The Pew Charitable Trusts, a foundation built from the estate of Joseph Pew, staunch conservative and oil man, has come on strong in newsrooms in recent years. Its Washington-based Pew Center for Civic Journalism is a self-described "funding catalyst" of projects involving "public discourse and journalism." Since 1993, some 100 dailies, weeklies, and radio and TV stations have received $1.7 million in Center grants. The money is used by news organizations to help pay for projects or studies done in "civic journalism" style. That means many things, sometimes employing focus groups and "outreach" experts to involve the community in the gathering and presentation of news. To quote from Pew literature, civic journalism tries to help "close the gap between people's lives and political discourse."
 This spring, some journalists thought Pew came on too strong, putting its own spin on negative evidence about a civic journalism project undertaken for last year's elections by The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey. "The impression is that the funders wanted to promote good news about civic journalism and ignore bad," says Philip Meyer, Knight professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, a leading proponent of newsroom research and, as it happens, a backer of civic journalism. Counters Ed Fouhy, a former CBS News executive who directs the Pew Center: "What B.S.! It's amazing how simple things get chewed up."

 The Center backed a number of projects to improve campaign coverage in 1996. In Hackensack, using $140,000 in Pew Center funds and investing some $100,000 of its own money for extra newsprint and other costs, The Record, which serves northern New Jersey and has a circulation of 151,000 daily and 210,000 Sunday, conducted an effort called "Campaign Central." David Blomquist, The Record's public affairs editor, worked with Cliff Zukin, a consultant from the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. The overall supervisor was The Record's editor, Glenn Ritt, now vice president for news and information. Blomquist and Zukin did follow-up research after the November elections on the effects of The Record's foray into civic journalism.

 "Campaign Central" appeared daily except Saturdays from Labor Day through election day. Front-page teases directed readers to the inside full page. It offered such features as a weeklong series on the "values" of New Jerseyans, based on polls, and "On The Air," which reprinted scripts of campaign commercials and "sifted the evidence" for their claims. The Record also organized candidate forums, with "ordinary citizens" doing the questioning rather than reporters. There was more, all standard civic journalism fare, stressing issues rather than the horse race.

 It pushed all the public-discourse buttons . . . and it didn't work. In their post-election research, Blomquist and Zukin found, among other things, that:

"All the things that we hypothesized about civic journalism," says consultant Zukin, "turned out not to be so. Record readers didn't score any differently than other readers."

 Blomquist reported on some of the negative "Campaign Central" findings at a Pew Center workshop in Annapolis in December. In the January issue of Civic Catalyst, the Center newsletter, he was quoted as saying that a "Voters Guide" the paper ran the weekend before the election did engage readers. "This is what readers wanted in election coverage, concise side-by-side comparison of issues in bullet form." But "changing the framework from vox politics to vox populi may not be enough," Blomquist concluded. "Much of the challenge for journalists is: Can we do this without becoming McPaper and McNews?"

Civic Catalyst said the Hackensack research would be published "in early spring." The program of the fifty-second annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, held at the Marriott in Norfolk, Virginia, May 15-18, listed Zukin, Blomquist, and their paper "Does Civic Journalism Work?" as the second presentation at the May 17 morning session. Several of the top people in the survey-research field, including Phil Meyer, attended specifically to hear Zukin-Blomquist. The New Jerseyans were no-shows, their report withdrawn. As this article was being edited, Fouhy faxed a letter to cjr. It said the Norfolk gathering had been told "Blomquist and Zukin have decided not to present their research at this time to allow for some review."

 Meyer was upset. "Working in this area, I know how controversial it is," he recalls thinking. "If word gets out that only research showing positive effects is published, we're all suspect."
 Zukin told cjr there wasn't "censorship" of the negative findings. "Pew said it wanted more time to review our findings," he says, adding that Pew didn't get the finished paper until May 13, and "they said they had some concerns." Although the basic findings had been known since December, Fouhy says "it was a busy week at Pew, so we asked for time to look it over."

 a five-way conference call on May 15 connected Fouhy, Pew's Jan Schaffer, Zukin, Blomquist, and Ritt. It took ninety minutes. Fouhy says he told The Record team that "the decision to give or not give the presentation was theirs to make." His letter to cjr included a chronology that noted the conference call and said, "Blomquist ultimately proposed holding off" on the presentation. Blomquist says: "I thought it was good research. It would have been fun to discuss with that roomful of colleagues from all over the country," but he finally agreed to delay. Zukin acknowledges "not being fully happy" with the decision to withdraw - those were his peers in the room, too - but adds: "Pew wanted to contextualize our findings."

 According to Ritt, that meant Pew wanted to release the findings as "a package." It did, after the Norfolk conferees went home. The final package as mailed by Pew contains a three-page news release that casts The Record experiment as valiant civic journalism vs. candidates' malignant TV campaigning: "Nine weeks and 54 full pages of issues-based coverage in the New Jersey Senate race failed to break through the noise of that heated, television-saturated campaign."

 The mailing, to about 4,000 people, mostly journalists, included a two-page summary by Pew saying that the findings were limited to one project ("it would be presumptuous to make broad judgments about the overall potential of public journalism") and a six-page "lessons learned" essay by Ritt lamenting a world of "bored" readers and their "distrust" of the media and "nonheroic politicians." Then the Blomquist-Zukin thirty-three-page report appears.

 Journalist Hodding Carter, chairman of the Pew Center board, argues that while the "researchers' opinions are the operative ones, to ask if civic journalism works, and then to say on the basis of one experiment that it doesn't, is simply a dishonest question and answer." In his letter to cjr, Fouhy declared, "We have published every research report we have commissioned and will continue to do so."

 But for critics of civic journalism, the Hackensack experiment exacerbated the fear that those who pay for the show may want to call the tune. That Saturday in Norfolk, when one editor from a major heartland paper heard that the report had been withdrawn, he turned to a seatmate and said: "That's exactly why we don't take outside money."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe