2001 Batten Symposium Panel

"New Journalism, New Interactions"

Moderator Barbara Hipsman, associate professor, Kent State University School of Journalism and Communication, and panelists Jeannine Guttman, editor and vice president, Portland Newspapers; Ken Sands, interactive editor, The Spokesman-Review; and Miriam Pepper, readers' representative and associate editor/Forum, The Kansas City Star, explored various ways that news organizations can interact with the public to improve their journalism.

Growing Sources

Hipsman: Kent State University's involvement in civic journalism is multifaceted. We have new faces every year moving into the ranks of those who manage student media. We've plotted communities near the university and written about issues of importance that those communities identified to us.

Recently the editors of The Daily Kent Stater held a small forum to discuss the ramifications of an ad that some of you have probably heard about concerning reparations to African-Americans. Dozens of students wanted to talk. The Stater had three non-journalists - not professors - ready to listen and to help facilitate the discussion. It's a prelude to a series on race on campus. They've held focus groups and meetings with various groups and come to realize that race is still a continuing issue on this campus, as it is in many areas. We wish them well in their drive to get people to talk.

Hipsman: Which takes us to our first question. How do we get people to talk and make sure we include those people in our stories?

Sands: E-mail is one way. If you can develop a list of sources, you can send out e-mail for a variety of purposes.

The first example is for a news story that we were writing. The Idaho legislature decided that squaw would remain in Idaho as a place name. They did that on a Monday morning. I sent out e-mail to about 750 people to get the one thing that stories like this normally miss - community response, community reaction. And easily within three hours, I had enough for a full 20- or 25-inch sidebar, giving a broad spectrum of community responses to what they had done.

This is reader reaction that appears at the same time as the news story first appears. It's not sometime down the road, two or three or four days later, as a letter to the editor. It's in the same day's newspaper.

Hipsman: How do you get those names? Where do you go to find those people? Are they handpicked or slanted some way?

Sands: There is no phone book for e-mail addresses and I didn't want to spam anybody by sending it out to all kinds of people unsolicited. But over the course of four years, I developed a list of people who had submitted letters to the editor by e-mail, who had contacted a staff member by e-mail or had left comments on our newspaper's Web site.

I also put a little blurb in the newspaper asking people to be a newspaper advisor. And every time this little blurb runs, people send an e-mail and say, "I want to be a newspaper advisor. That sounds really cool."

I've developed those names over four years and now have a database of every writer of letters to the editor, and we publish something like 4,000 a year. So we have this huge database that we're working on to make those same contacts.

Hipsman: Is there any way to be selective? What about the letters you reject for publication, for one reason or another? Are there certain people that you reject?

Sands: I do. I call them repeat offenders. By the time I'm sick of hearing from them, I'm sure the readers are, too, and I put them in almost a wastebasket. They will give us their opinion anytime, so I no longer solicit their opinions.

Hipsman: What do your reporters think about that? Are they asked to follow up with some of these people?

Sands: There's always, among traditional journalists, a little bit of suspicion about civic journalism. But what I can do and have done is give those reporters a tool to make their jobs easier and more effective.

When a reporter came to me and said she wanted to do a story about problems with barking dogs in the rural areas, I sent out an e-mail. By the end of the day, I had 12 stories from people who were willing to be quoted and their phone numbers and names.

And I gave these to the reporter.

Hipsman: Is there any way you can check to make sure these people are who they say they are?

Sands: Originally, when we contact them, we go through the same verification process we do with letters to the editor. So we get a phone number, address and a name and we call to verify their identity. Once we've got an e-mail exchange set up, I feel like that's fairly foolproof, not totally.

Participant: Do you only use the quotes after you have the reporter call and reinterview them? Or can you use them as is from the e-mail?

Sands: Either or both. I always try to make sure to tell them, in certain terms, we'd like to use your comments either for a story or for letters to the editor. When they send the comments in, I send them a reply back saying, "Thank you. We plan to use a variety of comments, possibly including yours, in the paper in coming days," to give them another opportunity in case they want to back out, to let them know again, we are publishing this.

Participant: How many people are in your database?

Sands: I have two [databases]. One is just for the five northern counties of Idaho, and that's about 750. Our other database we're developing now has about 2,500 names in it. So we're hoping that it's going to grow by leaps and bounds and replace the other one eventually.

Hipsman: Do you have a demographic base that you've done on these e-mailers?

Sands: No, but in our letters-to-the-editor database, we can search by subject. So if we wanted to, we could do that. We just don't want to.

Participant: What about the structure of the e-mail? Is it going out under a letterhead, or is it just a standard e-mail text?

