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 […]
Teddy White Would Have Approved
By Stan Cloud Executive Director Citizens Election Project Back in the summer of 1976, when I was covering Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign for Time magazine, I spent one warm summer evening sitting poolside at the press motel in Americus, Ga., with Teddy White, author of the famous Making of the President books. Between sips of Jack […]
Covering Politics Civic Journalism Style Daily
By Rick Thames Public Life Editor Charlotte Observer When voters sent George Bush into early retirement in 1992, we journalists looked around and said, “This must be the year of the angry voter.” Then came 1994 and the American public really showed us anger, throwing record numbers of Democratic incumbents out of office in Congress and […]
Citizens Election Project
By Stan Cloud Executive Director Citizens Election Project Whatever the outcome of the 1996 presidential campaign, the Citizens Election Project, an undertaking of the Pew Center and the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism, has already demonstrated ways of covering politics that may help restore voters to their rightful place in the process. To the […]