2001 Batten Symposium Panel

"Race and Civic Journalism: Case Studies and What's Been Learned"

John L. Dotson Jr., president and publisher of the Akron Beacon Journal, guided the audience and panelists through the tough issue of covering race relations. The panel included journalists involved in groundbreaking newspaper coverage of racial issues: Janet C. Leach, vice president and editor of the Akron Beacon Journal; Madelyn A. Ross, managing editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; and Carl Crothers, executive editor, Winston-Salem Journal. In addition, Dr. Fannie Brown, executive director of the "Coming Together Project," which grew out of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on race by the Akron Beacon Journal, shared her experience on how newspaper articles can lead to concrete community actions.

Groundbreaking Journalism

Akron Beacon Journal
In 1993, the newspaper published a yearlong series on race relations in Akron that was inspired, in part, by the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. The series, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994, focused on four key areas where whites and blacks held different views: education, housing, economic opportunities and crime and the criminal justice system.

Dotson: We decided to take a hard look at assumptions that had grown up around racial issues in our community. We did some good old-fashioned reporting, not just relying on the view of experts. We launched the project with an opinion survey to identify the largest areas of conflict. We also did a careful sifting through numerous computer databases. We sought to have a diverse group of staffers work on the project and included 17 whites, 11 African-Americans and one Latino. Of these, 18 were men and 11 women. Finally we put together racial groups and had them address racial issues separately and then together. Inevitably, when blacks and whites were combined, awkwardness gradually yielded to warmth and candor. Those initial efforts at dialogue led to the second phase of the project. We decided the newspaper needed to reach into the community to encourage more dialogue between people of different racial backgrounds. That's what led to the "Coming Together Project."

Brown: The "Coming Together Project" has been able to accomplish a great deal in a very short time. I think a crowning moment for the project was that we were selected to host the first national town hall meeting on race in 1997 ... It gave us that national recognition we needed. We started out with four annual programs and now we're moving past 40 programs annually. We have increased awareness of our program locally, regionally and nationally. We have increased our board and we have insisted on pairing up diverse groups in the community.

Leach: The Beacon Journal helped support and found the "Coming Together Project." But we have also taken a hard look at other issues since then - issues that divide us and issues that bring us together, such as crime and racial profiling, domestic abuse and disparities in education.

The Beacon Journal has also been a watchdog for the community. It's one of the things I'm most proud of. Race per se is not a beat at the newspaper. It really permeates all beats, including social, crime and judicial coverage; sports beats at all levels including pro sports on down to high school athletics; feature stories and even business news. In some ways, race can be a reason for change and that would make it worthy of a story or the reason for blame, which would again be the reason for a story.

I think race infuses society and ignites debate. As journalists, we cover society and debate. And so we must do that, even when it is unpopular or when it upsets and confuses readers.

One of the most tenuous and difficult stories we've ever covered involved the former police chief of Akron and his alleged domestic abuse against his wife. He sued the paper for covering that story, and we were roundly criticized as making that a race issue because the police chief is black and the editor of the paper is white and the community saw that as divisive.

Everything we wrote about that, from the eight-day series and other news stories, including unrelated news of his grandson's arrest, his retirement, his replacement, all of those things became tainted with the issue of race.

I thought, and I continue to think, that domestic-abuse allegations, proven or not, by a police chief in any city are issues for the newspaper to cover since that is the top law enforcement official, charged with protecting people against domestic abuse. I would have covered that story had the chief been purple.

I take very seriously our role as a watchdog, as a citizen of the community and as a shaper of public opinion. And I know that we will continue to do that as the issue of civic journalism relates to the newsroom.

Winston-Salem Journal
"Dividing Lines" was a 1998 eight-week series that resulted from 18 months of reporting on the history of racial coverage at the newspaper. A core part of the series was a thorough investigation of the newspaper's role in racist coverage over its 100-year history. Among those interviewed was the man who had been the only black reporter at the paper through most of the 1940s and 1950s. The newspaper also revealed its poor record of minority hiring and lack of diversity in recent times, said Executive Editor Carl Crothers.

Crothers: Probably the most stunning revelation was a story that uncovered a conspiracy in the 1940s by the newspaper and the owners of the newspaper to bust a black union at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. The owner of the paper in the 1940s was Gordon Gray, whose uncle was the president of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which is the industry in Winston-Salem, much bigger then than it is now, but a major force.

Mr. Gray hired a former FBI agent to cover this union-organizing effort. Essentially what they did, our reporter found out in talking to a lot of people who, I guess, in their old age wanted to come clean, was planted stories about members of the union having communist ties. In 1947, that was deadly. It was based on very flimsy evidence. But it served its purpose. The union effort was crushed and it was a source of distrust and, really, hatred in the black community for decades after that. There's still distrust because of that incident.

I always feel inadequate talking about the project because while it was a watershed event for the Journal and perhaps for the city, it only scratches the surface on a topic that demands daily attention, daily coverage. And we don't always do a good job of that.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
In 1995, following several racially charged incidents in the city, the newspaper received a telephone call from a reader who accused Pittsburgh of being the most racist city in America. The accusation spawned one of the most extensive and expensive reporting projects in the newspaper's history, involving 40 staffers unleashed for six months to explore and uncover the correctness of the reader's assertion. As part of the coverage, the Post-Gazette conducted a region-wide attitudinal survey that involved 25,000 telephone calls and revealed that 90 percent of white respondents got all of their information about African-Americans from the media - they had no firsthand information about blacks. The series ran five consecutive Sundays on six full pages, said Managing Editor Madelyn Ross.

