The Role of Newspapers in Building Citizenship

Keynote Remarks by:

Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center for Civic Journalism

5th Brazilian Newspaper Congress
São Paulo, Brazil
September 13, 2004

Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to share some of the lessons learned on the forefront of the journalism reform movement in the United States. It is a movement that has sought to ensure that the press better fulfills its mission of helping government go well and helping public life go well.

This is my first visit to your country. And I know that you are confronting difficult challenges with a new proposal to put government controls over journalists and the practice of journalism. I hope for the best outcome for you.

This development in your country occurs even as the profession of journalism itself is wrestling with many other challenges, including profit pressures, the rise of new information technologies, and, frankly, some bad journalism habits that have left our readers distrustful, at times, of our efforts.

The rise of new information technologies are prompting new questions, such as:

• “Who is a journalist?”
• “What is journalism?

As access to online publishing platforms becomes more available, ordinary citizens are starting to participate in gathering and delivering news. In some cases they are watchdogging news organizations and reporting stories we got wrong. In other cases, they are reporting the news before journalists discover it. And they are also focusing on hyper-local community news that most newspapers don’t have the resources to cover. So, we must also figure out ways to embrace new ideas, such as participatory journalism and citizens journalists, while holding onto old ideals. And I don’t know how a government could begin to control that.

Meanwhile, bad journalism habits have given rise to such initiatives as civic journalism. Civic journalism aims to help return journalism to its core mission — to give people the news and information they need to do their jobs as citizens.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who was a keen observer of American life, said some 170 years ago: “You can’t have real newspapers without democracy, and you can’t have democracy without newspapers.”

A level of interdependence is a defining part of our journalistic mission. And it is one of the reasons newspapers in the U.S. and elsewhere are often given special constitutional protection.

I’ve been asked to speak to you today about civic journalism and give you some ideas of how to practice it. Civic journalism has focused not only on some problems of journalism, but also possible solutions.

It has sought to:

• Restore good journalistic habits.
• Build connections with readers.
• Get better stories.
• Build better citizens.

It’s no longer enough for journalists themselves to think they are doing a good job. Readers have to agree that a free press plays an essential role in our democratic society for journalists to merit their special place.

Civic journalists are motivated by deep concerns about contemporary journalism. Media surveys tell us that the public believes that the lines between reporting and commentary have become blurred; the lines between entertainment and news have become blurred. Journalists seem to be unable to “get it right.” The news media are spending more time serving elites than ordinary citizens. People tell pollsters that the media is out of touch with the public. They also say that journalism is motivated by commercial interests, which are driving sensational coverage.

Jim Lehrer, anchor of the respected NewsHour on U.S. public television, commented a few years ago: “Journalism, as practiced by some, has become something akin to professional wrestling — something to watch rather than believe.” He may have a point.

It doesn’t help that reporters have developed some bad habits. We:

• Act rushed
• Hover with our notebooks
• Ask loaded questions
• Expect very fast answers to our questions
• Write down only the quick quote – and stop listening
• Show up only when there are problems
• Sometimes, engage in corrupt behavior.

In 1993, a non-profit foundation in the United States, The Pew Charitable Trusts, entered the picture. But the Pew Trusts was not concerned about journalism; its fortunes were made in the oil business. Rather Pew was concerned about civic engagement. The foundation was worried people were not voting, not volunteering and not participating in civic life.

The Trusts feared that democracy was broken. And they wondered, in part, if it was because journalism was broken, too.

Among the questions civic journalists asked: Were we creating a nation of spectators watching a daily civic freak show instead of a nation of citizen participants engaged in the issues and the choices that must be made in a self-governing society?

Civic journalists wanted to see if it was possible to:

• Retain the media’s watchdog role, spotlighting corruption and injustices.
• Abandon the attack dog role that seemed to be just creating a lot of noise in a very noisy media environment.
• Add the duties of a guide dog – we say “seeing-eye dog” — helping people figure out what kind of roles they could play in a democracy beyond simply casting a ballot.

