How-to Articles
Public journalism in the newsroom: Putting the ideas into play
By Lisa Austin
Jul 25, 2002, 4:22pm

Public journalism in the newsroom: Putting the ideas into play


When critics of civic journalism say the approach is “just good journalism,” or question whether there’s any need for a movement, I don’t necessarily disagree — until I start looking for citizens in news reports. I find taxpayers and consumers, plenty of residents, and, of course, readers galore. But I don’t see many citizens, and I don’t think I’m alone. “Readers” have so displaced “citizens” in the journalistic rubric that a vice president of a national media chain stopped discussion in a public journalism seminar to ask: “What does that mean? What’s a citizen?” An editor offered this reply: “Citizens get involved in the public process. They either vote or they take a position or they talk to their friends. That is what citizenship is. It is an active verb.” 1
The editor came to that understanding through practice. As experience with public journalism spreads among hundreds of news organizations, and as journalists discuss their experience in interviews and seminars, a multi-stage progression emerges that covers not only public journalism practice, but also motivations for the work, understandings of citizens and their roles in a democratic society, and definitions of public journalism itself. Successive stages appear to develop only with experience. Changes in reporting and editing techniques stimulate greater interest in ideas about democratic society and the journalist’s role in it. In turn, this deeper understanding sparks new journalistic practices, including efforts to incorporate public journalism into the daily report.
“It’s a very difficult concept to understand. It takes a long time to explain it, and you also have to practice it a while before you see the applications of it,” said Portland (Maine) Newspapers Managing Editor Jeanine Guttman.2 “Part of the reason it may be difficult to understand is that it sounds so similar to what you’re (already) doing. Reporters say ‘Yeah, right, I do that.’”
How do public journalism routines differ from other practices? What kinds of stories distinguish civic journalism from “just good journalism?” How might journalists change coverage routines to show what citizens do? In newsrooms where “citizenship” is often a more elusive concept than it might seem, it’s a challenge to show the difference between residents and citizens, especially when a story without citizens is essentially accurate, good enough for Page 1A.

Patterns from the past shaping journalism of the present

Public journalism emerged in a climate of criticism, as the public at large and journalists themselves began to question the profession, its business interests and its role in civic life. The critiques centered, essentially, around three dynamically linked forces that had come to drive the practice of journalism in the late 20th century: economic factors, a change in professional cultures, and questions of effectiveness. As key elements in the rise of public journalism, these developments continue to color the discussion, and in some cases feed misunderstandings that lead to a kneejerk dismissal of the movement.
A sense of crisis opened the door to public journalism in the late 1980s, when journalists began to admit that downward trends in readership and circulation were an ongoing industry force, not a sociological blip driven by the baby boom’s youth. The resulting financial pressures were a stark contrast to the growth period in the ’70s and early ’80s, when resources for newsgathering increased as the industry consolidated: morning and evening papers merged and large media companies bought local news outlets.
Along with gains from economies of scale, corporate acquisitions brought new standards, methods and faces into local newsrooms. Market research for the first time was used to study the “news product,” marking the entree of analytic data and consumer preferences into editorial practice. This was a notable change in routines, both driven by and developed out of the changing character of newsroom staffs. Where journalistic instinct and the gut judgment of editors and reporters with long-standing ties to the community once drove content, now staffs were more transient and standards more outcome-based.
In the last half of the ’80s, the term “customer” became ubiquitous in the news business; media companies made it a goal to improve return by giving consumers what they said they wanted. Using “customer” in reference to members of the community emphasized a producer-consumer relationship between journalists and members of the community. If community members were customers, what were journalists? Sales staff? Marketers? Suspicions about this orientation toward readers — and the underlying implication that journalists were merely purveying a commodity — laid the groundwork for both the development of public journalism and lingering resistances to it.
At the same time the news business was changing, public life continued to deteriorate. The cynicism bred by the Vietnam War and political corruption reverberated, rather than quieting with time. Social trends toward isolation and fragmentation accelerated. Communities — local, state and national — failed to grapple with ongoing problems, as sound bites and spin doctors replaced public deliberation and nuanced reporting.
Journalists began to question whether they were playing a role in the deterioration of public life. They started asking how they might reinvigorate their profession, moving it closer to its ideals. A market research study by media conglomerate Knight-Ridder Inc. couched a new response, showing a correlation between newspaper readership and sense of connection with the community. People who had strong ties to in community life — more than just consumers — were more than twice as likely to subscribe; subscribers were more likely to play larger roles in their communities.3
In response, Knight-Ridder’s then-CEO James Batten began to champion the importance of addressing readers as citizens, not just as consumers. “If we can help revitalize our communities by cracking through the apathy and indifference, we keep faith with the Founding Fathers and, at the same time, look after our own important interests.”4 People wanted to know how to make better decisions in their communities, he suggested; they weren’t just reading for diversion. The difference was as important for the journalists as for the people they served. As citizens, people have rights, responsibilities and identities well beyond those of consumers. In relation to them, journalists are much more than salespeople or entertainers.
By serving citizens, journalists can play a role in democracy, public journalism advocates believe, thus restoring a professional purpose that is undermined when news is treated merely as one more product in a consumer society. Few journalists garner personal and professional satisfaction from “selling” newspapers. That kind of satisfaction comes from the watchdog and information-gathering roles — looking out for and reporting on the interests of the citizens, as citizens themselves.

