Building Road Maps for Reporters
By Pat Ford Staff Writer, Pew Center Experts on sprawl and race relations identified a series of challenges for journalists who delve into a new series of polls by the Pew Center. The polls reveal dramatic frustrations over sprawl and growth now edging out more traditional local issues, such as crime. Moreover, the polls found […]
Studying Civic Journalism
By Sharon Hartin Iorio Wichita State University How is civic journalism being conveyed visually by designers and photographers? And how is civic journalism being written about? These two questions are the focus of academic studies that will share top research honors this year, awarded by the Civic Journalism Interest Group of the Association for Education […]
Bringing Viewers Back to Local TV News
By Deborah Potter and Walter Gantz The news is troubling for local television news. Audiences in many major cities are down across the board for early evening and late newscasts. And news directors are searching desperately for ways to reverse the trend. “We’ve heard the wake-up call,” one corporate news executive says, “we’re just not […]
Future News: It’s More than Just the Facts
Chris Peck is editor of Spokane’s Spokesman-Review, which CJR recently listed as one of the country’s 25 best papers and one of the five papers to watch for new ideas and innovations. As president of APME, Peck released the results of a new poll, “Journalism Interactive,” co-sponsored by the Pew Center, APME and the National Conference […]
High Impact Logged in 600 Civic Projects
By Lew Friedland and Sandy Nichols Center for Communication and Democracy University of Wisconsin-Madison For years, journalists and scholars have asked how many newspapers were practicing civic journalism. Now, a new study of more than 600 projects in the Pew Center archives documents, for the first time, that at least 345 newspapers and magazines have […]
Planting the Seeds for 1996
Exactly one year away from the first primary of the 1996 presidential campaign, three dozen journalists from a half-dozen states met on the Harvard campus to do something that has never been done — in the year before a presidential election. They brainstormed on how to cooperate to create news coverage that would give citizens a […]
New Hampshire Mission Statement
Voters’ Voice is a partnership dedicated to making voters’ issues and voters themselves the focus of news coverage of New Hampshire elections in 1996. Its goals include re-establishing the role of the electorate by putting their issues first; reducing coverage of “campaign issues” that will disappear after the election; reducing coverage of mudslinging and attacks; […]
Some Editors are Saying “No”
By Ed Fouhy Roger Ailes, the television executive who was one of the political handlers behind both the Reagan and Bush election victories, likes to talk about his orchestra-pit theory of American political journalism. It goes like this: a presidential candidate can give the most important speech of his career on a topic that is […]
Poynter Focuses on Election Coverage
By Deborah Potter Coordinator, Poynter Election Project Your news director has just named you the chief political reporter for 1996. Where do you turn for help? You’re an editor, frustrated by campaign coverage dominated by meaningless straw polls, spin doctors and photo-ops. Where do you find new ideas for 1996? Your news organization is […]
Stan Cloud Directs Pew’s Citizens Election Project
Stanley W. Cloud, former newspaper editor and Time Magazine’s Washington bureau chief, has been named executive director of the Citizens Election Project (CEP), the Pew Center’s research and demonstration program that will feature voter-oriented news coverage of the 1996 Presidential campaign. CEP is dedicated to making voters’ issues and the voters themselves the focus […]