In other words, could you hold citizens accountable for doing their jobs as citizens, much as you would hold public officials accountable for their actions in public office?

It is not surprising that civic journalism started in the early 1990’s, experimenting with new kinds of election coverage. Civic journalists sought to:

• Avoid reporting on horse-race polls – who’s ahead, who’s behind? Unfortunately, this coverage is out of control in the current U.S. presidential campaign, and I would suggest that it often leaves voters thinking: If we know who’s going to win, why bother to vote?
• Increase issues-based election coverage – focusing on voter issues, not the issues that candidates tout to move niche constituencies –such as abortion control, or gun control, or gay marriage in the United States.
• Frame election stories as hiring decisions: Who do we want to hire to run our government? And what kinds of information do voters need to make that decision?

The Pew Center for Civic Journalism

The Pew Trusts in 1993 created the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, which I ran. And we asked a simple question: If journalists did their jobs differently, would citizens do their jobs differently?

The short answer is “yes.”

We funded 120 pilot projects in newsrooms to see if there could be different models of journalism that still adhered to core values — accuracy, objectivity, independence, fairness — but also actively engaged citizens.

We also:

• Tracked a total of 650 projects
• Trained more than 4,000 journalists
• Produced 65 training videos and publications
• Awarded 30 prizes for excellence in civic journalism.

Now, we are moving civic journalism into the digital arena through such efforts as news exercises, tax calculators, clickable maps, or budget calculators, to help people better understand important public issues.

You can read about this activity at www.civicjournalism.org and www.j-lab.org.

Civic Journalism

Civic journalism is now a broad label put on efforts by editors to try to do their jobs as journalists in ways that help to overcome people’s sense of powerless and alienation.

Here’s a definition: The goal is to produce news that citizens need to be educated about issues and current events, to make civic decisions, to engage in civic dialogue and action — and generally to exercise their responsibilities in a democracy.

Civic journalists believe that it is possible to create news coverage that motivates people to think, and even to act, and not simply entice them to watch, ogle or stare. And, in fact, they believe it’s their responsibility to do so.

I caution, however, that civic journalists don’t want to tell readers and viewers WHAT to think or HOW to act. The journalists are simply creating a neutral zone of empowerment, arming citizens — with information and sometimes methods — to shoulder some responsibility, or offer some imagination or solutions for fixing a problem.

Think of a soccer analogy: You could cover the game from the press box, high above the field, neutral and very detached from the action. Or you could cover it as though you were part of the game – and I would suggest that the media is very much part of the game – much like a referee. You are closer to the field – still neutral about who wins or loses – but you’re job is to ensure that the rules are kept and the game is played fairly. Civic journalists see their role as closer to the referee than to the detached sports reporter.

The civic journalism toolbox consists of:

• New definitions of “News”
• New sources of News
• New Interactions with Readers
• A Mental Check List of Questions

What is “News”?

One way that civic journalists try to do different journalism is to seek new definitions of news. What does that mean?

Let’s look at the research. It turns out that journalists have dramatically changed the definition of “news” over the last 25 years, mostly in response to market forces Let me share some findings from a 1997 content analysis. I’m afraid the trends have worsened since then:

• One in three front-page stories in the U.S. in 1977 used to be about government. By 1997, it was one in five — a drop of 38 percent.
• The number of front-page stories about celebrities or entertainment has skyrocketed to one in every 14 stories. It used to be one out of every 50 in 1977.
• Scandal coverage has also tripled. Front-page scandal stories have increased to one in eight — from one in 25 in 1977.
• Violent crime coverage has grown far out of proportion to actual levels of crime. For example, U.S. murders declined by 20 percent from 1993-96, yet network television coverage of murders increased in that time by 721 percent over the previous three years.

Civic Journalism seeks to expand these definitions of news so that they better serve citizens. Among their techniques, they seek to:

• Cover consensus as well as conflict.
• Include solutions and success stories.
• Abandon scorecard journalism. Citizens are not keeping score.
• Make sure we not only get the story right, but that we also get the right story.

