Rod Gramer
News Director
KGW-TV, Portland, Oregon
With civic journalism, you dig a little bit deeper. You take a subject that’s not getting a lot of attention and dig into it and do stories that can make a difference.
When I was in Idaho, we did a project on education and prisons. We discovered that state spending on prisons was growing proportionally greater than state spending on higher education.
We polled the public to find out what it thought the priority should be. We held focus groups around the state to debate the issue. Then, we held a statewide “town hall” discussion. We used microwave hook-ups to bring together the stakeholders — law enforcement officials, education officials and citizens — and we broadcast an hour-long discussion.
It turned out that people wanted to punish the bad guys. But they also believed strongly in education, and they did not want schools to suffer in the name of locking people up.
They also realized that many of the people in prison are there for relatively minor offenses involving drugs and alcohol, and they felt the state should do a better job of rehabilitation.
Our stories caught the eye of the state legislature and the governor, and that led to more discussion and debate about the issue than ever before.
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