Weaving Your Community’s Master Narrative
By Jan Schaffer Pew Center Executive Director Whenever I ask a group of journalists to name a subject that would make their readers squirm – not call to complain, but squirm – they readily nod their head and start volunteering responses: race relations, education, the have vs. the have-nots, growth and sprawl. Then I ask if […]
Civic Journalism: The Public “Gets” It
By Jan Schaffer Pew Center Executive Director What is civic journalism? Read on for a hard and fast definition. We all know civic journalism has had a lot of journalism done to it. To some degree, it’s been caught in a journalistic time warp. Stuck in an old master narrative almost entirely informed by Lexis-Nexis […]
Interaction = Connections = Relationships
By Jan Schaffer Pew Center Executive Director An old colleague, now a major daily metro editor, once asked me: Why? Why would an editor want to engage in civic journalism? Why bother to seek community input, try using it to enrich coverage, invite feedback? “I want to decide the stories,” she declared. “That’s why they […]
Combating Subversive Inactivity
Rebecca Rimel, president and CEO of The Pew Charitable Trusts, was stranded at an airport, unable to get to Chapel Hill. Don Kimelman, project director of Pew’s Venture Fund, delivered her prepared remarks. Highlights: Over the last 10 years, I have been interviewed and challenged more on civic journalism than on any other issue the […]
Ten Take-Away Ideas for Civic Coverage
By Jan Schaffer Pew Center Executive Director More than 200 people at this year’s Batten Awards celebrated a decade of civic journalism accomplishments. They were proud; they were energized. As Buzz Merritt, former Wichita Eagle editor, proclaimed, we created laboratories for newsroom experiments, venues for people to participate, new platforms for interactivity and hope for a future […]
A Community Coordinator can be an Activist
By Charlene Price-Patterson During the past five months I have fought back more tears than ever in my entire life — tears of joy, hope, sadness, frustration and gratitude. The tears are a direct result of my position as community coordinator of The Charlotte Observer’s “Taking Back Our Neighborhoods” project. I would not trade […]
Tapping the Hidden Layers of Civic Life
By Richard C. Harwood and David Mermin The Harwood Group Davis (Buzz) Merritt, Jr., editor of the Wichita Eagle, calls it “the swamp.” It’s the invisible public life of communities — the informal web of interactions and public conversations that take place in the void between the “official world” of government and institutions and the every-day private […]
On-Line
Two months after the Tallahassee Democrat launched its Public Agenda project to get citizens talking about community problems and possible solutions, they took the project on-line, on the Tallahassee Free-Net. After only a year in operation, the computer network, which provides free access to the Internet, already had 20,000 users. By Bill Edmonds Op-ed Editor […]
Getting People Talking
By David Blomquist Can one regional newspaper, three cable television systems, a radio station, and a group of municipal officials come together to get people talking about the challenges facing City Hall? Well, it wasn’t always easy, but we did it. And when our first broadcast closed in April with the phones still ringing off […]
Citzens ’96: Linking Civic Journalism Nationwide
By Dave Iverson Executive Producer Wisconsin Public Television On Jan. 5 at 9 p.m. (EST) something interesting will happen on public television. It’s called Citizens ’96, and it’s an attempt to link together civic journalism projects nationwide. This unique national partnership involves public television and radio stations, newspapers and on-line services all working together on the […]