Civic Catalyst Newsletter
Summer 1998

Three Winners Share Batten Award

The Asbury Park Press found houses sold for inflated prices. The Sun probed the process of learning to read. Idaho journalists uncovered a dramatic increase in non-violent offenders in prison.

The Asbury Park (NJ) Press, The Baltimore Sun and a coalition of Idaho newspapers and television stations received the 1998 James K. Batten Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism at an award symposium and dinner in May in Chicago.

The winners were chosen by an Advisory Board of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, which sponsors the annual awards. "For the third year in a row the board of judges chose three news initiatives to split the $25,000 award," said Jan Schaffer, the center's executive director. "Each entry took a different approach to reporting a problem and the public policy choices surrounding that issue. The news organizations then served as catalysts to engage the public in solving the problem."

"Notable in the 83 entries this year was the depth and the sophistication of the civic journalism. Civic techniques were blended with investigative, computer-assisted and explanatory journalism and with classic newspaper crusades in ways that advanced the tools far beyond early uses of polls and town meetings," Schaffer said.

The Idaho Statesman, The Idaho Spokesman-Review, the Lewiston Morning Tribune, the Idaho Falls Post-Register, Idaho Public Television and KTVB-TV joined forces to present "A Collision Course: Prisons vs. Higher Education in Idaho." The journalists created a statistical database profile of the state's prison inmates, which showed a huge jump in the number of non-violent offenders incarcerated. Then they compared the steep climb of prison spending with the declining support for education. The results led state legislators to think about sentencing and other reforms.

More than 100 people convened at Northwestern University's Thorne Auditorium in Chicago for the batten Symposium.

"One of the things that emboldened us to take this on as a statewide project," Dennis Joyce, Assistant Managing Editor for the Idaho Statesman, told 125 people at the Batten Symposium, "was that Idaho has a reputation as a fairly fiscally conservative state and yet we're spending gobs of money, with no end in sight, on prisons. So we set out to ask ourselves 'Why?' "

"We very quickly started looking at what were the costs that come from a particular course of action in the public arena. It became clear fairly quickly that higher education was a good area to focus on. It was shrinking almost as fast as prisons were rising."

"It was a controversial decision: We were going to compare A with B. Many of our partners said you should be comparing A with B, C, D, E, F, and G Ñ in other words the entire state budget . . . It didn't satisfy everyone, but I think it worked in the end."

"Once the issue of cost was presented to Idahoans, people who might have walked into a focus group as rock-ribbed, law-and-order types, walked out thinking, 'This issue isn't quite as simple as I thought it was'."

The media partnership gave the individual news organizations much greater impact, said KTVB Executive News Director Rod Gramer. It was so successful that the partners are continuing to work together on a civic journalism election initiative Ñ funded in part with some of their Batten Award money.

The Sun's winning entry, "Reading by 9," involved explanatory reporting about how children learn to read, followed up by tutoring and volunteer efforts by the news company's staff and by news stories focused on a single goal Ñ building the capacity to help children read by third grade. The paper began the effort after reporting that 90 percent of the city's third graders got less than satisfactory ratings on reading assessments.

"This was not the journalism we've been doing," Maryland Editor Robert Benjamin said. "It's not about schools. It's not about education. It's not about literacy. It's not about reading. It's about primary-grade reading instruction."

"Another aspect that's been unusual, for us at least, is that, I don't know that we broke down walls within The Sun, but we crossed some lines that had been there. I know that I personally worked with more people in other parts of The Sun on this project than I had in the 17 years I'd been at the paper. This raised some questions and sometimes some conflicts."

The effort began with a four-part explanatory series that went beyond the phonics vs. whole language approach to reading instruction and delved into brain research on how people can be taught to read. A second part is following children in two schools using different teaching approaches.

After the initial series, the paper printed a phone number and 600 people called in four days to leave two minutes of taped remarks; some called back to keep talking.

"We struck a nerve that I had no idea existed there," said Mike Bowler, the paper's education writer. "When we got that flood of telephone calls . . . some of them were people who were crying."

Said Benjamin: "Parents called up to tell us about their own sad stories with kids. Teachers called up to tell us what they've been doing to circumvent bad programs. A lot of people simply said 'thank you,' which I never really heard too much in previous big projects."

". . . It's become part of the community conversation."

The Sun has made a five-year commitment to the project and is continuing to devote at least four full pages a week to ongoing coverage.

The Asbury Park Press's winning series "What Ails Asbury? A City Searches for Solutions" and the related "House of Cards" spotlighted problems and solutions for that blighted seashore community. In the process, reporters uncovered a real estate scam that attracted the attention of law enforcement officials and was the impetus for new laws to protect citizens.

"What we found from listening to the public was a blueprint of where to go and what to look for," said Jody Calendar, who spearheaded the effort for The Press.

The listening led reporters to one of the largest investigative projects the paper had ever done, exposing a bold real estate scam. Coming amid stories that tried to engage town residents in solutions to their problems, the investigative coverage was perceived by people to be a negative story about Asbury Park, said Business Editor Robert Hordt. The challenge to the reporters, he said, was to explain how it was impacting the city.

One day, Hordt said, a resident called to say he went to buy a house two days after it went on the market only to learn it had been snapped up for an astronomical sum by a speculator Ñ- as part of the scheme to defraud a mortgage company.

"In other words, he was going to take an eyesore and turn it into a habitable place to live, a place that would have contributed to the tax base of the town," Hordt said. "This is the impact that we had to translate for the reader."

"One of the things that helped us was the forums we held. . .they went a long way in explaining to people why we were doing what we were doing."

The Batten Award judges reacted positively to the evolving models of civic journalism.

"This year's entries showcase the many new elements now seasoning the mix of civic journalism approaches," said John X. Miller, managing editor of the Sun News in Myrtle Beach and a member of the Batten Award Advisory Board.

"There appear to be new sensitivities and creativities in engaging readers and viewers in choices and solutions and in creating a kind of journalism that is useful to the community. By acting on a different set of journalistic reflexes and using different tools to explain to readers what the world is like, civic journalism is producing much better news stories."

The awards were presented May 12 at the annual James K. Batten Symposium, hosted this year by the Medill School of Journalism in Chicago, Ill. This year's symposium topic was "News Futures: Civic Innovations in Reporting."

Journalism schools that would like to host Batten Award activities in future years should call the Pew Center, 202-331-3200 or send a short written proposal. The activities are fully funded by the center.