Are You Now,
or Will You Ever Be,
a Civic Journalist?

On a Sunday morning last October, in a suburb not blessed with the most sensitive of law enforcement officers, a pair of cops strode into a Korean Presbyterian church just as the minister was cranking up his sermon. They said the church building lacked a certificate of occupancy, and they ordered everyone out. The law, they said, was the law.

 Two months later the local newspaper invited Korean community leaders, still angry, to meet with local politicians to discuss the issue, perhaps to bridge the rift. The newspaper would offer a meeting space and "facilitate" the get-together, then cover it. Like so many newspapers lately, this one was involved in what has come to be called "civic" or "public" journalism, and the meeting was seen as a chance to run a civic journalism experiment.

 The experiment did not go well, at least according to the account written by the newspaper's religion reporter (his unpublished version later circulated through the newsroom and to cjr, along with a request that the newspaper not be named). Most of the meeting, the reporter wrote, was consumed with "verbal sparring, tit-for-tat arguing." Although town officials had already apologized, the minister wound up his remarks with "a series of demands that included a call for the borough to 'apologize to the congregation, and more importantly, to God.' "

 When the piece got up to top editorial levels, or the Ministry of Truth, as one newsroom employee put it, it got a makeover. In the new version, the one that the readers saw, the religion reporter shared a byline with the editor who had facilitated the meeting, and the article had a brighter point of view: The meeting "began with both groups still feeling pain and casting blame, but the ensuing discussion helped find some common ground for a new foundation of understanding. Participants said the lessons learned from the incident -- and the meeting -- point to the need for bridge-building." A Korean lawyer provided the new kicker: "We've got to live together, so let's laugh together and let's work together."

Which version of the meeting -- food fight or celebration of diversity -- is closer to the truth is difficult to discern, but the incident points to a fine line that the civic journalists sometimes walk. It is in the interest of a newspaper to portray its public journalism efforts as successful and helpful, perhaps even when they are not. With a few twists of the semantical dials, public journalism can become public posturing.

But so can other forms of journalism. When such lines are crossed -- as even civic journalism's supporters concede they will be, at least on occasion -- does that point to a fault in the philosophy or merely to an editorial lapse? Design flaw or driver error?

In a few short years the civic journalism movement has touched a lot of newsrooms and aroused a great deal of passionate debate. It has attracted high-class critics -- people like Leonard Downie, editor of The Washington Post; Max Frankel, former editor of The New York Times, Anthony Marro, the editor of Newsday, and others -- who tend to see the movement as the latest substitute for a healthy editorial budget and solid journalistic instincts, gobbledygook at best, dangerous at worse. Any good thing that does come out of a civic journalism initiative, they can be counted on to contend, is plain old traditional journalism, nothing new. Proponents, meanwhile, complain bitterly that the critics erect and bash straw men, skewering examples that are aberrations or arguing against tenets that civic journalism just doesn't hold. Both sides tend to talk journalistic theology, like so many cardinals in the curia, rather than look at what's happening in the newsrooms when the movement has taken hold.

Civic journalism grew out of a sense that, as we in the press have dutifully reported for so long, our democracy actually is going to hell in a handbasket. As a report, a joint effort by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, put it this spring, "By the most common measures of citizenship -- registering, voting, volunteering -- citizens are shunning public life. The implications for democracy are serious; self-government depends on individuals taking responsibility. The implications for journalism are equally ominous; citizens who don't participate have little need for news."

By this logic, the time for the press to act merely as a mirror of events has passed. Focused as they are on conflict and failure, and constantly boxing the citizen out, journalists may actually make things worse. They hop from problem to problem, unloading on readers and viewers a "spiritually debilitating" information overload, writes Davis "Buzz" Merritt, editor of The Wichita Eagle, in his recently published book, Public Journalism & Public Life. All this bad news, Merritt goes on, creates a "frantic triage" in the "emergency room of the mind." It "arrives at our eyes and ears packaged in hopeless insolubility. It is framed by both politicians and journalists as black-and-white contests, presented through the words of experts and absolutists. Each of the framers has a stake in continuing the argument; none has a stake in resolving it."

