Minneapolis, June 20, 1997 - I want to welcome you all here -- to what may be for many of you a venture into the realm of what we sometimes call experimental journalism but I think that by the end of the weekend, you're going to discover that it's really nothing more than the most fundamental, basic good journalism. Journalism 101 -- with at times some more interactive elements thrown in.

And I don't necessarily mean on-line interactive -- I mean basic shoe-leather interactive -- getting out into your communities and listening to your people. But one of the wonderful things is that civic journalism is wonderfully compatible with the new technologies.

Similarly, we want this workshop to be very interactive. And to help that come about, we deliberately kept this session much smaller. We had 80 journalists in Baltimore last fall, 80 in Cincinnati this spring. While that's great for the ego, one thing we learned is that if you have to walk up to a microphone to ask a question, it kills a lot of spontaneity.

So, no aisle mikes here. We want to hear from you. Ask questions, pose challenges, debate, agree, disagree, create, invent, take risks -- tell us your stories. But most importantly, be in our faces and the faces of our panelists -- sorry, folks.

We've titled this conference "Tapping the Hidden Stories in Your Community" because it comes only three weeks after the release of a new report, commissioned from research at the Wichita Eagle on how to tap into what the Eagle's editor, Buzz Merritt, calls "The Swamp" of civic life. It's sort of a workbook on how to dig deeper into our communities so journalists can get closer to issues and ideas before they filter up through the food chain of community groups and elected officials. How do we enter civic spaces now occupied by what our researcher, Rich Harwood, calls civic catalysts -- people who make things happen in a community, but don't hold any titles -- and civic connectors, those folks who get things done in a community because when they ask you to do something, you'll never turn them down.

Why bother? Well, it's certainly another way to diversify our "source list" but with civic voices -- not just minority voices. It's another way to get stories first (In Wichita, Harwood's interviewers learned long before the Wichita Eagle that a major local grocery store was going belly up.) It helps us ask better journalistic questions, see more possibilities for framing stories and write harder-hitting stories.

And all of this is really what civic journalism is all about: to try more aggressively to get citizens' voices, their issues, their agenda, into our news reports. Not just the voices of "elected officials" or so-called "experts."

At its heart, civic journalism is about giving people the information they need to behave like citizens -- rather than as consumers of your product -- be you a newspaper, radio or television station. And you'll hear this weekend a lot of talk about building community capacity.
There is a concern among some of us journalists that we are teaching something called "learned helplessness" through our news coverage. We do this in two ways: By buying into the expert view of things. And buying into the hopelessness view.

The Expert View suggests that our problems are so great that only the experts are qualified to speak about them. Nobody else is worth quoting.

The Hopelessness View occurs when we don't find sources to quote who have the sense that the problems we're writing about are no more difficult or insurmountable than the problems we as a nation have solved in the past.

Well, civic journalism means covering issues not so cynically that your readers and listeners give up hope for any solutions, but covering them so that you also focus on areas of agreement as well as disagreement. And it means finding other people to quote who have a sense of the possibilities.

Wichita Eagle editor Buzz Merritt says that to practice civic journalism requires a bit of a mental journey -- a journey toward the conscious realization that journalists are not totally detached from civic life. Not totally detached from civic life.

Well, we journalists tend to be bi-polar creatures. So if we’re not totally detached, we must be attached, right?

Herein lies the root of some of the criticism by the uninformed. That civic journalism is advocacy journalism or boosterism.

Well, editors around the country who are practicing good civic journalism -- and not all of it is good -- can tell you that taking one step back from total detachment -- from being so far removed that we don't care whether even our own system of government, our democracy, is working (It's not our problem we say.) -- that one step back from detachment is not antithetical to the values of good journalism.

One step back from total detachment is not -- NOT -- one step back from objectivity and neutrality as journalists attempt to practice those things.

Rather it is a realization that our job is to do more than just provide information -- cold, hard information. It's more than just writing about our elected officials as "freaks" and turning citizens into spectators to watch the freak show.

It's more than just getting the right facts, as Richard Harwood would say. It's about getting the facts right. A subtle but important distinction. So that when readers and listeners and viewers come to our stories they are shaking their heads "Yes" -- it rings true, that journalist "Got it."

I suspect that by now we have all seen the most recent feedback on declining readership and viewership. Just last month the Pew Research Center for People and the Press -- that's not us but a brother organization -- reported that fewer than half the public -- 42 percent -- now say they regularly watch one of three network news broadcasts. That is down from 48 percent last year and 60 percent in 1993.

The percentage saying they had watched TV news "yesterday" slipped to 59 percent this year. That number had been as high as 74 percent as recently as 1994.

Now the poll found no further decline in newspaper readership this year -- although we all know where circulation numbers are heading. Only half those polled -- 50 per cent -- said they had read a newspaper the day before the survey -- that's higher than the 45 percent registered last year -- but down from 58 percent in 1994. For you radio types the numbers are stable -- 4 in 10.