Stage one: Beyond the customer: helping citizens get started

Regardless of the kind of critique that leads a journalist or a newsroom to interest in new practices, the conclusion is usually “We need to do better.” “Better” is usefully simplistic, because at this point the journalist rarely has a conceptual foundation for understanding the difference between the limited identity of “reader” and the broader identity of “citizen.” As a result, “better” usually means providing more or a different kind of information. Sometimes that’s as simple as more citizens used as sources in stories. Sometimes it’s a new angle or frame of reference, sometimes a move to offer solutions in coverage.
In such early attempts, public journalism work commonly involves how-to tips for citizens: whom to call, where to send questions, how to get involved, where to go to talk about an issue. The work also often offers how-to advice by example, citing solutions developed by communities facing similar problems. Also typical at this point are plans for a new strategy of contact with the public — more invitations to write or fax, more phone numbers or e-mail addresses into the newspaper, audiotext, more listings.
“Just bringing those voices in every day can really transform a newsroom,” said Mizell Stewart III, projects editor at the Akron Beacon-Journal, where a citizen-based series on race relations won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for public service.5
Later in the practice of public journalism, efforts often incorporate investigative or computer-assisted journalism to lay out problems, then involve citizens in the development and implementation of solutions. Journalists who are experienced in public journalism talk about “holding citizens responsible” just as they hold politicians responsible. But for beginners who still think citizens just need more facts and phone numbers, there’s a risk. Unless the journalist gets on the citizen wavelength and understands how citizens discuss issues among themselves, efforts to “hold citizens responsible” may degenerate into a rationale for more journalism as usual. If only citizens paid attention to our coverage, the journalist can rationalize, they’d do something.
It’s not that simple.