 People are frustrated, he writes, by these packages of information that "have no handles, no place for well-intentioned citizens to begin the search for solutions."

 So the dispirited people turn us off. We see the results in our declining circulation figures, in findings such as the 1994 Times Mirror survey that reported an astounding 71 percent of respondents feel that the media "stand in the way of America solving its problems," or the measurement of people's confidence in major institutions by Yankelovich Associates, which shows confidence in TV news and newspapers dropping like a rock -- from 55 to 25 percent for TV and from 51 to 20 percent for newspapers -- in just five years, 1988 to 1993.

The civic journalists see themselves as part of an effort to try to get the wheel turning the other way, by providing those "handles" for a community to grapple with community problems in some kind of meaningful way. "In a word," writes Jay Rosen of New York University, one of the movement's founders, "public journalists want public life to work. In order to make it work they are willing to declare an end to their neutrality on certain questions -- for example: whether people participate, whether a genuine debate takes place when needed, whether a community comes to grips with its problems."

 These ideas are attractive to an increasing number of journalists. Just over three years ago, when cjr first took note of what is now called public or civic journalism ("The Wichita Experiment," July/August, 1992), the number of newsrooms toying with it could be counted on one hand. By last fall, the last time Jay Rosen's Project on Public Life and the Press added up the number of newsrooms experimenting with what the newsrooms see as public journalism, the number had climbed to 171. Part of the momentum stems from the fact that a number of people inside and outside of journalism have been thinking along similar lines and finding each other's work (see sidebar, page [TK]).

But ideas alone have not fueled the civic/public journalism movement; it has also been pushed by several institutions with money. Knight-Ridder c.e.o. James K. Batten, who died this summer, was a patron, and encouraged the company's newspapers with budget dollars. The Kettering Foundation in Ohio, with its mission of improving democracy, was an early supporter. Kettering hooked Jay Rosen up with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, founded by Knight Newspapers heirs but independent of Knight-Ridder, and the foundation gave half a million dollars in 19[TK] and again in 1995 to fund The Project on Public Life and the Press. The project serves as a catalyst, connecting interested journalists with each other, disseminating Rosen's prolific writings, and, along with the American Press Institute, holding public-journalism seminars.

The Pew Center for Civic Journalism, meanwhile, was born in September 1993 with a $4 [OR 4.5?] million three-year grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, founded by Sun Oil Co. heirs, as part of its "Renewing our Democratic Heart" initiative. The center puts out civic-journalism newsletters and videotapes and, in partnership with the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation and The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, holds two-day East and West Coast workshops on the topic that cost participating journalists only a $35 registration fee. More importantly, the center supports a dozen civic journalism projects around the country, kicking in from a few thousand to a hundred thousand dollars to the budgets of the news organizations involved. To maximize the impact of the projects and to bring radio and TV into the fold, Pew funds only projects that include print-broadcast partnerships. On September 13 in Washington, the center will sponsor a major forum on civic journalism and award $25,000 in civic journali prizes, [OR ONE PRIZE?] enough money to get anyone's attention.

 Although Rosen prefers the term "public journalism" and Pew's executive director, Edward M. Fouhy, prefers "civic," the two seem focused on the same goals. Foundation funding has allowed them to preach their gospel at journalism gatherings -- IRE meetings, Nieman Foundation forums, and the like -- all around the country. Rosen, a bearded and professorial New Yorker, has little journalism experience but he is a thoughtful academic writer; Fouhy is a respected former journalist with twenty years in network television, some of them as CBS's Saigon bureau [CHIEF?] during the war in Vietnam, Washington bureau chief for CBS, and executive producer of the 1988 and 1992 presidential and vice-presidential debates. These two are occasionally joined by Buzz Merritt, the white-haired and deep-voiced Wichita newspaper editor. They make a powerful troika.

They also draw a lot of hostile questions. Like members of any other proud profession, journalists do not always like hearing new theories about how they ought to change their ways.

