THE ACTIVIST

As military base closures and defense department cutbacks loomed in early 1993, community leaders in Kitsap County in Washington knew the timehad come to act. For years they had talked about their economy's overdependence on Navy spending -- the area has three large military installations and scores of defense department contractors -- but they had done little to pursue economic diversification.

Among those leaders was The Sun, a 40,000-circulation, Scripps Howard daily in Bremerton, and a newspaper where the buzzwords "community involvement" mean more than reader advisory boards, focus groups, and the like. Editor Mike Phillips, along with The Sun's general manager and its advertising director, helped plan an economic diversification summit, at which some 250 business people, educators, and labor leaders joined high school students and retirees to discuss their community's future. And The Sun contributed more than its managers. Before the summit, reporter GinaBinole researched and wrote a multi-part series on five other communities' efforts to diversify their economies. She traveled from Spokane to Norfolk, Virginia, to find out what had worked and what had not.

Reaction to The Sun's unusual involvement in community affairs was generally positive. "I think the activist newspaper -- and, yes, I consider The Sun a community activist newspaper -- creates a different political climate by the intelligence it brings to an issue," says Warren Olson, a summit organizer and former schools administrator and chamber of commerce president. "A better-informed population makes better decisions."

Jerry Reid, who owns real estate business in the county and has been active in community projects for decades, says he found The Sun's role refreshing: "I guess that I'd never thought that a newspaper had -- I won't say a duty -- a possibility of playing 'what if? ' or throwing out ideas."

The economic summit seemed to give Kitsap County Economic Development Council a shot in the arm. It applied for and won a $ 100,000 federal defense conversion planning grant, becoming one of seven counties in the nation to win such a grant, and picked up another $ 50,000 in state matching funds. Part of the money will subsidize a new "business incubators" program, which was first envisioned at the summit.

Earlier, however, on another civic issue -- a campaign to build a larger fund for the county to purchase and protect open spaces -- The Sun's role was less universally praised. In 1991, after citizens successfully blocked plans to develop a much-beloved forest, Phillips wrote an editorial entreating readers to push local government to "think big" about open space. The editorial set off a campaign, which the newspaper helped organize: citizens attending some fifty meetings throughout the county were invited to design an open-space preservation plan. At the meetings, Phillips himself presented a slide show with examples of open spaces that might be preserved. The Sun later published a special report on the citizens' preservation plan.

Largely because the plan became a bond issue (later defeated), some people in The Sun's newsroom felt that their paper had gone beyond its educational role and stepped into the political arena. (They did not want to be quoted for this article.)

Since Phillips became editor in 1989 he has urged people in the newsroom to become involved in the community, although he acknowledges that such activity sometimes forces journalists to walk a very fine line. As a guideline, he suggests that his journalists avoid partisan politics, refuse to work as publicists for any group, and decline to serve in organizations that spend tax dollars or make public policy.

"People in the community look to the The Sun to provide leadership both on and off the printed page -- to come out of the newsroom into the community and help resolve differences and make decisions," Phillip says. "They don't want us to tell them what to do. They just want us to help."

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