St. Paul Pioneer Press Engaging Journalists in Their Community
Maja Beckstrom sat in her usual spot in St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ on Sunday morning, Feb. 22, 1998. Normally, church is her respite from the daily newspaper wars. Beckstrom is a reporter at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the scrappy underdog in a battle with the bigger, richer paper across the river. The […]
The Press & Sun-Bulletin Facing Our Future: Building on Citizen Ideas
In the garden at Clinton and Front Streets, yellow and lavender viola bloom. Tulips and Johnny-jump-up mingle with black-eyed Susan and irises. In spring, white petals cover the chokeberry; in fall, its leaves go scarlet. Copyright 1996 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin. Photographer: Beth KaplanHistoric photo of Endicott Johnson: Surrounded by workers from Endicott Johnson shoes, […]
The Journal Star Leadership Challenge: Building a New Generation of Leaders
Marti Shullaw can remember sitting on a lawn chair in her backyard, watching people waiting to buy drugs from her neighbor. “I mean, they would line up like it was McDonald’s,” she recalls. Her husband wanted to move. But Shullaw refused. “I guess it was part stubbornness and part knowing I could make a difference.” […]
Springfield News-Leader The Good Community Breaks New Ground
Ron Davis left the Springfield News-Leader at 2:30 p.m., Oct. 11, 1995, along with most of the rest of his colleagues. Executive editor Randy Hammer had cleared the newsroom, declaring the escalation in the juvenile crime rate in Springfield, Missouri, an all-hands story. This story didn’t break, it oozed. But Hammer took the approach usually reserved for […]
Introduction
Most reporters and editors have, in their mental story file, an idea they can’t seem to get down on paper. It’s too sweeping, too amorphous, and yet for that very reason, it may be the very story readers need to read. A story that engages not only readers’ time and interest but also their priorities, […]
About spotlighting critical issues.
Bill Marimow Managing Editor The Sun, Baltimore In my mind, civic journalism and public service journalism ought to be synonymous. To me, that means a news organization takes its big spotlight and shines it on a very important public issue that requires attention. And by shining a spotlight on that issue, it compels public […]
Civic Journalism Is…
Now a broad label put on efforts by editors and news directors to try to do their jobs as journalists in ways that help to overcome people’s sense of powerlessness and alienation. The goal is to produce news that citizens need to be educated about issues and current events, to make civic decisions, to engage […]
About setting priorities.
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 […]
About paying attention.
John McCaa Anchor, Host of “Metro” WFAA-TV, Dallas Here’s what civic journalism is NOT. It is NOT parachuting into the community as if it’s a special forces operation and getting the loudest voices and then walking away. You may touch the veneer that way but civic journalism gets underneath to the woodwork, where the […]
About meeting the needs of citizens.
Joan Cartan-Hansen Reporter, Producer Idaho Public Television Going into the 1998 elections, we were hearing the same old thing from politicians. They knew what was important. They decided what to talk about and voters had to make a choice based on the candidates’ agenda. We decided there was a way to make our election […]