Most journalists define news as conflict: Incumbent vs. challenger, winner vs. loser, pro vs. con, good vs. bad.

In the U.S., if you send a reporter out to cover a meeting in which everyone agrees on something, they are likely to come back and tell their editor, “Nothing happened.” There’s no story. Journalists find it difficult to cover consensus even when we’re agreeing on major changes in our communities. In fact, I would suggest to you that newspapers don’t value consensus; we value conflict. In fact, we want conflict.

Civic journalists try to probe where people agree, as well as where they disagree. They report success stories as well as failures. And they examine solutions that have worked elsewhere and may be copied in their own communities.

Focus on Solutions

Let’s look at solutions reporting. The Savannah Morning News, for instance, involved its community in trying to figure out how to aid its failing schools, which were among the worst in the country. The newspaper didn’t think it would be very useful to, once again, write stories about poor student test scores, and the number of students who dropped out of school, and then have parents blame the schools and have schools blame the government for lack of funding.

Instead:

• The newspaper convened a task force of citizens. The task force talked to experts, school officials, parents, students.
• Citizens and reporters visited model programs around the United States.
• Citizens contributed articles to the newspaper about what they saw that might work in their town.
• The group came up with an action plan, which the newspaper covered.
• After the journalism project ended, the citizens stayed together and created a non-profit foundation to raise money to improve the schools.

What made this civic journalism? The newspaper:

• Asked for input and ideas from ordinary people
• Demonstrated that it valued the everyday knowledge of people who have children in the schools, of employers who hire graduates, and of the students themselves.
• Developed entry points – a task force — for people to brainstorm how to make things better.
• Examined solutions that could apply to the problem.
• Built what we call “civic capacity.” Citizens took ownership of the problem and continued to work on it.

Rethinking Journalism Habits

Civic journalists observed that sometimes our journalistic rules actually get in the way of our stories having impact.

For example, in California, The Orange County Register tried a new narrative technique to tell the story of Motel Children — achingly poor kids living in residential motels literally across the street from Disneyland. The story was all told in dialogue, using only the childrens’ voices.

No experts were quoted. The newspaper did not solicit a response from public officials. There was none of the usual “he said/she said” coverage. The children were not a sympathetic lead on the story, they were the story – their words and photos. This didn’t conform to the usual journalistic rules. Was this unethical?

The readers didn’t complain. The response was overwhelming: 1,100 people called the paper to offer support and donate $200,000, 50 tons of food, 8,000 toys, and thousands of volunteer hours. The county directed $1 million to a housing program to get families out of motels. A nonprofit agency launched a $5 million campaign to treat drug abuse in motel families.

The reporter said afterwards that what amazed her was how everyone was working together towards a solution. “A similar story, told in a conventional way, would have put government agencies on the defensive. But because of the writing approach, no one felt like they were being blamed.

So instead of wasting energy defending themselves, they’ve “hit the street” to fix the problem, she said.

Redefining Balance

Let’s talk about redefining balance. Journalists report two sides of a story and say it’s fair and balanced. Civic journalists suggest that is not balanced coverage — it’s bipolar. Moreover, it leads to what I call “scorecard journalism,” where the journalists spend their time keeping score. Who’s up or down today? The president or congress? The school superintendent or the teachers union? In the U.S., is it the Democrats or the Republicans? The workers party or the liberals or the conservatives?

The problem is, our readers don’t really care about the score. And they often don’t see their concerns reflected in any of the extreme positions.

Balance is in the middle not at the extremes. Civic journalists try to ensure that all the people affected by the issue — all the stakeholders — have a voice in the story, not just the proponents of the most opposing viewpoints who send us their press releases. Instead of reporting two sides of a story, they may report four or eight sides.

And in the process, journalists make some discoveries. For instance, they may discover that the issue being argued about isn’t the real issue at all.