 Some of the critics hear a call for an end to neutrality on certain issues and fear an end to objectivity, U.S journalism's first principle. Jane R. Eisner, editorial page editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is one of those who worries about the press climbing out of the press box and onto the stage. "Our central mission is to report the news, to set priorities, to analyze but not to shape or direct events or outcomes," she wrote in an open letter to her readers not long ago. "Subsume or diminish the central mission, and we become like any other player in society, like any other politician, interest group, do-gooder, thief. I am not willing to relinquish this unique role." The public journalists, in turn, say that nobody has to give it up, that losing objectivity is not what they mean at all.

Some of the criticism does seem to betray misunderstanding of what Merritt and Fouhy and Rosen are calling for. Albert Hunt, in his June 22 Wall Street Journal column, for example, worries about public journalists overusing "marketing techniques, polls, surveys, and focus groups" as a replacement for "actually spending time reporting on citizens"; although public journalists tend to like polls and surveys, "actually spending time reporting on citizens" is probably their first commandment. The editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, William F. Woo, wondered in a speech on public journalism this spring whether a newspaper can "objectively report on a burning community issue when the editor sits on the commission that is promoting a particular point of view on the matter." Such things have happened under the banner of public journalism, but they seem to be very rare, and not in keeping with what the public journalists advocate.

 Other misgivings about civic journalism have more resonance. In his Sunday magazine column Max Frankel, former executive editor of The New York Times, points out that newsrooms have limited resources and that devoting large amounts of attention and money to big-ticket public journalism activities could shortchange (or further shortchange) basic news gathering.

 The best reason for rejecting public journalism, perhaps, is that its rhetoric makes such excellent cover for pandering, for the notion that in order to reverse our declining fortunes we have to steer clear of hard-hitting reporting on subjects that the reader is reluctant to hear about. A newsroom that would seek to market itself as the community's pal is the kind that could reflexively refrain from doing anything that might offend that community. Newsday's editor, Anthony Marro, is proud of a series his newspaper did in 19[TK] on segregated housing patterns on Long Island. But the series brought some of the most vicious reader reaction Marro says he has seen in his career. "If we went out to people and said 'what are your concerns?' this would not have been one of them," he says. "A lot of time people don't want to talk about the most important stories."

 The quality of the civic journalism debate would be a lot higher if it was better grounded in what is actually happening in these newsrooms all over the map where journalists are trying to turn civic journalism's big but amorphous ideas into stories.

 What's interesting is how different these efforts are. They range from small -- a citizen panel which regularly gives its thoughts to the Manhattan, Kansas, Mercury -- to the ambitious -- National Public Radio's Election Project, which in 1994 included newspaper/radio partnerships in six major cities and some fifty smaller communities. NPR used polling data, extended citizen forums and small-group-interviews, and other techniques to try to put citizens and their thinking at the center of campaign coverage, to cover the campaign as an ongoing public conversation and not just as a race. In the 1996 election cycle, according to John Dinges, NPR's editorial director, the list of large-city print/radio partnerships will be expanded to a dozen, and he hopes to include the newspapers in the two convention cities, San Diego and Chicago.

 "We've never seen this as departing from traditional journalistic principles," Dinges says. "I see it in terms of a framing of the coverage -- aligning the journalistic priorities with the citizens' priorities. It's not talk radio. When people talk to each other as citizens and form an opinion, that's a different opinion from one that is not based on dialogue. We try to convey citizen opinions that are the result of them talking with other citizens. It's really pretty encouraging, because they don't say off-the-wall things. People talking together use common sense." Not that NPR is in awe of what the citizens say, he insists. "You definitely have to explore the inconsistencies, talk about the factual underpinnings, whether these are accurate or not. This is journalism; you don't just transmit things."

