Lucy Himstedt
VP and General Manager
WFIE-TV, NBC-14, Evansville, IN
To me, civic journalism is going out to people to get stories rather than sitting in your newsroom opening press releases and listening to the scanner. We do a series called “14 Listens.” We don’t try to convene meetings ourselves but we go to already-scheduled community meetings — PTA meetings, Rotary Club meetings — and we spend time after the meeting talking to people about their community. We don’t promise to fix anything; we don’t even promise we’ll do a story. But we listen for what’s important to them.
When I worked in Montgomery, Alabama, we found out one community was having a terrible problem with the 911 system. People who lived on rural mail delivery routes had no street addresses so, in the middle of a crisis, they would have to give 911 operators complicated directions to their house. County officials had been promising to assign them addresses but it had been a whole year and they hadn’t gotten around to it. Well, just by running that story, those people got their street addresses.
The benefit is not always so immediate but there’s always a benefit to listening. We like to sit back in the newsroom and think we know what’s going on. And we don’t. You have to get out there.
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