The Internet, and how this technology may change everything about information gathering and dissemination, including the role of newspapers.
The big picture of Internet growth and newspaper readership decline is well known and not pretty:
Twenty-five years ago, 70 percent of adults read a newspaper regularly. Today, 51 percent read the paper regularly, which means they read it yesterday.
Five years ago, not 1 in 10 American households had access to the Internet or ever went online. Today, over 50 percent of Americans have access to the Internet and the number of people who sign on regularly, as in the last 7 days, is growing at a rate of 100 percent a year.
As of August 1999, about 56 million Americans will read a newspaper. About 48 million will sign onto the Internet.
So, many bright newspaper executives asked: Why not put newspapers online and solve this problem? That has happened. A majority of American newspapers now are online. Is everybody happy? No.
Online newspapers are, for the most part, money drains and staff intensive. A few large newspapers, most prominently The Wall Street Journal, have grown their sites into break-even or slightly profitable enterprises. But get most other newspaper executives at the bar, alone and with a couple of beers under their belts, and the truth will come out. Very, very few newspapers have cracked the nut on how to integrate their web sites into the larger newspaper operations and make money.
The fact that online newspaper operations are unprofitable, however, is not the most significant problem online newspapers face. Newspapers could be a bit less profitable and put more money into online efforts and other research and development projects, and the world wouldn’t end. The first decade of the new century probably is the most important period in 50 years for newspapers to invest more heavily in research and development and the re-tooling of their core competencies.
But the investment and money issues miss a crucial point about what is happening to news and information on the Internet today. The most significant problem newspapers face from online technology is the growing sense among online users that newspapers are marginalized and irrelevant online and aren’t the place to get news or information.
Only one newspaper site, USA Today, ranks in the top 20 of the Media Metrix ranks of online news, information and entertainment sites. The number-one news site is something many of us have never heard of: ZDNet. ZDNet is an online news site of Ziff-Davis, the publishing, media and marketing company with little newspaper history.
MSNBC and Disney also are in the top 10.
Editors like to think newspapers will eventually win a market share online because the online news reports aren’t verifiable and often carry a Matt Drudge-like attitude when it comes to accuracy. Again, the worrisome answer for newspapers today is, “Sorry Charlie.”
The 1999 American Society of Newspaper Editors research on newspaper credibility showed that TV already outranks newspapers in terms of believability for most people. And, more significantly, a survey by Jupiter Communications published online by ZDNet this month shows that 87 percent of online news consumers trust online news as much or more as newspapers or broadcast TV.
Perhaps understandably, many editors and publishers have turned inward to examine their own operations. Many newspaper organizations are putting tremendous effort into examining why they are losing credibility, why they aren’t trusted, why they aren’t read as often as 20 years ago.
These are worthy examinations. It is like examining yourself for cancer. You look for lumps, rough spots, open wounds.
The newspaper industry certainly has its share of trouble spots. You recall the six credibility problem areas identified by the American Society of Newspaper Editor’s 1999 Ethics and Values Committee earlier this year. Readers of newspapers complain about:
Too many factual errors, spelling and grammar mistakes.
A perception that newspapers don’t demonstrate respect for, or knowledge of, their readers and communities.
Bias in the news reports and in the decisions made on what to cover and what not to cover.
Over-coverage of sensational stories.
A vast gap between what newsroom people feel is ethical and right compared to what the public feels is ethical and right.
First-hand accounts of being covered by newspapers and having that coverage be inaccurate, incomplete, and unfair.
All six of these problem areas surely need to be addressed. But the most important message from Chris Urban’s credibility research does not lie in yet one more listing of the problems newspapers must address. The most important revelation from Urban’s study, in my view, is to understand the bigger picture these problems reveal about the relationship newspapers today have with the communities they are supposed to serve.
Again, to use the cancer analogy, I suggest that many newspapers are focused on finding a cure for a crippling illness but are missing the larger message of what it takes to prevent cancer in the first place.
If you have been to your doctor lately he or she has probably told you what it takes to stay healthy. Eat right, don’t smoke and exercise. And, be aware of the environment around you. You shouldn’t inhale the smoke of others and you should pay attention to environmental factors in the workplace and in the food you ingest that likely create circumstances where cancer can get a toehold. What you put in the body, plus exposure to environmental factors, creates the interaction between human cells and outside influences that create cancerous conditions in people.
I would submit that a similar interrelationship between external events and a newspaper’s internal operations has led to the pockets of illness in our industry today.
