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The citizens participating in focus groups had a problem with the San Jose Mercury News: some thought the paper was kind of bossy, always telling readers what to think.
All you had to do to figure that out was look at the editorial page, they said–– the newspaper’s opinion ran in the most prominent spot on the page, in big type, while the letters from the masses ran much lower on the page, in smaller type.
It was––– and still is––– the prevailing format for American newspapers, and the complaint is one that plagues newspapers everywhere, not just the Mercury News.
But as much as journalists would like to defend themselves against such accusations, Rob Elder, Mercury News editor realized there was some truth to what those citizens were saying, and something needed to change.
“We wanted to break out of the caste system that says the newspaper speaks with a deep authoritative voice, while readers, if they get to talk at all, speak with little piq-squeek voices,” said Elder who runs the paper’s editorial and op-ed pages.
So, he said, “We literally set out to change the relationships between us and our readers.”
Elder’s epiphany came as a result of his efforts to foster public deliberation through the newspaper using the National Issues Forums with the help of local public libraries in the San Jose area.
Starting in fall of 1995, the Mercury News––a respected daily newspaper serving California’s Silicon Valley––– began holding a series of community forums with the public libraries to get people talking about affirmative action. The timing was perfect ––– it was the year before California’s vote on the controversial Proposition 209, which would eliminate consideration of race and gender in hiring decisions, effectively ending affirmative action programs.
Just getting people to really listen to other viewpoints was a daunting enough task, particularly considering the topic. Affirmative action had tremendous potential to polarize Californians along several lines.
But in San Jose, people heard each other out. “We got going, the only large number of multiracial discussions about affirmative action in northern California,” Elder said. In all, 30 forums were held over the next year, the smallest being a cozy discussion among 6 people, the largest a group of 300. Four groups of people met several times over four weeks, and they continued to meet even after the Mercury News’ sponsorship ended.
As is so often the case with public deliberation, the forums didn’t seem to change many minds. But that wasn’t the point, Elder said. The point was to engender enlightenment. “If you believe in the ability of people to govern themselves, it becomes quite important for them to do it in an informed and intelligent way,” he said. “The people I feel most proud about are the ones who said, “It’s going to be much harder to vote now that I have seen the other side.”
The forums accomplished many things besides deliberation, Elder said: Building good will between the newspaper and the libraries, getting people to think of libraries as places where people can go and talk to each other, teaching journalists to listen better.
And the forums taught journalists something about themselves as well, he said. “It made me aware that my mind-set going into this was that the politicians and the journalists were the real players and the public was just the audience.”
It was a mind-set embodied by his own editorial page, vividly symbolized by type sizes.
The forums helped put that in perspective by giving the public’s views greater priority. The Mercury News had one simple rule: Journalists and politicians could listen, but not talk. And the priority was not what citizens said to the public figures from the newspaper and city hall––– it was what citizens said to each other.
That revelation about newspaper’s mind-set was startling enough, but one more was on the way: even as the Mercury News was learning how to foster public deliberation in community forums, it still didn’t know how to do it in the newspaper.
The city editor had sent reporters to some of the forums, but by all conventional measures, those discussions didn’t yield any good stories: Nobody won. Nothing was decided. “We don’t understand discourse or dialogue,” Elder said. “If there is no winner, we don’t think that’s a story.” Eventually, the reporters stopped going.
“But it wasn’t just the news side that didn’t know how to do it–––it was us, too,” he said. In a state with 30 million residents, you can’t just reach people in groups of 60. The challenge was to use the newspaper itself to engage and involve 360,000 readers.”
Elder’s solution––– or at least his first step in what has become an ongoing effort–– was to break down the caste system on his editorial page. He did it by introducing “Another View.”
Another view is an opinion piece written by a member of the public, but it’s far more than a letter to the editor. The writer is given the same amount of space as the person who writes the Mercury News’ editorial, and the piece runs side by side with the newspaper’s opinion, both in the same size type. Instead of making itself king of the mountain, the Mercury News would share the mountain, acknowledging that other opinions are equally important: (The Mercury News’s position is this… and this is what one reader thinks.)
The redesigned section debuted in January 1996, and reaction wasn’t very good.
Before the redesign, focus groups had told the Mercury News they thought the newspaper was a bully that always told readers what to think. After the redesign, fans of the old system came out of the woodwork. “People said, ‘I don’t care what those people think–––I want to know what you guys (at the newspaper) think,’” Elder said.
But he attributed most of the reaction to the shock of the format changes (readers are notoriously resistant to change in their newspaper) and not explaining the idea well enough to readers. “We confused people about what this was going to be,” Elder said.
The editorial writers weren’t all big fans either. Joanne Jacobs, who describes her role in the redesign as “objector,” said: “It was not universally agreed we should be that humble.”
As an editorial writer, Jacobs also dealt with the practical problems of the new format: How to work with people who just couldn’t write very well. How to find readers who could quickly produce an opinion piece about breaking news, such as the president’s State of the Union Address. How to approach issues where differences of opinion were more subtle than simply being for or against something.
It just wasn’t practical to publish these alternative viewpoints all the time, so after the initial rush, the newspaper began publishing Another View pieces less frequently. But Elder also began cultivating sources in the community who could write articulate opinion pieces on short notice, making the task easier. In time, the redesigned section fell into a routine that was comfortable for writers, and readers realized the Mercury News was onto something after all.
“When we endorsed Clinton, we gave half of the page to Dole’s top guy in California,” Elder said. “The reaction was good.”
Jacobs sees the value in the new format as well.
“We do have a lot more debate on the page itself. There’s more than one way to think about issues, and opposing viewpoints encourage more discussion,” she said. “ I think many people see newspapers as big bullies, and if you’re giving them a fair, honest presentation of issues, they love it,” she said.
Minal Hajratwal, the newspaper’s reader representative, said she hears from readers who are concerned about the power of the press in general and the editorial page in particular. “But it’s great to tell them, “You can write Another View,” she said. “I think that helps a lot.”
For the lay writers, it is an unaccustomed privilege. When the newspaper took a stand in favor of an ordinance banning sitting and lying on sidewalks in downtown Palo Alto, it gave equal space to opponent Robert Norse Khan, an advocate for the homeless. When the newspaper took a stand supporting a controversial development at Stanford University, it solicited Another View pieces from both proponents and opponents of the project.
“It was a refreshing change to have the Mercury come to us,” said Andy Coe, director of community relations for Stanford University and writer of the proponents’ Another View piece. “I think it’s a good format. It’s a chance for people to get both points of view and make up their own mind.” Of course, neither Coe nor Khan particularly enjoyed having their pieces edited and cut. But nor do any of the writers at the Mercury News, or any newspaper, for that matter.
The newspaper is still gauging reader response to the changes. Elder didn’t have statistics on whether the redesign attracted more readers or drove them away but, he said, “You can’t measure all of this in numbers. If you kept the same readers but got them thinking more, that wouldn’t show up in the numbers.”
One survey that landed on his desk as he was being interviewed for this article, though, did have preliminary good news: Among readers who noticed the change, people who liked it outnumbered those who didn’t by a margin of more than four to one.
But Elder believes his task––– improving public discourse through the pages of the Mercury News––– isn’t over yet. The evolution, he promised, will continue.
Holly A. Heyser, covers Virginia politics for the Virginia-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia.
” The Kettering Foundation
© Copyright 2001 by YourSITE.com
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