Ross: After the first installment, we started getting calls from the community inviting us to participate in forums that had been inspired by our research. We had the YMCA, the schools, the Urban League, group after group after group rising up automatically from this first installment saying, "We need to get together and talk about this."

At one forum where I had spoken, an old lady, an African-American, walked up to me and shook my hand. This was personally gratifying to me. She said, "You know, I've taken 10 copies of the Post-Gazette and I put them in my cedar chest for my grandchildren to read." And I said, "That's very flattering, but why would you want this? This series says that our community is about as racist as you might imagine. Why would you want to preserve that?" And she told me it was because after 85 years, somebody had told the truth.

So, I would say that our series meant not to do anything besides tell the truth. And I think it did the best that any journalism could - it told the complicated truth. But it was the community then that rose up and tried to do something about it. And those programs, most of them, continue today, six years later.

Q & A Session

Participant: These exemplary programs in Winston-Salem, Akron and Pittsburgh are of the same model. In the year 2001, where are we with race and where is it that newspapers haven't gone yet but can go in providing public service?

Crothers: I think the Internet provides a very good laboratory at this point for improving social interactions across communities of interest that traditionally have been somewhat isolated. I'm encouraged to see what's happening there.

Ross: What we've been doing now on a continuing basis is getting out more into the African-American communities, places where, frankly, 90 percent of our staff does not live and does not know about. But if you're going to keep these issues alive and continue to be able to tell the truth on a daily basis - and I don't mean truth with a small "t." I don't mean accurate. Obviously journalists have to be accurate.

I mean tell the truth about the way people's lives are affected and how they live. We have to be out there much more than we ever were before.

We're going to do another project, I hope. But our commitment is on a daily basis, to do it better every day as part of the routine coverage of the community, and by exposing those communities both to good and to what needs to be fixed, I think together we improve everything about the situation.

Leach: You need to give voice to all your readers and non-readers and really be the watchdog and the illuminator of what's going on in the community. And I think that's where you take a project like this, when the project is over.

Participant: Recently, new numbers were disclosed that basically said the numbers of minority journalists, despite all of our efforts at diversifying newsrooms, were down. I wonder what, as a profession, we can do to keep in touch with - not the external tensions, which are easy to cover - but really the internal tensions that are what all of you have talked about in the community and are much more subtle. Can you do it without a multicolor, multicultural newsroom? And how are you going to get there, if even the most aggressive efforts that we've had lately are not working?

Crothers: That's a tough question. At the Journal, we've tripled the diversity in our newsrooms in the past three years, but we had a lot of catching up to do. So we're making inroads there but have a long way to go.

It's difficult. Midsize papers have a real difficult time attracting and keeping minority journalists. Now, of course, North Carolina is rapidly changing in many other ways. The Hispanic immigration numbers were remarkable in the census, so we've got other challenges.

I believe some of the places that have had the most trouble need not to look at the diversity recruiting efforts or strategies as much as just the culture in their newsrooms.

Ross: I think every editor believes in diversity in the newsroom. Diversity of all sorts, not just race, but diversity of education and experience. The more diverse the newsroom, the more interesting it is and the more you see.

I'm going to be politically incorrect and say that while we're waiting to be more diverse there is absolutely no reason good journalists can't cover their entire community, no matter what color they are. Journalism isn't innate. You aren't born that way, as you're born white or black or tall or short. It's learned. It's a skill. It's something you work very hard at being good at. And it's something that once you're good at can be applied across the board.

Leach: I would really echo what Madelyn said. You know, those numbers are so depressing. When I was in college it was [hiring] women, and now it's people of color. We should focus on the journalism. We should go back to the basics and remind people why it's important to cover your community. Let's go back and remember what journalism does well.

We need to make sure people understand how important journalism is and that it's a really satisfying career no matter what gender or what color you are. Go back and say you can make a difference in this community if you do journalism.

Dotson: I was involved in setting or helping to set the ASNE goal back in 1978 to have America's newsrooms reflect the nation's population in the year 2000. In the year 2000, the number of minorities in the newsroom went down. In fact, more minorities left the newsroom than were employed in the newsroom.

Now minorities in the newsroom are at 11.64 percent, if The New York Times is right, and minorities are 31 percent of the national population. Those are devastating figures. That was in a good year, in which the number of journalists increased. This year we are in a negative economy and people are losing their jobs. Chief among them are minorities.

The future for journalism and minorities in journalism must be reversed if journalism, or if newspapers at least, are going to maintain their credibility as institutions seeking fairness and accuracy.

Participant: What kind of credibility does a nearly all-white, smaller newspaper have when it's trying to do a race project with a very small minority segment on its staff? What kind of credibility will it have in the greater community?

Crothers: We faced that issue when we got started with this project and when we turned our reporter on our story. I think honestly in the way that we covered that and the way that we wrote it - in other words we were rather frank and honest about our situation - did give us some credibility. It didn't make up for it, but here's the lead:

"This series on race relations was conceived by white people, written and edited mostly by white people and illustrated by white people. It is the product of one of the least integrated newsrooms in the state."

And then we basically told our story and detailed what a bad record we had.

The answer is the only way to do that is to be honest, to confess to what your situation is, and to endeavor to do something about it. It's a difficult task, but I would say go out in a very honest manner, but definitely do it.

Ross: We're a large newsroom in a major city and our minority numbers aren't too bad. Still, we're overwhelmingly white. We didn't hear any of that criticism when we produced this project because we weren't opinionated on it. We weren't giving our views on things.

We went out and we got the goods, and we presented the goods and we said: Here it is, talk about it. Because of that, the numbers are indisputable. We documented it. They're indisputable. So there was really no reaction towards the color of our staff.