At the end of 1998, a year that included our most successful civic journalism initiative to date, my senior colleagues met to determine how we would apply this brand of journalism in the future. We liked what we had accomplished Ð but a hesitancy pervaded the meeting: What would civic journalism look like in daily beat reporting? What would it cost in resources? We're still talking.

As the editor on most of our big civic journalism projects, I would claim that shifting these techniques to daily beat reporting wouldn't involve giving up, just doing differently.

Our parent corporation, Knight Ridder Inc., has enthusiastically supported civic journalism for many years with grants to individual newspapers on a project-by-project basis. This year, our corporate leaders asked those of us on the frontlines to consider ways it could be mainstreamed into daily reporting beats. We all feel it is time to take civic journalism techniques that have been sequestered in large projects and spread them into grass-roots journalism. But it's still unclear how we will do this.

Although some reporters who have had the opportunity to work on the projects have embraced civic journalism, the movement remains largely an editor-driven endeavor. How do we drive it more deeply into the newsrooms?

Some civic journalism projects around the country have resulted in stultifying accounts of citizen panels that never seem to engage their participants with passion. How can we improve on the early models?

Civic journalism - reporting that thoroughly engages a broad range of citizens on a level beyond the sound bite Ð- doesn't just require a change of mentality about journalism. It takes tremendous time to do it well, to get close to citizens and listen for a long time. How can we do this and not neglect our other responsibilities?

We hope our massive efforts to turn the ocean liner of journalism in a citizen-based direction have had an impact beyond those isolated projects, but we simply don't know.

But then, we don't really know if our traditional techniques have served us very well, either.

Missing Some Clues
In Minnesota, our very best traditional measures of public support for political candidates - polls that screen for likely voters, close scrutiny of campaign finance records, attention to endorsements and special interest backing - failed to alert us that a former pro-wrestler and third-party candidate named Jesse Ventura would inspire 12,000 first-time voters to show up at the polls in 1998.

A volatile pool of likely voters sent the polls ricocheting up and down for a month before the election - suggesting there would be a lot of last-minute decisions. Our conversations with citizens Ð and there were many - tended to be with those already engaged enough to be planning to vote. The new voters went under the radar, undetected, as we sorted for likely voters in our polling. While the Ventura campaign clearly had some momentum, it didn't appear to be a threat to the Republicans or the Democratic-Farmer-Laborites (as we call Democrats up here).

We discounted the clues we did observe as evidence of Ventura's celebrity: Citizens packed around his booth at the Minnesota State Fair in August. His tremendous support on talk radio. The signing on of the state's politically savvy adman, Bill Hillsman, to the Ventura campaign.

The alarm bells that a stunning upset was in the offing didn't ring - or we didn't hear them - until Election Day, when reporters spent the early part of the day employing the most basic technique of civic journalism:

They hit the polling places and sought out lots of people from lots of different places.

The reporters listened all day. And the citizens spoke very clearly.

No media outlet in the Twin Cities - a vibrant media community with two healthy, competing daily newspapers, a feisty alternative press and lots of quality television and radio reporting - saw the upset coming until they saw busloads of new voters showing up at the polls.

Clearly, even after a decade of experimentation in civic journalism, we aren't as in touch with our readers as we would like to think.

Although, in retrospect, I think public journalism techniques might actually have sniffed out the story two weeks before the election.

Core Journalism Values
My introduction to civic journalism occurred in 1992, at the hands of Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor. Knight Ridder had asked him to explain this emerging form of journalism to frontline editors. Articulate, erudite and just scrappy enough to appeal to newspaper editors, Rosen made a compelling case for trying a new approach.

In November, he visited us in the Twin Cities and was grappling with the same question: What next for civic journalism?

The movement has been declared dead or dying by naysayers many times over 10 years, he noted. Yet when journalists gather and talk about how to reverse circulation declines or how to revive our credibility among the public, the values of civic journalism quickly percolate into the conversation - even if they don't always carry the civic or public journalism label.

It makes common sense to get close to readers, understand their interests, hold public officials accountable for addressing citizen concerns and include citizens' voices in coverage. Call it civic journalism or call it good journalism, it's hard to argue against these core values.

It has been a fascinating decade of experimentation. A few civic journalism experiments around the country have gone off the deep end and failed to serve their communities or have closed the minds of some journalists to a valuable experiment.

For those of us who have decided to use it to add citizen voices to balance official and establishment voices rather than to replace those knowledgeable voices, we've come away convinced that it is strengthening our approach to journalism.

Or maybe it has simply returned us to good journalism and to techniques lost in the daily scramble to get the stories fast and get them in the newspaper. Ask a reporter what prevents him or her from getting close to citizen sources and you will hear one answer: time. The tried-and-true official, who gives good quotes and is paid to be in the office, is a fast solution when editors and deadlines loom. So, if editors want to take this grand experiment and make it part of daily life in newsrooms, they need to be prepared to provide the time.

I can't count the number of times when, after I describe civic journalism to colleagues, their response is: "But isn't that simply what really good journalism is?" Absolutely, but in resource-squeezed newsrooms, the best of our techniques sometimes are squeezed out, too.

"One of the failures of the journalism profession is that journalists are more likely to want to sit out a discussion of ÔHow do we economically save this craft?' " Rosen said.

For those of us convinced that civic journalism is strengthening our profession and is worth the time and resources, it is critical that we remain in that discussion.

The next questions we must confront are very clear:

Has the civic journalism movement truly strengthened our communities beyond the time frame of individual projects?

Does this kind of journalism provoke citizens to be more engaged in their communities over the long term?

And finally, a question of self-interest: Do those citizens, once more engaged in their civic life, develop a strong, sustained desire to be well informed?

Our very existence as reporters and editors of quality journalism - and the access citizens have to quality information - depends on determining the answers. As we try to do that, the second decade of civic journalism promises to be every bit as fascinating and controversial as the first.