Civic Catalyst Newsletter
Summer 2002

Batten Symposium: Panel Highlights
Civic Newsrooms: Building New Reflexes

Three top civic editors talked about newsroom goals, conversations and civic mapping to deliver useful news.

STEVE SMITH
Executive Editor, Statesman Journal, Salem, OR
I promised a few of you I would open by debuting my new definition of civic journalism. Here it is: The relentless expression of professional values every news day until utterly exhausted. Now if you put that on a chart, it comes out R-E-V-E-N-U-E. That's the definition of civic journalism you can try to sell to your publishers. And if you manage, you might be a little more successful than I've been. ...

At the Statesman Journal ... these are our goals: Number one, we reflect the life of our community every day in all of its wholeness and complexity. I have repeated that statement to the point that it has become embedded in the culture of our newsroom. If you were to poke one of our reporters with a sharp stick in the back late at night, they would jump and shout, "Our job is to reflect the life of our community in all of its wholeness and complexity every day."

We tell people what we know when we know it, and hard news is job one. Civic journalism is hard news. It's hard news as defined by citizens. And that's our first job.

We give voice to the voiceless, and we defend the defenseless. We recognize the positive lives led by our community's young people every day. That's a value that's particularly important to me.

And we empower citizens so that they can exercise their citizenship, probably the most fundamental value that we bring to a newspaper in a democratic system.

JOHN X. MILLER
Public Editor, Detroit Free Press
On Sept. 11, the world changed. And because of the work the Free Press had done previously, we had access to the Middle Eastern community; they trusted us. They allowed our reporters back into their homes. They allowed us back into the mosques. They allowed us back into the same places we were a year earlier. And very surprisingly to outside observers, the month after the attacks, in October 2001, we had a roundtable set up with the Arab-American community.

We had begun setting up this roundtable in August, scheduled it for October. The room was packed with Iranians - packed, meaning everybody we invited showed up. There were people from various ethnic and cultural organizations within the Arab-American community. There were imams, there were women, there were people from Afghanistan, from Yemen, from Iraq. There were people who sat across the table who were traditionally enemies.

We had these people around the table and the first five or 10 minutes of the conversation with us, the editors of the Free Press, was thank you for telling our story in the media, versus everybody else who parachuted in. They did not know the essence of what our lives were like before. They can only tell that story now ...

So our civic listening led us to a place where we were prepared to cover a breaking-news story a lot better than our competition and a lot more deeply than our competition because we had gained access initially.

DAN SUWYN
Managing Editor, Savannah Morning News
We kind of blew up our newsroom eight years ago. Our goal was to be as nimble, open-minded and empathetic as our communities. In fact, we needed to be more so, because we needed to be out ahead of where they wanted to go.

So we organized in a way that made conversation essential to get the paper out. You had to blow up the structure of the newspaper so that the photographer and the reporter had to have a conversation before the story could get in the paper - a number of rich and deep conversations. In fact, the expression that Rexanna Lester, our executive editor, came up with is, "We are only as good as the quality of our conversations, both internal and external." That's kind of what drives us. You had to have a system that made conversation essential.