Sands: Just standard e-mail text and it appears from me, Ken Sands. Most of those people know who I am. In the near future, I intend to make this tool available to our entire newsroom. I'm going to have to walk reporters through this and hold able to send out the e-mail messages themselves and therefore get the replies back themselves, so I don't have to act as a conduit for all of this.

Building Relationships

Guttman: In this day and age, people can get news information from anywhere they want. There's only one reason they buy your paper, because they have a relationship with your paper. They want that relationship. And they want you to honor that relationship.

In many ways, I think readers are somewhat frustrated with us that we don't seem to get that. They're waiting for that. That's why, no matter what we've done, no matter how much we cut our news or trim our paper or reduce our staff, they're still there. We raise our prices, they're still there. And through all of these evolutions, revolutions, in media and technology, those readers are still there. So they're very loyal to us because I think the relationship is very valuable to them.

When we did "On The Verge," we had this idea to have kids tell us their stories themselves. So when we met teen-agers at pizza parties, we handed out disposable cameras, along with a permission slip to their parents. And when it came back signed, we printed the pictures, and we got two sets of prints. We sent them one and we put some of them on an online photo gallery.

Barbara Walsh, the very gifted reporter on this story, spent enormous time with these kids. Barbara had spent weeks with one girl she was profiling - high achiever, honor society, straight-A person - she thought she knew this girl cold. When the pictures came back, Barbara noticed all these pictures of a cemetery and a headstone and an obituary that were tacked onto the girl's bedroom mirror.

Barbara is looking at these and she said to the girl, "What is this?" And the girl says, "Oh, my mother died when I was young, and it really affected my whole life. Every day I talk to my mother." And the story just turned. Barbara didn't really know the story before those pictures came in and there it was.

That's why this girl was such a high achiever, and that's why she was the person that she was. She had this traumatic event that continued to affect her life. We wouldn't have gotten that story through traditional reporting methods. It just would not have happened.

Participant: How much of a gap did you find in communication between parents and children?

Guttman: We found that all of us, as adults, because we have obviously survived our adolescence, think that we know what it's like to be a teen-ager. So already there's a filter there. And most people tend to think it was hard when they were kids. But what's the big deal? They think, "I got through it, you can get through it, too."

In fact, it's different. We found one of the obstacles was just getting people to understand that it is different and then getting them to see how it's different. And it did, indeed, open up a lot of people's eyes - parents, teachers, the community at large - to what these kids' lives are like.

Participant: I teach high school journalism and I really admire what you did and how you did it, but I'm still a little concerned about not having the adult balance and the experts. I understand why you did that. But the lack of balance concerns me.

Guttman: I think it's how you define balance. To us, when these kids saw coverage about them in our newspaper, that gave them a forum they never had before. They have been an uncovered population within our community. We don't cover them as a group.

One of the things they actually had a lot of anger about was that people just saw them as consumers. They said, "We buy lots of CDs and we buy lots of clothes and we're constantly marketed to by media. And yet, no one listens to what we have to say. No one values our voices because they think, 'You're just a kid.' " They really resented that.

Participant: What's the newspaper's responsibility in following up on problems that are revealed?

Guttman: It's not the newspaper's responsibility to do that. We had some follow-up stories about community reaction and there was some reaction to some of the kids in particular. There was one boy who had a pretty rough childhood and got accepted to MIT and didn't have enough money to go. So boom, Portland sets up an account for the kid and the community sets up a fundraising drive to help him out and just really embraced him as one of their own.

It's interesting to me that when you have a story like that, people rally around it. It warms people's hearts. I know that sounds corny. But this is a classic American story.

Participant: It seems like the reporting method of getting to know your sources so well and getting to know them so intimately worked out well with the project. Has it spilled into any other types of reporting that you've been doing? It seems like it would be harder to use the technique with hard news.

Guttman: We've used the method in our campaign coverage and some other projects that we've done. What we don't do anymore is - we call it "MOTS" and "POTS" - man on the street, person on the street. Where your editor says, "Go out and get six real people." And you go out and stand on the street corner and you grab people and ask what they think about what's going on in Israel today. And you want that in about 30 seconds.

And when the citizen can't give you a good answer, you come back to the newsroom and say you couldn't find anyone with an opinion. We don't treat people very well. We treat them like they should just perform for us.

Connecting Through The Ombudsman

Pepper: A newspaper ombudsman gives readers a name and a face that they can call to try to pierce the giant corporate newspaper in town and get some reaction and some contact.

I think it's very hard for most readers to figure out who to call and how to reach them and how to make their point. When you have someone who is independent, acts independent as an ombudsman on staff, you try to be less defensive when you're listening to readers than someone who writes the story.