In Madison, Wisconsin, The State Journal and local television stations have been helping to run We The People citizen forums since 1992; demographically selected volunteers have served on a mock legislative panel, developing a property tax plan among themselves; a mock national budget session, where citizens took on the deficit; and citizen 'grand juries' on gambling and health care reform, not to mention election issues. Forums are broadcast live from several sites in the state and covered by the paper as a news event. In the most recent forum, a panel of seven citizens sat on the judicial bench and questioned candidates vying for the state Supreme Court. We The People participants say that questions framed by citizens can carry more weight and be less easy to dodge than those framed by reporters. In the 1994 gubernatorial election in Wisconsin, for example, a We The People forum participant, a man in an American flag shirt, no less, is said to have reshaped the campaign by asking for the candidates to supply, "in writing, in detail, your plan onow you're going to raise the revenues or cut the programs to meet the property tax cuts."

The most celebrated public journalism experiment is probably the Taking Back Our Neighborhoods project at The Charlotte Observer, in partnership with WSOC-TV and two local radio stations, both serving Charlotte's black community. The seeds of the project go back to a double murder that seemed to be a final straw for the crime-plagued North Carolina city, the killing of two city policemen in 1993. The Observer's response was a long-term examination of the city neighborhoods -- one at a time -- that produce the most crime, including an assessment of what might reasonably be done about some of the problems in those neighborhoods. As described in a Poynter Institute study, the journalistically unusual underlying purpose of the series was "to bolster efforts of neighborhoods in Charlotte's 'crime crescent' and to give residents outside these areas a stake in reclaiming those neighborhoods." Information was gathered in the usual ways, by computer and shoe leather, but also by neighborhood advisory panels and well-attended neighborhood meetings organized by Charlene Price-Patterson, a nonjournalist "community coordinator" who works out of the Observer newsroom, and whose salary was underwritten by the Pew Center.

These packages of stories -- the first, about a neighborhood called Seversville, ran in July 1994 and the seventh, on Druid Hills, a year later (two more are coming) -- contain other unusual components, including a "needs" list of ways that Charlotte residents might help the neighborhood with goods, services, or time. United Way of Central Carolinas, Inc. agreed to help channel donations and volunteers (a sore point with critics, who worry about the paper's connection with the charity).

 Charlotte's response to these big media blitzes -- the packages run on page 1 on Sundays, coordinated with TV specials and radio shows -- has been remarkable. According to Price-Patterson, each has generated a major response. Among the callers to the Seversville package, for example, was the mayor, who pledged a recreation center; a local bank, First Union, agreed to donate a $50,000 for a trailer to serve as community center in the meantime. After the series, Price-Patterson notes, the police began a drug operation and some crack houses were shut down. "The police chief came to that meeting," she says, "so he was there to hear the anguish that people felt in that neighborhood."

Ordinary folks have also donated and volunteered heavily in response to the series. An anonymous woman, for example, gave $2,000 to send Seversville children to summer camp; another volunteered to make uniforms for its Girl Scouts. "She went out and got a company to give her material," says Price-Patterson. "She was just phenomenal." After the latest part of the series, the Druid Hills package, Price-Patterson notes, she heard from Willie Green, the wide receiver on Charlotte's brand new NFL football franchise, the Carolina Panthers. He said he wanted to help, and he and Price-Patterson are working on just how he can be effective.

"Do you want to be in the business of delivering shoes to kids? Is that what newspapers should be doing?" asks Jim Walser, an assistant managing editor. "You can obviously take this to an extreme. But I personally think newspapers need to stand for something. In the eyes of a lot of people they've become just another big corporate money-sucking institution."

 Walser says much of what his newsroom learned through the big project has changed daily coverage. "We've learned far more about our neighborhoods -- what people care about, how things actually work -- than we ever used to learn about our city by covering city commissioners and cops and the mayor's office. That's a terrible way to learn about a city. This is grass-roots reporting. It's old fashioned in that sense, old fashioned crusading. It's the newspaper saying we believe something needs to happen on this subject."

There are newsroom critics of public journalism at most of these newspapers, and that's also true at the newspaper that has been experimenting with public journalism the longest, The Wichita Eagle. At the Eagle, editor Merritt, disgusted by the level of political campaigns in Kansas, began fooling with new ideas in election coverage in 1990, 1991, and 1992. As his public-journalism thinking has evolved in the years since, the paper has moved away from big-ticket projects, Merritt says, toward the more subtle altering of everyday stories, their framing, tone, selection. To Merritt, public journalism requires reporting the news "in a way that facilitates people thinking about solutions, not just problems and conflict. The most crucial thing is to figure out how you frame stories in a way that accomplishes that end."

As an example, he points to a Sunday analysis --headlined what do we do now? -- that ran four days after the Oklahoma City bombing, a series of short pieces headlined with questions -- "What are we willing to give up to monitor and control the activities of political groups?" or "What are we willing to give up for more security?" -- that invited readers to think together about those questions and their ramifications.

He also points to a June 11 package on affirmative action -- headlined what is fair? -- that starts with a page-one invitation to the reader to join the national search for a "lasting consensus" on the issue. To do so, "We must examine not just our opinions and other people's opinions, but the core values that drive those opinions," the introduction to the package says. "A large portion of today's A section is devoted to trying to help that process along. In order to participate, please turn to page 12A. . . ." On page 12A, an analysis piece tries to frame the discussion by describing the "core values" that underlie the affirmative action debate -- "People have an obligation to help other people be successful" vs. "People's success is in their own hands." The piece asserts that only when such values and their logical extensions are addressed and "middle ground sought between them" can an issue be resolved. The idea, Merritt says, was to have readers see the rest of the package -- a look at how affirmative actionctually works, its legislative and regulatory history, short profiles of workers and bosses whom affirmative action has or has not helped -- through this "core values" frame.

On a smaller scale, he points to a recent local controversy in which residents who live on a cul de sac in a wealthy part of town proposed putting up a security gate that would have cut them off from the rest of Wichita. It's an interesting piece, well written, polite and exploratory in tone, that also raises a series of questions, such as, "What if everybody wanted to do this?" What's so public journalism about it? "Five years ago, it would have been framed in terms of 'this wealthy community out there wants to keep the hoi polloi out,' framed in a much more combative, polarized way," Merritt says. "Instead, it recognized that there is a middle ground in there somewhere. Yes, you put the fence up or you don't, but what's important is how you arrive at the decision, that people see the possibilities of true open discussion of things. "You know how it is these days," he continues. "People just leap to one polarized position or another, and there is no true deliberation. I think this public journalism is an imrtant and valid journalistic job. It reflects the truth more accurately than people just lobbing shells at each other."

 Merritt's newsroom seems to agree that something new is indeed going on at their newspaper. Not everybody likes it, however. Nick Haines, statehouse bureau chief for Kansas Public Radio, which has worked in partnership with the Eagle in public journalism election projects and finds it valuable, says the paper's thinking had not filtered down to all of its political reporters by the last election cycle. "The management is on board, the reporters didn't care a jot," he says. "After the first week or so, they went back to business as usual. The reporters would sort of roll their eyes. They'd say, 'Oh, that's Sheri Dill,' " [the paper's executive editor, who ran the Eagle throughout 1994, during Merritt's year long book-writing sabbatical].

More seriously, some reporters associate public journalism with a recent softness at the paper -- a softness that critics in and out of the Eagle newsroom see and worry about. "I'm not sure it's connected with public journalism," says one reporter, "but its almost like we're afraid to stir up as much controversy as we had in the past." "We had a zoo animal on the front page every week for six or eight weeks," says another. "It was fucking embarrassing.

"Now that Buzz is back, things are getting better," that reporter continues. "But I think this is something they are wrestling with -- how do you balance public journalism, whatever it is, with the inevitable circulation concerns: they worry about pissing people off, that we're a negative media, and blah blah blah. Buzz will tell you public journalism doesn't mean going soft, but I think there's a gap between the rhetoric and the application." (The Eagle does indeed have circulation concerns. Sunday and daily circulation has been dropping slowly but steadily, from 120,828 to 111,827 daily and 198,906 to 187,662 Sunday between 1990 and 1994, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.)