A case in point involved coverage of a vote on building a light rail system from Norfolk, Virginia, to the resort community of Virginia Beach. The newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot, reported on the usual arguments against building the system, which revolved around the high cost, tax subsidies, and triggering too much growth. The reporter, however, was a civic journalist. Through careful listening, he caught a subtext in the arguments that sounded almost like a coded appeal to those who fear blacks.

After more interviewing, he wrote a very courageous story. It wasn’t a transportation story; it was a race relations story. He reported that opponents of building the rail system really didn’t want black people from Norfolk having an easy way to get to Virginia Beach.

Internal Conflict

Do you remember the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal several years ago? It was always covered as conflict between people: Clinton vs. the prosecutor, Ken Starr, Republicans vs. Democrats.

Civic journalists suggest it might have been more meaningfully covered as a conflict in values: Do we value an effective leader over marital fidelity or truthfulness? Polls kept showing that Clinton continued to have a fairly high approval rating. Readers were telling journalists they didn’t care about the conflict between the people — they weren’t keeping score. The journalists were.

But the people struggled mightily — internally and in the polls — with prioritizing what leadership traits they valued in their president even as they disapproved of his personal conduct. A lot of Washington journalists never understood that – they though the poll respondents were stupid — and never reported that story.

Developing New Sources of News

Civic journalists have developed an important new technique for developing new sources of news in local communities. It’s called civic mapping.

It involves examining the newspaper’s pre-conceived ideas about an issue or an area, then testing those stereotypes with reporter legwork.

The steps to civic mapping involve:

• Identifying the newsroom’s pre-conceived ideas about an issue or an area.
• Listing community people who can introduce journalists to the “go-to” people in the community. (It’s funny, but politicians often know who these people are; journalists seldom do.)
  • Look for the community “catalysts.” These are “unofficial experts.” They get things done, but don’t necessary have a fancy title.
  • Look for people who are “connectors.” These are people who belong to several community institutions – they may coach student soccer teams, be active in schools, attend church. Think of them as “civic bumblebees.” They pollinate a lot of different community groups and are very well informed about what’s going on in their area.
• Have open-ended conversations with them, not interviews.
• Test your newsroom stereotypes with them. Ask them about their concerns. And listen to how they frame the issues.
• Ask them to define the terms they use.What does “crime” mean to them? What do “good schools” mean? Crime to a journalist might be a felony. Good schools to a newspaper might be high test scores. But that may not be how the community defines them.

We need to capture the knowledge of these people and add them to our reporter phone books. And we need to understand their concerns to do good journalism.

Once we make connections and demonstrate that we are listening to their concerns, they will call us with news and we will get stories first. And when we are confronted with a bill of law that might threaten the newspaper’s connection with its readers, those readers will be our allies.

You can learn more about civic mapping in our “A Journalist’s Toolbox” set of videos and in our “Tapping Civic Life” workbook, at www.civicjournalism.org.

New Interactions with Readers

Civic journalism seeks to create two-way conversations with readers not a one-way pipeline of information.

These conversations usually involve some kind of interaction, which can happen in the news pages, on the air, in cyberspace, and sometimes in real space — at forums, focus groups or town hall meetings.

One of the most successful civic journalism projects of all time was The Charlotte Observer’s “Taking Back our Neighborhoods” series.

It looked at violent crime in 10 urban areas. It used all the civic journalism tools. It started with computer-assisted data crunching and a poll, but quickly moved to neighborhood listening sessions, citizen advisory groups and town hall meetings. The idea was to figure out how people living in those 10 neighborhoods defined the problem of crime – not just how the police, or the mayor or some criminal justice expert described it. It included:

• TV and radio partners.
• Success stories about neighborhoods that had tackled their crime problem balanced the stories about the crime-ridden, drug-plagued pockets of the city.
• Entry points such as neighborhood meetings and town halls for people to get involved.
• A “needs” lists of very specific things people in these neighborhoods said they needed – everything from baseball bats to a new recreation center. And they published a phone number to call.