External forces at work in the communities we serve, combined with the newsroom’s often toxic response to these external forces, have dangerously affected the health of all those who work in those hallowed halls doing God’s and the First Amendment’s work. And that leads to…
DARK CLOUD #2
Community fragmentation and erosion of “the common good.”
Unlike my little Wyoming hometown of 50 years ago, people today don’t come into the newspaper that much anymore. We have guards there. Reporters and editors often live in other towns. The newspaper often is printed miles away and is delivered by adults, not neighbor kids earning money for a bike.
Newspapers wrestle with this disconnection from communities every day. Go talk to a circulation manager and he or she will tell you about the fight just to get the addresses of a fragmented society where families withdraw to enclaves behind walled gates, divided by race, class, income, education, computer literacy and cultural norms.
Remember your history and philosophy lessons for a moment. From the time of the Roman statesman Cicero in 100 BC through the age of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century and on into our time with the likes of Walter Lippman, the idea of a common good has been at the heart of much social and political organization. Democracy, in particular, is an idea that relies on the core principle that the welfare of a majority of citizens carries more weight and support that the welfare of factions or special interests.
And I think it would be safe to say today that the notion of a common good in America is being blown apart by everything from the debate over guns, President Clinton’s private life and The Simpsons TV show.
Ted Glasser, director of Stanford University’s graduate program in journalism, has pulled together an excellent book called The Idea of Public Journalism. In his introduction, Ted talks about what has happened to the idea of a common good and concludes, “It is not realistic today to expect individuals to reach across their social and ideological differences to establish common agendas and to debate rival approaches.”
Instead, Glasser notes, public participation today most often occurs through participation in what he refers to as spericules, a term coined by New York University sociologist Todd Gitlin to describe distinct political groups organized around affinity and interest but not a sense of the common good.
Note to copy desks: Look for this word to appear in an upcoming AP stylebook: spericules.
I fear the continued proliferation of spericules and a multi-tiered conception of what “public life” is will not only lead to further erosion of a sense of common good but will also render impotent many of the inward-focused newspaper efforts to restore credibility.
Sure, it would be better to spell more names right and show a little more respect for the community as the ASNE survey suggests. The far more serious problem confronting newspapers, however, is the nettlesome question of what it will take for fragmented, divided, spericuled communities to find some common ground and agree on some definitions of the common good so that newspapers may continue to maintain their basic business model.
Remember what the business model of a newspaper looks like. A newspaper is conceived as a mass-market bundle of news, information and advertising built on a foundation of common interests, issues and ideas that cross the boundaries of class and race and penetrate all levels of the income tax brackets.
As America becomes both a more ethnically diverse nation and a nation divided between the rich top 20 percent and an increasingly stratified and impoverished 80 percent, the propensity grows for a society to live more fully in our silos and make the job of newspaper editors ever more difficult.
My friend Keith Woods of the Poynter Institute wonders how newspapers will fare in the early 21st century when white America becomes a minority and white male editors of American newspapers are left trying to find a common ground for their readership. It’s a very good question.
Only last week the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released its survey results on the top issues in the public mind and concluded, somewhat wistfully, that no single issue dominates the public’s mind these days. Some people are worried about health care (18 percent), some people are worried about Social Security (14 percent), a few worried about Medicare (11 percent), and others are thinking about gun control, education, and a balanced budget.
Note to the Pew researchers: my 17-year-old daughter and all her friends do have a top issue on their minds — boys!
The point is that most newspapers today are fundamentally out of alignment with the people who live in the specific geographic areas where newspapers circulate. These geographic regions are home to dozens of different publics created by vastly different economic and social relationships that aren’t tied into public institutions like political parties, civic projects or even schools.
The issues of today are linked to personal values, life stages, and class and gender issues. Yet newsrooms, for the most part, are still organized around bricks-and-mortar buildings with men in suits at the helm, because this is the world where most well-educated, well-paid editors live, work and play.
The problem confronting newspapers is more than getting spelling right. It’s about building personal and social relationships with the many publics not organized around traditional public institutions and therefore largely invisible to newspapers. Only as these relationships are strengthened can newspapers then begin to look for opportunities to connect the dots, find overlapping areas of concern, and create a business for the 21st century.
The combination of the rise of Internet and the increasing fragmentation of society into specialized interest groups could be a kind of dry rot that eats away at the keel of the newspaper even as it floats high on waves of prosperity. Remember, the unsinkable Titanic went down in less than three hours.
To put it more succinctly, this is…
DARK CLOUD #3:
The classified problem.
Earlier this year I shared a table with Chris Hendricks, recently named Vice President of New Media for McClatchy Newspapers. We talked at length about the implications to advertising of the Internet and the fragmentation of the public.
Already, Chris says, many high-tech companies won’t advertise in newspapers for help wanted. They want online classifieds only, because these companies want to hire the kind of people who would look for online classifieds and that, in turn, increases the number of ads that appear online only for high-tech jobs.
In many cities, online advertising run by people like Monster Board or AutoNation is taking bite-sized chunks out of non high-tech advertising, including real estate and autos.
At the publisher conventions these days, the talk all centers on the possibility of a sudden shift in basic newspaper economics in the years ahead. All agree the decisive battle to protect the economic foundation of newspapers as they exist today likely will be fought over classified advertising.
In the July/August issue of Brill’s Content, a team of media futurists warns that 40 percent of newspaper revenue and 50 percent of newspaper profit comes from classified advertising and is at risk in the next decade.
Let’s look at what that means. A loss of even 10 percent of classified revenue could cut profits by 5 percent at newspapers. Should the profit margin begin to dim at that rate, the first lights to go dark are often those of vacant positions in the newsroom or other non-revenue producing departments.
So, just as newspapers are struggling to find resources to do Internet business, just as newsrooms are struggling to put more people on the street to connect to increasingly fragmented communities, the economic foundation of newspapers suddenly grows shaky.
In a gloomy assessment of what the next five years could hold for the traditional newspaper advertising base, Brill’s Content warns, “If newspapers lose half of their classified revenue … profit margins will evaporate and scores of papers will close.”
Prayers anyone? Last rites?
Help is on the Way
Not yet. I believe help is on the way for newspapers. It comes in the form of lessons learned from a decade of experimentation in civic journalism over the last decade.
Let me conclude, then, by laying out some strategies that, to me, suggest how the practices of civic journalism can provide an umbrella for newspapers in the stormy days ahead.
First, the threat posed by the Internet.
Andy Grove, chairman of the giant computer chipmaker Intel, told publishers in May, “Nothing sharpens awareness of a situation like the sight of the gallows.” For many newspaper executives, the Internet clearly has sharpened an awareness of the challenges ahead.
When newspapers look clearly at the threats and opportunities posed by the Internet some long, overdue debates about where newspapers should, and shouldn’t, be expending precious resources rather quickly come to a conclusion.
Frankly, TV, the Internet, or some hybrid of the two already owns, or soon will, a portion of the mass media news franchise, and newspapers won’t ever get it back.
In my view, it’s time for newspapers of all sizes to cut the losses and cut back on the newsroom resources devoted to those areas where TV and the Internet have a long-term, strategic edge.
Tomorrow’s editors should get out the red pencil and begin trimming back the newsprint and staff currently devoted to such lost causes as incremental coverage of international news, breaking news that everyone heard about on last night’s TV, national sports that doesn’t involve a local team, weather and Hollywood gossip.
Newspapers can’t win in these news and information categories. So they should cut them back, and fast.
The time, money and intellectual effort spent on wire editors, people column writers and national sports columnists would then be redirected on training and development of civic journalism skills that gather more local news from non-institutional sources and provide local perspective and connections on national and world events.
In other words, newspapers should go on the offensive against the weaknesses of the Internet.
We know the weaknesses pretty well by now. The Internet is very deep, but has trouble connecting issues, ideas and concepts across a local landscape. It’s more like a microscope than radar. It can see the smallest things, but can’t look at the landscape.
Newspapers, the good ones, are very much a community radar system and are upgrading their early warning systems fast. Newspapers that work to truly and deeply stay in touch with the people and geographic communities they serve can detect very early the issues, trends and activities that define and engage a geographic community.
The Internet can’t do this yet. The most popular web sites create virtual images of local communities, but they really don’t have a local feel or much true local knowledge. As David Hiller, senior vice president of development at The Chicago Tribune told The Economist last month, “Local takes a lot of feet on the beat. You can’t do that from Redmond, Washington (Microsoft’s hometown.)”
In the end the newsroom is really there. The Internet really isn’t.
Here then, emerges the unique, relevant value of a newspaper that engages in high-level work with civic journalism. Such a paper will be working hard to, first, better understand the communities it serves and, second, help citizens develop greater ability to make connections and good decisions on matters of community and public life.
