Last spring, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch invited readers to join in serious conversations about important public issues in a Sunday section that includes background on an issue and opportunities to join a discussion. In the weeks since its debut, readers have responded with phone calls, letters and e-mail expressing their interest. Now, the newspaper is working with a local television station to produce a weekly public affairs broadcast based on the feature.
“Imagine St. Louis,” the Post-Dispatch’s redesign of its Sunday news analysis section, was launched April 11.
“We hope this new section will help all of metropolitan St. Louis engage in serious discussion of our most pressing priorities,” said editor Cole Campbell in a signed column. “We hope these will become continuing conversations because what you say will affect how we explore each issue. Over time, we hope all this talk and news coverage will set the stage for action.”
It is a new way for the Post-Dispatch to reach out to readers. But it is an approach Campbell has pioneered, creating similar features at The Virginian Pilot before moving to St. Louis in 1997.
“Imagine St. Louis” topics have covered plans for a new bridge over the Mississippi, the area’s arts community, immigration, the use of tax money to finance the construction of a new baseball stadium and access to health care.
The April 11 section focused on literacy and included a number of features that section editor Robert W. Duffy says will be present in every “Imagine St. Louis.”
A mainbar at the top of the page defined the problem and its scope. Below was a feature about one man’s struggle to learn to read. Down the right-hand side, a column called “Conversations” suggested ways readers could respond to the information. The Post-Dispatch phone and fax numbers, e-mail and mailing addresses were top-most. Reader comments and letters followed, usually addressing the previous week’s topic.
The “Conversations” column also announced radio and TV call-in talk shows focusing on literacy and two St. Louis area organizations hosting speakers on the subject. Duffy helped arrange for the speakers and worked with the broadcasters to schedule shows on the topic. He says local stations are attracted by the cross-promotion the section offers.
Inside, the information was broken down into bar graphs and pie charts and what Duffy calls the “issues map.” The “map” showed how four key questions about literacy might be answered from four different perspectives. For instance, people answered the question “What should be done” about illiteracy quite differently, depending on whether they believe the power to read is a personal responsibility, a school obligation, a societal duty or simply beyond the ability of some to acquire.
“This,” says Duffy, “is where actual light bulbs came on for people.” He says readers confessed they’d never looked at the issue from different perspectives before and actually came away with a better understanding of other viewpoints.
The inside pages also included a bibliography of where to get more information, a list of decisionmakers and policy leaders, labeled “Who Calls the Shots,” and a directory of agencies “to get or give help.”
The Literacy Council of Greater St. Louis, which was listed, says it received a “huge increase” in calls after the section ran, some seeking help but even more offering to volunteer.
The Council’s education coordinator Tammy Bigler says the response, at times 10 calls a day, surprised her. “We didn’t expect it to move people as it did,” says Bigler. “I figured it would strike an interest but I certainly didn’t expect all the calls we’ve gotten.”
The Council’s executive director Michael Guynn says the figures — which suggested that about a third of St. Louis adults were functionally illiterate — “kind of shocked people.” The section has stimulated what he called “water-cooler type conversation.”
“If there is such a thing as interactive journalism,” says Guynn, “that’s what this is; something you can actually use other than for wrapping fish.”
Donna Burke, director of Parkway Area Adult Basic Education, another service provider, says she especially enjoyed the letters that appeared the following week. She even quoted from them for a proposal she was writing. “I think it’s just the kind of mindset we need in St. Louis to open ourselves up to how we can work together as a community,” she says.
That is just the sort of reaction Post-Dispatch editors were hoping for in designing the section, says Duffy. “This region is so fragmented,” he says, “unless some strong institution comes to the fore to talk to people, to find common cause, acknowledge a common destiny and make real strong structural improvements in the region, we’ll be in trouble in the next century.”
Executives at St. Louis television station KMOV-TV, the CBS affiliate, feel the same way. Editor Cole Campbell had talked with them before the section was launched and they read it with an eye toward expanding a partnership that has included the station’s use of reporters from the Post -Dispatch’s Washington Bureau and the newspaper’s use of weather forecasts from KMOV’s meteorologist.
Several weeks later they agreed to cooperate on a weekly, half hour, public affairs broadcast to launch September 26. KMOV Executive News Director Steve Hammel believes it will be a “perfect fit. We looked at what the paper was doing and it was good for the community. It will allow us to take a look at one issue in depth and deal with that issue in TV terms.”
The program, to air at 10:30 am Sunday mornings, will focus on the topic the Post-Dispatch is covering that week. The newspaper reporter who writes the Sunday section will also co-anchor the program along with its regular KMOV host. The broadcast, to be pre-taped Wednesday evenings, will feature not only experts but also citizens whose lives are effected. Each program will begin with a background report on that week’s issue and may eventually incorporate telephone and e-mail responses from viewers.
Duffy says reporters, while nervous about appearing on television, “love” the concept of having a public affairs broadcast centered on their work. If they have reservations about appearing before TV cameras, he reminds them that they don’t have to give a speech. “You know what you’re talking about. It’s your beat,” he says.
Hammel says the challenge will be to make a good concept work for television. If successful, he believes the broadcast can make the impact of “Imagine St. Louis” even greater. The first broadcast will be about creating jobs to sustain the regional economy in the 21st Century. “That’s a good example of why it should work,” Hammel said. It deals with “issues that impact people’s lives, possibly providing solutions for them.”
Duffy thinks it’s natural for the Post-Dispatch to play the role of creating opportunities for dialogue. “This fulfills in rich and glorious detail Joseph Pulitzer’s call to ‘never be satisfied with merely printing the news.'”
There is still some staff skepticism about “Imagine St. Louis,” acknowledges Duffy. But, he says, there are also converts. “This is a great showplace for reporters’ work,” he says, “a good place to show their authority on their beat.
“There are a number of ways to shine a light in a dark corner and this is one of them. It’s very exciting and it’s enriching for the community. The people responding to this feel like there’s finally a way to have a great big civic conversation.”