More than 1,200 readers did call because the paper made it easy for them to see what they could do. The paper won a lot of journalism awards.

But, as important, 10 years later, people in those neighborhoods still credit that project with incredible transformations. Those neighborhoods don’t look the same, crime is down, new neighborhood leaders have emerged, the city came in and closed drug houses and put in new street lights and other improvements. Community centers have been built. And the people thanked the newspaper, The Charlotte Observer, for that.

The newspaper did not tell people what to do. It just published a menu of options and the citizens took it from there. In the civic journalism world, we call this building civic capacity.

What We Know

From independent, academic research, this is what we know about civic journalism.

• It triggers civic behavior – from voting to volunteering. from attending a town meeting or joining an action team, civic journalism got people involved because it gave them a road map for how they could get involved — if they wanted to. And they usually did.
• It builds knowledge. People who participated in civic journalism projects were measurably smarter about the issues than people who did not participate.
• It builds credibility and connections to the community. People trusted the news organizations more after a civic journalism project.
• Citizens “get” it – and like it.
• It builds the capacity of the community to address problems.
• It builds the capacity of news organizations to cover new kinds of stories – what I call “master narratives.”

Covering the Silences

Journalists do a pretty good job of covering the noise, but sometimes all we get is more noise. Civic journalism seeks also to cover the silences in our communities – especially those silences that make people squirm.

These are stories that don’t “break,” they seep and ooze and sometimes get overlooked in a newspaper’s rush to daily deadlines. These are the stories that connect the dots on individual happenings. They provide the best opportunities for newspapers to add value – instead of adding more noise.

The San Francisco Examiner’s “New City” project reported on the impact of entirely new immigrants in the city’s neighborhoods – and it tracked their impact on new restaurants, the arts scene, sports, schools, even the new music being played in the clubs.

The Savannah Morning News’ “Aging Matters” series told a master narrative of how an influx of senior citizens was affecting not only housing and health care, but was also changing the nature of charitable giving and and the pool of candidates enerated new candidates to run for public office.

And in Portland, Maine, The Press Herald’s powerful series “Deadliest Drug: Maine’s Addiction to Alcohol,” broke the silences about the devastating cost of alcohol addiction by reporting the number of traffic fatalities, house fires, abused children, foster children and emergency room visits.

All involved interactions with citizens, developing new sources and a lot more explanatory – instead of conflict – reporting. Maine’s alcohol series prompted more than 70 towns to convene more than 2,000 people to come up with solutions.

Civic Journalism Mental Checklist

If you want to practice civic journalism, here’s a checklist of questions to help guide your coverage.

• How do you position people in your stories?
  • As pieces of furniture that you can move around to make good copy?
  • Or as citizens capable of action?
• Do you stop at only raising awareness of an issue?
  • Can you also invite ideas, input?
  • Can you offer ways that people can do something with your information if they want to?
• Have you captured all the stakeholders?
  • Do you report more than just two sides of a story?
  • Do the arguments for and against get you to the real story?
  • Do you report internal as well as external conflict?
• Do you help people see possible choices – and the consequences of those choices?
  • Do you examine conflicting values?
  • Do you advance a discussion of solutions?
  • Do you report what has worked elsewhere?
  • Do you invite community brainstorming?
• Do you invite participation, interaction?
  • How can people respond?
  • Are there entry points for input?

Building Connections

In closing, I want to suggest that civic journalism taught us that we need to think more about connections and possibly less about craftsmanship. And I believe the word “connections” has a lot to do with the future of journalism.

In a 2001 Pew Center did a poll of newspaper editors, 90 percent said the future of newspapers depended on more interactivity with readers; 73 percent said they want more interactivity.

What civic journalism has shown us is that it’s more about the attachments we build with our readers — the connections, the entry points, the interactions, the participation. Those attachments build relationships, and the relationships with the news organizations are what make people committed readers.

These connections will ultimately help us deliver less noise – and more intelligent interaction.

Thank you very much.