Stage two: public listening

Learning to listen to citizens in new ways is the most transformative step in the practice of public journalism, because it is ultimately humbling. The journalist who drops all preconceived notions of news and instead listens for how citizens see things learns something new, beginning to conceive of a mission other than “the journalist’s solemn duty to protect people from their own ignorance,” as journalism educator Cheryl Gibbs puts it.6
It’s a progressive transformation that develops as a desire for better connections with readers sparks changes in reporting techniques. Alternative coverage begins to encompass new sources, group interviews or a broad source base such as an interview pool of poll respondents. By talking differently with different people, the journalist may begin to change the conception of the source’s basic identity. Instead of seeing a citizen they are interviewing as merely a “good quote,” a “reader,” or (at a commonly muttered extreme) “some idiot,” it is possible for a journalist to recognize times when sources step out of themselves and weigh their own interests against the needs of the community.
The change can be a special challenge when demographic differences between newsroom staffers and local residents compound difficulties in understanding. Rising professional standards in the industry over the past 20 years mean journalists are on the whole better educated, and often earn higher incomes, than the community at large. Journalists may be further isolated from their communities if newsroom staff are transients on a career track, or if perceptions of conflicting interests serve to formally or informally discourage involvement in community activities.
To overcome the gap in understanding, journalists “have to ask more questions,” says Portland’s Guttman.7 “When someone says ‘crime,’ say, ‘What do you mean by that?’ It’s more difficult. We’re so used to hit-and-run reporting — go in, get out, do the story and you’re on to something else. That’s what’s hard to unlearn. In many ways we’re addicted to that. We and the government and the bureaucrats speak a common language, but the public speaks its own language that doesn’t necessarily click.”
In Philadelphia, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Chris Satullo found himself baffled by the lack of community response to an editorial-page initiative that sought to bring together city and suburban residents to tackle common problems.
“I was far more interested in the question of the modern postwar suburb hitting middle age and whether in confronting that, suburbs might find new political reasons to ally themselves with cities,” Satullo said.8 “I have written well-thought-out editorials and columns with beautiful turns of phrase and it makes no difference to the population I’m trying to engage, the suburbanite who says, ‘The city of Philadelphia? To hell with it.’”
But after 80 community meetings and a new round of invitation for input from the community, Satullo began to discover what he called “the first issue.”
“They feel like the place they grew up has been stolen from them,” he said. Suburbanites who left Philadelphia say, essentially, “You can talk all you want about economies of scale and land-use planning, but don’t you expect me to let the same forces that stole my boyhood home come out here and do the same thing to the home I’ve worked for in the suburbs.”
That’s actually a much more interesting conversation for most people than questions of land-use planning. But it’s a conversation that can go unnoticed by reporters. It is, as Akron’s Stewart said, “a mindset in terms of looking at people. Instead of looking at them as the great unwashed, we look at their opinions as the ones that matter.”9


Stage three: Deliberation

As journalists begin listening to citizens, putting ideas into practice, they can drop their own expert position and find, sometimes to their surprise, that teaming the media and the citizen generates a powerful new authority that neither citizens nor journalists have alone.
This stage commonly marks a retreat from the suspicion that public journalism sacrifices professional skills and practices. Instead, journalists often begin to recognize that their skills have little meaning without a well-understood sense of the citizen’s interest. This new attitude resolves what is, essentially, cognitive dissonance in the professional culture: the traditional journalist’s belief that he or she is on the citizens’ side, jangling in tension with the sense that the public is poorly served by the press and with the awareness that stories written “in the public interest” too often result in little change.
“I think the key is not to create another kind of journalism, but to ask how do we help our kind of journalism evolve,” said Nancy Kruh, a features writer for the Dallas Morning News who originated a landmark 1995 series on the rising interest in civic life.10 The stories never mentioned her own industry’s work, nor was she familiar with public journalism when she started the series. “... Where else do people get community news? Covering it is a lot more than what’s going on in churches or schools. It’s a field as much as government is a field, and a field that has been under-reported. I think our society suffers from it. Where do you find dialogue?”
Dialogue is the critical element of this stage, the outgrowth of repeated conversations with citizens, where reporters discover that people have a pretty good grasp of basic issues and want to discuss them. They learn to listen for what Satullo in Philadelphia called “the first” issue, discovering a discussion different than the ones in legislative chambers or city council meetings.
In interviews and the resulting stories, people are more likely to say how their perspective is influenced by personal experience and emotion. They’re quicker than lawmakers to talk about links among problems that seem disparate at first glance. (They might say bad schools are related to juvenile crime which in turn is related to breakdowns in families, and so on.) And they’re less likely to draw conclusions quickly. Decision-making isn’t a linear process; people take in and consider different ideas again and again until one “just clicks.”11
“A report is much less conflict-centered, much more tension-centered,” said Cole Campbell, a pioneer of public journalism as editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, now editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.12 “What are the tensions keeping something from happening, not so much ‘Gotcha!’...The writing changes, that’s what you know. It falls away from the official master narratives of conflict and good guys/bad guys and gets to be exploration of what issues facing community need to be addressed.”
Reportage at this stage moves toward encouraging community dialogue by replicating the deliberative process on the page or on the air, over an extended period of time. It covers emerging steps toward common ground and beginning ideas about home-grown solutions, providing a forum where people can consider and work through the issues in the common space of the newspaper.
In San Jose, Editor Rob Elder worked to develop editorial pages that try to replicate this process on the page. Offering prototypes to focus groups, he found people eager for differing opinions and utterly uninterested in the questions he and fellow journalists had about the new pages. They were scornful of the paper’s award-winning editorial efforts.
“They said the most unflattering things, like, ‘Who do people think they are with the arrogance to tell us what to do about this, with mastheads listing the names of persons in charge, and editorials written by people we don’t know.’ They went on and on about who (do) these people think they are,” he said.13 “The difference in perceptions about the need for an institutional voice between journalists and non-journalists is about 100 percent. Journalists see it as very necessary and readers see it as the first thing to throw overboard. There wasn’t a hint of reverence for institutional voice.”
Instead, readers preferred pages with at least one differing opinion, which they saw as an attempt at fairness. They preferred seeing the names of editorial writers on the page. And most importantly, Elder said, “They got it that we’re trying to create a page that’s like a forum, seeking common ground and deliberation,” even though the readers had no introduction to these concepts.

Stage four: Framing

Informed by the study of contemporary democratic life, journalists who have engaged in deliberative conversations come slowly to recognize that the basic cut or “frame” citizens put around issues is a different way of looking at a problem than the lens through which journalists or policy makers see things. Consequently, they often drop the claim that their everyday choices about coverage are neutral. They recognize that issue-framing itself is an act charged with consequences for public life. Fairness and even-handed treatment remain as essentials in reporting and editing, but the work is done with an awareness of journalist’s power, informed by the conscious understanding that only citizens can name and frame their problems effectively.
“I think gradually I’m getting oriented to a different outlook,” said Doug Floyd, an editor at the Spokane Spokesman-Review.14 “When I’m at these activities where civic leaders with the best of intentions say they’ve identified our problems and they must now build a strong public consensus through our community, I want to stand up and bang on the window and say, ‘How can you do that when you’re deciding what the problems (are)?’ Especially when the ego is being stroked by yourself or by others and you think it is your role and your right to judge for other people who has something to say and who doesn’t.”
The journalists do not presume to make these decisions, either. A well-functioning public sphere is one in which citizens are involved and take responsibility for their community’s well-being, not one in which journalists wield power to force specific actions or further any interest. The journalist’s goal is for citizens to see new ways to engage in public life, taking on the responsibility of solving the community’s problems for themselves. Those who have practiced public journalism over a period of time begin to talk about holding citizens responsible, obviously reflecting a belief that citizens are not idiots after all.
“There’s a danger of romanticizing average citizens that’s shot through all this — they can get by with saying platitudes and sounding profound,” said Chris Satullo in Philadelphia.15 “How do we engage them in a respectful way while still holding them responsible, being honest about that without being dismissive?”
He puts forwards a strategy suggested by Michael Kinsley in a New Yorker article Satullo keeps pinned above his desk: “We need a new form of democratic piety. It shows respect not contempt for people to hold them to the same intellectual standards you would hold yourself or a friend.”

Stage five: engagement

The effort to engage citizens is public journalism at its most experimental, not — as critics charge — because the journalists take sides, moving into advocacy, but because engagement is ephmeral, sometimes consistent, more often momentary, and virtually impossible to measure. A community can be engaged by an issue for three months, then resolve the particular problem and move on; likewise, citizens may be merely attentive, interested at the moment but unwilling or unable to tackle their underlying troubles.
Those who practice public journalism do not define engagement as journalistic interest in a specific outcome; in fact, the opposite is true. The only outcome public journalists advocate is an engaged citizenry, moved out of frustration and cynicism into and deliberation and resolve. When public journalism is effective, it leaves something behind — a conversational effect, at the least, and, at best, an ongoing structure for citizen participation.
It’s hard to pin down “engagement,” in part because public journalism is still new enough to make it a distant goal for most. Instead, the driving question might be: “What does the community need to know or do to take responsibility for itself?” The answer is not simply more information; rather, the answers build on lessons learned in previous stages about citizens and what say they need to re-engage in public life, from how-to tips to wholesale reframings of the narratives used to discuss major issues.
“This movement seems to diagnose what’s wrong with this country as our lack of civic duty,” said Nancy Kruh.15 “We’ve forgotten how to be citizens. Instead, we’re taxpayers and clients of the government — political speeches over the years stop referring to citizens and start referring to taxpayers. ...What’s really going to resonate is this call to come together. I’m waiting for that voice to come to the surface.”
That voice rightfully resonates in the community itself, though the news organization may have earlier convened town meetings, hired community coordinators or published coverage that led new groups to form. The goal is to develop coverage that helps tosurface the public voice.
In Norfolk, members of the League of Women Voters clipped the paper for a month to chart the paper’s commitment to public journalism, then offered editors a surprise critique. Held to its own standards, the paper drew a mixed review from the League. Nonetheless, the critique was published it for all readers to see. 16 And League members did say they could see a difference. Their report pointed out stories that considered all points of view including, say, a victim’s, and which gave people a sense of possibility that crime could be fought by showing where citizens could take action.
“Everyone seeks to influence us one way or another, but this was not lobbying, it was performance appraisal,” said Cole Campbell of St. Louis, formerly executive editor in Norfolk.17 “It was doing public journalism to us — holding us responsible for what we do.”
That responsibility in some ways closes the loop journalists open when they start where readers start, bringing the paper back together with its community. That doesn’t happen at a given moment, but in leaps and bounds — and integrated stages.
“Even long-term, there’s no silver bullet,” Campbell said. “You have to get 12 or 14 or 132 things right. You have to get design, and data, and accuracy right, and you have to get the public journalism. It isn’t going to be one thing. It’s everything, and we’re in a war zone all the time.”

Notes

1. Project on Public Life and the Press seminar transcript, American Press Institute, March 25, 1995, p. 48.

2. Author’s interview with Guttman, August 1995.

3. Batten, James K. “Newspapers and Communities,” in “Community Connectedness,” by Jay Rosen. The Poynter Papers: No. 3, p. 13. St. Petersberg: The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1993.

4. ibid, p. 15.

5. Author’s interview with Stewart, July 1995.

6. Author’s interview with Gibbs, June 1997.

7. Author’s interview with Guttman, August 1995.

8. Author’s interview with Satullo, July 1995.

9. Author’s interview with Stewart, July 1995.

10. Author’s interview with Kruh, April 1996.

11. The Harwood Group. “Meaningful Chaos: How People Form Relationships with Public Concerns,” p. 7. Dayton: Kettering Foundation, 1993.

12. Author’s interview with Campbell, July 1995.

13. Author’s interview with Elder, August 1995.

14. Author’s interview with Floyd, July 1995.

15. Author’s interview with Satullo, July 1995.

16. Hartig, Dennis, “Changing a Professional Culture: The Case of Public Journalism,” presentation to Council on Foundations Civil Investing Seminar, San Francisco, Calif., May 3, 1995. For further details, see Jay Rosen, “Getting the Connections Right,” p. 71. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996; and Cole Campbell, “League Takes Us at Our Word, Studies Our Effort to Serve Citizens Better,” Virginian-Pilot, June 18, 1995, p. A2.


Lisa Austin was research director for the Project on Public Life and the Press. Her professional experience includes seven years at the Wichita Eagle, where her coverage of public policy and military issues garnered national and regional awards. She also has served on the staff of former Congressman Dan Glickman, now U.S. secretary of agriculture, and worked as an arts administrator at two major museums. She holds a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, specializing in strategic nuclear policy, and degrees in political science and journalism from Wichita State University.

Copyright © 1997 by the Kettering Foundation

© Copyright 2001 by YourSITE.com