When critics at the paper speak of softness, they mention Judy Thomas, who recently left the paper for The Kansas City Star. Thomas had been a top reporter on the Summer of Mercy story in Wichita in 1991, when anti-abortion protesters targeted the city and hundreds were arrested. By all accounts she has excellent sources on the Christian and anti-abortion right; Shelley Shannon, accused of attempting to murder a Wichita abortion doctor, confessed to Thomas from her jail cell in October 1993. (Shannon was sentenced to eleven years in prison, and last month pled guilty to setting fires in six other abortion clinics in the northeast.) The Eagle twice nominated Thomas's work on the abortion issue for a Pulitzer.

 That kind of coverage of the anti-abortion movement, according to reporters and others, brought complaints from a number of readers in the heart of Bible-belt Kansas. Last year, Thomas began to feel that her digging into controversial subjects was no longer a priority. Some reporters worried that the reason was public journalism, or at least Dill's interpretation of it, a sense that the need to connect with readers had become bound up with the fear of offending them.

Among Thomas's rejected story ideas is one that looks awfully good in retrospect -- the rise of right-wing militias -- since she proposed it months before the federal building exploded in Oklahoma City. Several such militias, she says, were forming at that time in Kansas, and she had developed good sources, partly by traveling to gun shows. "I was told our readers did not have the appetite for that kind of story," she says.

 Another rejected story was about how three priests in the Wichita area had died of AIDS in a three-year period. Managing editor Janet Weaver, who came to the Eagle only last summer, in the middle of Merritt's sabbatical, declined to discuss the pluses and minuses of individual stories. Merritt says that in the case of the priests, the piece should not have run because Thomas had not confirmed the men's names. No one would advocate a story saying that "three unidentified lawyers or schoolteachers" had died of AIDS, he says, "thereby implicating all other lawyers or schoolteachers." But Thomas says she had confirmed the names, from each of the priest's families, and had been told to revise the piece and leave the names out. "I'm not saying I disagree with public journalism," she adds. "But when you see some of these things you get paranoid. You wonder if there is a connection."

Worried reporters at the Eagle also mention another rejected piece, this one reported by Gail Randall, who left the paper last fall, about questionable behavior by Wichita's drug police in the city's ghetto. Much of the material she used was drawn from court records in which judges had taken the cops to task, according to Bill Hirschman, a fifteen-year Eagle veteran now at The St. Petersburg Times. (Randall declined to discuss the story). Merritt says that by the time he left to write his book in 1993 Randall's story was not ready to run, and that "people I trust" told him in 1994 that the piece still had holes in it, "and there was the additional problem of the data getting cold."

 Hirschman, who worked briefly with Randall at the start of her reporting, has a different impression. He thought her first draft "was brilliantly written, scrupulously fair," but that it sat somewhere in the Eagle's system, without Randall getting a yes or a no on it. After some time, he says, Eugene Roberts, then working for Knight-Ridder, now the managing editor of The New York Times, visited the Eagle and Randall asked him to read her piece. "He made suggestions and it got even better, even harder and more fair." But it never ran.

Even Buzz Merritt concedes that the Eagle has gone somewhat soft lately, but he blames internal problems at the paper, which he says are being corrected. He concedes no connection at all between softness and public journalism. And a number of other staff members tend to agree.

Hirschman, for example, who worked on a number investigative projects at the Eagle when he was there, is one who doubts that public journalism has much to do with the paper's troubles with controversial articles. "That goes back before anybody dreamed of public journalism," he says.

Like a lot of reporters, Hirschman is wrestling hard, back and forth, with the public journalism movement, wondering if its potential misuse is reason enough to reject it, or whether there's a baby in that bath water. Wondering if it will disappear in five years, or whether it might turn out to be a positive force. Watching carefully to see what it produces.

 "I'm so conflicted about this," he says. "I grew up in Oklahoma, where you couldn't believe 90 percent of what the newspapers say, and I worry. I've been very outspoken against public journalism; I'm not sure I've been right. But the line is so close. It's all about choices and direction and slippery slopes."

 We spoke shortly after Hirschman had listened to Jay Rosen discuss his movement at the Miami convention of Investigative Reporters and Editors. "I don't know if I'm changing or he is," Hirschman says. "He's making more sense to me. It's a philosophy that's still trying to articulate what it is, let alone how to implement it.

"It's an experiment," he says. "You gotta give it some room."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe