By Pat Ford
Pew Center Staff Writer
They stand out like butterflies on the drab gray streets of St. Paul – the colorful, head-to-toe scarves worn by Somali women who have immigrated to the Minnesota capital over the last few years. But in the days following Sept. 11, the women vanished.
Amid the flow of national and international stories, it might have been easy to overlook this sudden absence. But reporters and editors at the St. Paul Pioneer Press – attuned to community concerns through years of civic journalism – not only noticed, they worked to bring these women back to civic life.
Reporter Hannah Allam, herself Muslim, found the women had virtually gone into hiding after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. In a front-page article, “Grappling with Backlash,” Allam described how the women feared their scarves made them targets for hostility. So they were either doffing their scarves – unthinkable to many Muslim women – or waiting in their homes until they felt safe again.
“In terms of pure, basic public journalism, we gave them back a voice,” said Kate Parry, senior editor for special projects. “[Hannah] did a magnificent job of finding them and letting them tell the story of how difficult this was.”
Allam’s story is just one example of how news organizations across the country are finding ways to engage their communities in events that are at once global in scope and intensely local in their repercussions. Many newsrooms report they have been able to enhance their coverage of the war on terrorism by applying the tools and reflexes they’ve developed through civic journalism projects.
Working nonofficial sources, holding community forums, organizing reporters into teams for better coverage and giving people new spaces to share their thoughts and ideas are among the strategies these newsrooms are using to distinguish their reporting and free them from relying on wire stories.
“People are trying to understand what happened; it’s difficult to comprehend,” said Jeannine Guttman, editor of the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram. “So our real challenge has been to try to explain and to try to show the impact in a really deep and personal way.”
Guttman, for example, has turned page 2A into a reader-engagement digest, called “Maine, Reaching Out.” The page includes information about blood drives, fund raising and other ways readers can get involved or react. The section provides more space than a traditional letter to the editor and is culled from phone calls and e-mails that have surged since Sept. 11.
Several other news organizations also are experimenting with ways to give readers, viewers and listeners a platform for responding to the attack and its aftermath.
WHYY-FM, Philadelphia’s NPR station, partnered with the Philadelphia Daily News to air an October forum with 13 people on community concerns in the aftermath of the attacks.
The paper was running stories about how people were feeling after Sept. 11 – anxious, sleepless, insecure – but editors felt they were capturing only part of the conversation by having reporters interview people one-on-one. With WHYY, they brought together a group of people to talk to each other.
Projects editor Robert Fleming said the forum “helped us hear what our readers and our audience were thinking. And it led us to pursue storytelling in another way.”
The media partners hope to revisit the group in a few months. Meanwhile, the partners are working on creating a local version of the PBS “War Letters” program, which would include letters from Afghanistan.
Wisconsin Public Television expanded its weekly public-affairs show to 90 minutes on Sept. 14 to air a town-hall meeting. Executive producer Kathy Bissen said the show offered participants the chance to learn more about the Middle East, its culture and its politics.
“Everybody was saying ‘I wish I knew more about Islam’ or about the geography or the history [of the region],” Bissen said. “So this was an opportunity to get smarter and it was so well-received that we have added a segment called ‘Getting Smarter’ to the one-hour show every week. “
Bissen said the segment focuses on one topic – the Taliban, al Qaeda or Islam and women, for example – and begins with an expert on the subject giving basic information. Then the phones are open for questions. The show also takes e-mail questions in advance.
“We’ve been very pleased with the quality of the questions,” she said. “And we’re getting calls and e-mails from people all over the state saying, ‘Thanks, this is very informative,’ and commending us on this approach.”
KPIX-TV in San Francisco has developed a similar segment in its nightly newscasts called “In Perspective,” where the station answers viewer questions about Afghanistan, bioterrorism and the broader issues that aren’t normally explored in the daily coverage of events.
News Director Dan Rosenheim says the station has also created Web bulletin boards where viewers can discuss and debate the issues. “This is one way to take the pulse of the community,” he said. “We sometimes take comments from there and put them on the newscast.”
Rosenheim said the bulletin boards also have turned out to be a source of story ideas. He said the station first learned that authorities had closed small airports near Bay Area nuclear facilities from a local pilot’s posting on a discussion board.
The theme of “getting smarter” has been evident in terrorism coverage in a number of newspapers, as well. In addition to straight reporting, some papers are providing a base of knowledge for citizens trying to understand the conflict.
The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, WA, solicits reader questions and then assigns reporters to find definitive answers. Interactive Editor Ken Sands said the questions have run the gamut, from whether a smallpox vaccine is available to how Afghanistan weather will affect the war.
“Some of these questions may have been answered at one time or another in the paper but people don’t read every word of every story,” said Sands. “If one person is wondering, there are probably lots of people wondering.”
Sands said reader curiosity is sometimes ahead of journalists’. For instance, he said, a reader asked in mid-September how the Red Cross planned to distribute the money it was collecting – a question that became a major issue in November.
Another Northwest paper, The Seattle Times, has published a number of special sections and features to help readers make sense of events.
Shortly after the attacks, reports of backlash against Sikhs – South Asians who wear turbans but are not Muslim – prompted The Seattle Times to publish a staff-written-and-illustrated feature, “Understanding Turbans,” about the ways traditional head wear differs from culture to culture. Readers responded so positively the paper next ran a feature, “Interpreting Veils.”
“We came at this from the sense that we needed not just news stories but to educate people,” said Metro Editor Jim Simon. “We found there was a tremendous hunger among readers for more information.”
When U.S. bombing began in October, the paper published a section, “Understanding the Conflict,” which included stories about Islam, Afghanistan and other background knowledge that is often left out of a daily war report.
“We were in the unusual position of having people read everything we wrote,” Simon said.
Another goal of The Times’ coverage has been to report on the local impact of the war on terrorism with the same sophistication that characterizes the national and international stories in the paper. For instance, when the FBI raided a Seattle money-transfer company as part of a national search for Osama bin Laden’s financial resources, Simon said the paper examined the impact on civil liberties when the federal government casts a wide net for suspected terrorist links.
“We want to bring this thing home in a way that doesn’t trivialize it or end up sounding really provincial,” said Simon.
Journalists are also trying to make themselves smarter. Major Minnesota news organizations, including the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune, AP and Minnesota Public Radio, put aside competitive concerns to co-sponsor a December training session on bioterrorism. Electronic hook-ups enabled journalists in Duluth and St. Cloud to participate. A CD-Rom and videotape of the session are available from the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota for journalists who couldn’t attend.
Some local or regional news operations – without foreign or national bureaus – are trying to cross-pollinate newsroom expertise by taking reporters from disparate beats and assigning them to cover the story as a team.
Then, even if the day’s news is coming in over the wire, the team can spot where it overlaps local concerns and respond with stories that speak directly to the concerns of its community.
For example, The Charlotte Observer put together an “urgent team” immediately after Sept. 11 with a police reporter, two medical reporters and an environmental reporter. Metro Editor Mike Gordon said the team is generating front-page stories nearly every day – about airport security, mail facility testing and nuclear safety. Heightened alert, to The Observer’s environmental reporter, meant very specific consequences for Charlotte, the only major American city within 15 miles of two nuclear power plants.
“We thought we’d disband in two or three weeks,” Gordon said, “but if anything, the stories are getting moreinteresting; stories about the way businesses are changing the way they do things, the way the airport has changed its security.”
The Tampa Tribune put together a “war team” of a military affairs reporter, an investigative reporter, a reporter of Turkish descent who has useful language skills and a cultural trends writer.
“We’ve managed to get out front and do some interesting things,” said Special Projects Editor Pat Minarcin. For example, the team recently reported on security weaknesses in Florida’s agricultural sector – one of the most important sources of the nation’s food supply.
Some newsrooms have found it also makes a difference to have their own local reporters covering the story in other cities. The Press Herald’s Guttman, for example, sent her own columnist and photographer to New York to write about the World Trade Center attack.
Columnist Bill Nemitz found a couple of Red Cross volunteers from Portland – George and Lillian Lopes – who had moving stories about working on the rescue operation:
After her first shift at ground zero, Lillian emerged from the ‘hot zone( with a group of other volunteers to find a throng of New Yorkers crowding the sidewalks on Broadway. “There were hundreds of people standing behind the barricades and they were all clapping and saying ‘Thank you,’ “Lillian said.
“With all the news organizations there and all the stories coming out of New York, it seemed, at the time, like ‘how could we compete?’ ” said Guttman. “But what we found was when you send your own staff, they have a sensibility that’s connected to the sensibility of your community and your readers and your state. They brought home different windows through which readers could see what had occurred.”
The Star Tribune, in Minneapolis, went a step further, sending civic journalist Jeremy Iggers to the Middle East to write the series “Faces and Voices of the Islamic World.”
“I felt it was important that readers have a chance to hear what ordinary people from this part of the world have to say and that the people of the region be given a chance to speak for themselves,” Iggers said, e-mailing from Tehran. “It seemed to me that the news was full of expert opinion about ‘what they think’ delivered by non-Muslim American pundits.”
Iggers said such a trip is something even smaller papers should consider. He estimates the travel could be done for as little as $1,500 and could yield important results. “Showing that it is possible for someone from their own hometown to travel normally in these countries and that people in these countries live normal lives and are friendly to strangers is one way of overcoming some of the distrust and animosity,” he said.