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 […]
Investing in Risk: Re-engaging the Public
Rebecca W. Rimel President The Pew Charitable Trusts The Pew Center was an experiment when we got involved. It was, if you will, a risky investment, particularly for an institution like ours, which comes out of an anonymous grant-making history. And by our measure, and obviously by yours in giving of your time today, […]
Charlotte: Doing it Daily
To the Manhattan Mercury, Manhattan, Kan., which received the Inland Innovation Award for public journalism experiments, presented in February by the Inland Press Association, for one of the paper’s first civic journalism efforts on Binge Drinking. The award recognizes innovation and forward thinking in newspaper content. And it recognizes newspaper public journalism initiatives that serve as catalysts […]
Teaching Civic Journalism
All the chairs in the hotel meeting room were taken long before Professors Jay Rosen and Jim Carey, editors Buzz Merritt and Rem Reider, and reporter Colette Jenkins moved toward their seats for the panel on civic journalism. As journalism educators continued streaming in, a couple of people trudged steadily back and forth to other […]