It's really important that we be more responsive. As our credibility problems grow, we need to be open and admit when we've made mistakes and try to rectify them and try to explain what happens. What everybody will tell you is that in the absence of an explanation, they will assign motive. And usually it's negative for the newspaper.

With a column, you can explain how things happen and why they happen. You can be an independent critic, which I think readers appreciate the most, because just like we want to be a watchdog, many readers feel like there is no watchdog over the great big newspaper. When they think that their voice is being heard, when they've brought concerns to the ombudsman and the ombudsman publishes that in a column, readers think, "Hmm, somebody else thought just like I did, too."

A lot of people who want to criticize really don't want to talk to the reporter directly because they're either so angry at that reporter that they don't want to directly speak to him or her, or they're a little bit shy about talking to the reporter. We get a lot of incidents where I'll say, "Well, I'll be happy to connect you," and they'll say, "I'll put my husband on the phone now."

We also get a lot of tips. I tend to take the first shift of telephone calls for two hours. Usually that's when people are the hottest about what's going on in their newspaper. And then I go to the morning news meeting and I can bring up issues that readers have sent to us already. It could be that we missed an angle of a story, that the graphic doesn't present the tax bracket on the Bush tax plan that they're most interested in seeing exposed for how much will be saved.

We can come back with a lot of these things in future coverage and change it, and we do quite a bit.

Participant: Considering that most readers are of the opinion that the reporters aren't really interested in what they think about stories in the paper, what kind of response have you gotten from the reporters about the information they're getting from the readers?

Pepper: I think that's why it does help to have a staff person translating for the readers sometimes. Sometimes I can connect the readers with the reporter, but sometimes the reporter will listen better if I come over and make the pitch on behalf of the reader, because I speak their language.

Most of the reporters are pretty open. They don't always like to see me coming, I've got to tell you that. Some of them have suggested I wear some kind of big bell because I'm usually bringing bad news. Or when it's good news, or just a story tip, I'll kind of yell across the room, "This isn't bad. I'm heading your way but you don't have to duck at this point."

Sands: I think we need to get our arms around the idea that our readers should be involved every step of the way. Beforehand, like with reader panels and advisory boards that suggest story ideas. During, meaning as sources for stories.

And then, of course, afterwards, with feedback, letters to the editor and things like that. And that really we need to think of our readers as our sources, that they are part of the process. They aren't just these people who give us feedback that we're afraid of most of the time.

Hipsman: How might the three of you engage nonreaders?

Guttman: It's not just nonreaders. In the sea of teen-agers, we weren't covering them. It's true they probably weren't reading the paper very much, but they weren't in the paper either. So those voices were missing.

Hipsman: So, if they get into the paper, then they might become readers of the paper, as well?

Guttman: Yes, but the paper in itself is a more accurate reflection of that place. If you're taking out big chunks of your audience and they're never reflected in your news pages, then you're offering the community a really distorted view of the place where you're living. Fundamentally, as a journalist, I find that troubling.

Pepper: I think, too, with outreach, you go to other groups' meetings rather than invite them only to your own newspaper gatherings, so that not only would The Star host some community meeting in the neighborhood, but you have representatives of the newspaper go speak to other groups and that opens you up more, too.

I think that is a big issue for newspapers because you can't just rely on those who care enough to call you or write you.

Participant: How does the Web fit into outreach for the community?

Pepper: Our online site, KansasCity.com, has a lot of chats and talkbacks on controversial stories and the link will be right from the news story to the talkback. So it's a good way to get people in the community to talk among themselves.

Guttman: In Maine, we have MaineToday.com and we often post - if a reporter is working on a story - questions on the site from readers. Readers are your best sources because they're connected, because they care about this relationship. They have great story ideas.

Pepper: One possibility is online letters to the editor. I'm working on a survey for the Organization of News Ombudsmen and it's interesting that rejected letters to the editor are a real sore point for readers. And we all do it a lot. Until I saw these survey results, I didn't realize what a problem this is.

Sands: I think we're still in the Stone Age with all of this technology. This e-mail tool that I have, I feel sometimes like it's a hammer and chisel and that over the next year or two or three we'll refine it into something really cool. And by then it will be obsolete because something really cool will have replaced it.

"Civic journalism is good journalism, journalism that serves its community and its citizens ... Good journalism, taught at a good journalism school by good journalism faculty, can produce civic journalists no matter whether we articulate it or not. We're very proud of the fact that three of our graduates have been among the Batten winners in the last three years. "
- Pam Creedon
Director, Kent State, School of Journalism and Mass Communication