Clearly, we are becoming less indispensable to people's lives.

I think we at the Pew Center, and RTNDF and the Poynter Institute see civic journalism as one way -- certainly not the only way -- to do our jobs better.

How?

1) It helps us listen better. One of the stories you will hear this weekend is that long before Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire presidential primary, a partnership of the Boston Globe, WABU-TV and NPR knew that the economy was a major issue for voters.

"It's still the economy," was the lead of the Globe story in November -- based on listening to citizens in polls, discussion groups and focus groups.

Yet Dole the day before the primary -- in February now -- says he didn't realize how important the economy was to voters. And neither did the rest of the national media. The New York Times didn't launch its major -- and very good -- downsizing series until March.

Imagine how different the national conversation would have been if the press had listened to voters in the fall -- instead of presuming that Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America would be the agenda for the campaign.

2) Civic journalism helps us do our job better by framing stories better. Buzz Merritt, the editor of the Wichita Eagle, talks about a classic pro-con environmental story involving Kansas farmland in which his reporter decided to go and find the farmer who was neither totally for or totally against the proposal, but was in-between. Was ambivalent.

A lot of civic journalism is about writing about those gray areas of ambivalence because you know what? That's where most of our readers are.

They are not totally for or totally against abortion. Or totally for or against raising taxes for school improvements, new roads, whatever.

There is almost always a much more complex web of concerns. Yet how often do we journalists play up the conflicts -- the opposite sides or poles of an issue -- rather than report the concerns of most of our readers.

I'll tell you one thing. It's a lot harder to write about the gray area. We all know how to write the black and white. In fact, it's a knee-jerk reaction.

Karen Weintraub, a young civic journalist at the Virginian Pilot in Norfolk recently described to journalists in our Cincinnati workshop an exercise she tries to practice to keep herself from doing knee-jerk journalism. She steps backs, pulls out a sheet of paper and tries to figure out all the parties she can think of who might have an interest in this particular issues. Who are the "stakeholders." And what is this story really about anyway? It's amazing, she says, what a different lens it brings to your story.

3) Civic journalism is about helping citizens be citizens. And sometimes these days, they need a little help. They need a road map.

So when the Charlotte Observer wrote about crime in nine of that city's most violent neighborhoods, it not only did computer-assisted reporting and crunched crime numbers. It also published a list, a needs list of what the residents -- not the newspaper -- said the communities needed. And you know what? More than 1,000 people from all over Charlotte responded.

As editor Jennie Buckner has said: "All too often, we print stories that move our readers to call us and say: 'What can we do?" And our response is: "It's not our problem."

4) Civic journalism is about recognizing that journalists, despite all our good intentions have preconceived notions and biases.

When Wichita Eagle reporter Jim Cross got wind of a wealthy neighborhood that was planning to built a wall around itself, his first instinct, he said, was to slam them as a bunch of elitists. That was going to be -- in what is admittedly some civic journalism jargon here -- his "master narrative." Instead -- prodded by Rich Harwood -- he decided to go out and knock on some doors in that community and you know what? He found out that these folks were not very different from anybody else.

5) Finally civic journalism is about taking risks to find a way to connect better to our readers. It's not a process. It's very much a work in progress.

We at the Pew Center have come to use the shorthand that we are sort of a venture capital fund for risky journalism experiments around the country. But we are also serious journalists about the business of serious journalism. Then we use the results of our research and our funding -- the successes as well as the failures -- the lessons learned, to educate the rest of the profession. We're betting on leadership, on creativity. We'll have some hits and some outs. But that's the nice thing about being a non-profit. We don't have to worry about being profitable. We can afford to take risks.

So it was risky when the Bergen Record invited citizens to a town meeting in Teaneck, NJ, to talk about why more school resources were going to white kids than to black kids. It could have become a melee but it didn't. It launched a community discussion.

And it was risky when in a statewide town hall meeting with Wisconsin gubernatorial candidates, televised live, an executive producer at Wisconsin Public Television gulped and called on a citizen in an garish American flag shirt to ask a question on live television.

He could have been a nutcake. But you know what? He was just your average street-smart citizen. And he asked the best question of the evening. It was Page One news around the state. He simply demanded that the two candidates deliver to him in writing, two weeks before the election, their plans for reforming the state's property tax system.

What were the candidates going to do? They paused for only a moment, then said OK. No journalists had that kind of success.

It just goes to show a number of lessons we are learning: That citizens are pretty smart, and that they can demand a kind of accountability that journalists can't.

These were all cases where the journalists were objective -- just not totally detached. So, we're discovering how we can walk and chew gum at the same time. In that vein I give you Ed Miller. Let the games begin.