This is the mission, the purpose, and the vision of the newspaper. And it can wage a worthy battle with the Internet.
Strengthening the relationship between the newspaper and the community that it serves also will provide newspapers their best defense in coping with Dark Cloud #2, the fragmentation of society and the loss of the common good.
A quick reality check is in order. Let’s acknowledge that many powerful forces in American culture have led to the fragmentation and stratification of communities. Newspapers alone cannot hope to undo racism, rebalance wealth or keep people from moving out of the central city to the suburbs.
But newspapers can, and must, seek partnerships to resist these larger forces. Newspapers must assign many more resources to the work of getting to know the various and distinct publics that now exist. Once they know the hopes and dreams of these segmented audiences, newspapers must retool and realign their content to serve each of these separate publics. This means more niche publications, more targeted sections by class and interest.
And in all of these specialized sections, the newspaper must constantly be on the lookout for themes that cross the bounds of the separated worlds in which we all live and can be used to recreate a sense of the common good.
Admittedly, this is a big job. To rebuild in this way, newsrooms will need some new tools. The tools of civic journalism, particularly those that stress interaction between a newspaper and a particular community segment, offer tremendous potential for repairing fragmented communities and defining a common good.
Now, it’s important, at this tender point in the relationship between newspapers and communities, to not try to fix everything all at once with civic journalism. You still need good writing, accuracy, emotion, story telling.
Early proponents of civic journalism proclaimed that all of democracy and all of civic life could be repaired with the tools of this new approach. That’s overselling the promise and missing the first steps that need to be taken. I say, newspapers should fix the potholes in the neighborhood first.
Start with what I characterize as the ‘small c’ civic journalism that brings interactivity and connection with community to every section of the paper where different readers can be found.
Newspapers need to do the little things that mean a lot. Things like good neighbor contests that celebrate community building one neighborhood at a time. Things like sponsoring backyard forums to get people talking about how to solve very local problems.
This ‘small c’ civic journalism strategy allows resources to be spread throughout different sections of a newspaper that reach different segments of our fragmented communities. And, they quickly engage a wide swath of the newsroom in this work.
Sports should have a civic-journalism component, and the TV page and the teen page. The tools of civic journalism, including forums, small group meetings that frame coverage, interactive features, directed letters to the editor, listening posts, and other methods can connect the newspaper to its various audiences and quickly engage a wide swath of the newsroom in the work.
By contrast, the ‘Big C’ civic journalism projects built around elections or politics miss the fact that most people aren’t voting, aren’t involved in politics and are building their civic lives around things like church, fly fishing or Beanie Babies.
Saving democracy and improving citizenship can, and will, come later. Right now, civic journalism needs to be focused on reconnecting readers — at-risk readers, non-readers and the next generation of potential readers — to the newspaper. In short, civic journalism must move from being an idea of the elite, to the reality of a community-based newspaper that offers visible access points for the people living on their own islands.
This shift will take a new kind of journalist, with some different training and some revised philosophical foundations and assumptions. That’s where higher education comes in. To quote Garth Brooks, educators have got to convince their new, aspiring crop of students to go have friends in low places.
Journalism schools need to train the next generation of journalists how to run focus groups, how to do basic civic mapping, and how to frame stories so that they connect the dots on key issues so that fragmented elements of the public can see where others are coming from. The next generation of newsroom staffers need not just computer-assisted reporting but community-based reporting in neighborhoods and cultural awareness that gives them the confidence and ability to reach out to diverse communities.
Newspaper editors, particularly those at the bottom-line oriented, group-owned papers, will need quick and effective training in these new practices as well. I know that Jan Schaffer is thinking of something like the Institute for Journalism and Democracy as a next project for the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. This institute could be a training and testing ground for editors in all departments who want to learn new techniques and approaches for strengthening the newspaper’s ties to the very separated and different communities that read, or could read, a newspaper.
This is a tremendous idea. I think it is likely that if an Institute for Journalism and Democracy were established, every newspaper in America would, in the next five years, send an editor to learn practical applications of civic journalism. Things like how to build a public agenda page, how to direct a staff to meet with stakeholders in a story prior to reporting, how to organize civic mapping to gain much quicker and deeper access to sources in a community that often go unnoticed because the Rolodexes are out of date.
To exploit the weaknesses of the immature Internet and to defend against further erosion of a common community, the internal structure of newspapers must radically change.
Entirely new kinds of editors must be imagined and then empowered.
These are public editors, or civic editors or interactive editors. They are editors whose job it will be to align newsroom resources so staffers genuinely connect with the community. These editors will make sure reporters know how to listen to community voices, how to fashion news that addresses the concerns and cares of community segments across generations, rich to poor, Christian conservative to non-believers.
New kinds of beat assignments must be conceived.
Newsrooms must, in my view, rapidly move away from traditional politics and institutions and toward community-affiliated groups that don’t have a brick-and-mortar headquarters but are powerful greenhouses for cultivating civic life:
A soccer mom beat, where reporters sought out the views and politics of the families on the sidelines.
A faith and values beat, where a reporter went to church to hear what such congregations as the evangelical Christians and Metropolitan Community churches for gays and lesbians were hearing and saying.
An unplug-your-TV beat that talked about the messages on TV and in the movies.
When an interactive or civic editor detects a cause in a community that resonates across social, class and racial lines, the paper would build a bridge, one story at a time, between the separated publics. Story by story, the newspaper would knit together a fractured community and repair the idea of the common good.
We would still be, and always will be, journalists. We would seek truth. We would shine light in dark places. We would be accurate, fair and balanced.
But we would live in the world of our readers, and fellow citizens, and not in a world of our own.
And this, in the end, is how newspapers can hope to cope with Dark Cloud #3.
If classified advertising is lost, the economic assumptions about how newspapers work must change. A third stream of revenue and a new economic proposition must be developed. Down will come the wall between news and editorial because, just like when the wall fell in Berlin, one side could no longer support the weight. The newsroom, in effect, will be left to fend for itself.
And to survive, the editorial department should quickly erect a new wall. This one would encircle the newsroom, the advertising department, and the local geographic communities served by newspapers.
The wall will be designed to keep the community and the newspaper safe from intruders and interlopers.
Inside the wall are editorial, advertising, circulation and the community of readers who share information, share goals, share a common belief that every community needs good journalists to keep democracy alive.
Imagine the day when readers of newspapers actually became the owners. I believe this could be the long-sought-after ‘third stream’ of revenue.
I can envision a relationship between a newspaper and its geographic community where readers buy a share of the community’s journalistic resources. With this investment, not unlike an assessment for schools, comes the privilege and responsibility of helping shape and direct where those resources should spend time.
Under this stakeholder model, every city and town truly would have “their newspaper” or mypaper.com.
Readers and citizens would be a kind of board of directors that would, from a distance, have a voice in where the spotlight of journalism should next be shone, including investigative reporting.
Editors would be working for this board of directors and serve at the pleasure much as school superintendents and city managers do.
If traditional advertising disappeared, I believe community ownership of a newspaper could protect and retain the invaluable journalist skills that reside in every newsroom in every city of America and that are needed in every locale.
Civic journalism with a ‘small c’ would routinely keep open lines of communication and interactivity with readers of all ages and interests from sports, to cars, to fashion.
Civic journalism with a ‘large C’ would tackle major community issues that were brought forward by the stakeholders who owned part of the newspaper.
The community-based newspaper would become a brand name on other community services. The newspaper would manage community knowledge like anniversaries, weddings, deaths, promotions, and achievements. If the community-owned newspaper published a series on child abuse and neglect, every stakeholder/subscriber would receive a guide for parents and neighbors on how to recognize and help kids in trouble.
Of course, the Internet would be part of this model. Newspaper Internet sites should be re-crafted and used vigorously to track, chat and tie together the local, geographically based online communities. Every print subscriber should get free Internet access to the newspaper’s web site. Non-subscribers should have to pay.
When you subscribed to the newspaper and became a stakeholder in it, you also got the right to be part of the community history with your family’s key moments included in the paper, perhaps in an online edition that could be archived. You also would have online access to updated community information on everything from tickets to local concerts, summaries of real estate prices, test results from area schools, advice on cooking, a local history guide and updates on city life.
For all of this to happen, the organization within the newsroom, and the orientation of reporters and editors would have to be far different than it is today. It would be a community-based organization with journalists as the most important assets. I don’t know if this will work. But I believe continued experimentation and application of civic journalism offers newspapers in America a survival strategy for the 21st century.
In the next decade, I think it’s clear the newspaper industry will face more than just 40 days and 40 nights of rain.
My hope today is that I have given you an idea of how we might build an ark, or at least an umbrella, to give this essential, valuable concept known as a newspaper some shelter from the coming storm.
Thank you.