By Mary Beth Callie, Regis University
CIVIC & CITIZEN JOURNALISM | One of the most rewarding parts of my tenure as vice chair and now chair of the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group has been the opportunity is to learn from its founders, who are still active in the group. In 1994, when the University of Missouri’s Ed Lambeth founded the Civic Journalism Interest Group and became its first chair, two of its future chairs—Jan Schaffer and Cheryl Gibbs — were on the front lines of the civic journalism movement, which emerged in the late 1980s.
Meeting and working with people such as Ed, Jan and Cheryl has been not only personally rewarding, but also a way of understanding how what started out being known as the public or civic journalism movement continues to strive for approaches to journalism that enhance our democratic way of life.
Looking back at the movement, Lambeth sees the interplay of “creative introspection, professional action, and entrepreneurial scholarship.” Over ten years since they began working with journalists to develop techniques for getting beneath the surface of civic life, Rich Harwood and Jan Schaffer still demonstrate that interplay, as they work toward improving the depth and breadth of news available to citizens.
Harwood’s Institute for Public Innovation, for example, makes its webinars and resources widely available to communities and organizations. The institute also recently partnered with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on its “Community Engagement Initiative” (CEI),with 12 public radio and television stations. Harwood proposes that stations turn outward instead, seeing themselves not as traditional broadcasters but as “community-based leaders with media assets,” spanning boundaries. The CEI includes regular coaching to teach the journalists “community conversation” and authentic engagement practices.
Schaffer, now head of the J-Lab Institute for Interactive Journalism, emphasizes collaborative multi-media partnerships and networking to encourage community engagement in public issues. At J-Lab’s annual luncheon at the AEJMC 2009 convention in Boston, attendees learned about innovative consortiums formed by regional news organizations, such as the Ohio News Organization, which shares stories, in order to avoid duplication and create new possibilities for coverage. About a month later, J-Lab presented this year’s top Batten award for journalistic innovation to The New York Times for its range of digital initiatives. This year, J-Lab will support a Networked Journalism pilot project in which five traditional news organizations will each work with at least five hyperlocal sites.
J-Lab has also supported a recent study of perspectives and behavior in relation to traditional and new media, with a focus on women news consumers and creators. The study finds a changing definition of news, in which both creators and consumers seek to build and participate in community, not just cover community from afar.
Initiatives such as Harwood’s and Schaffer’s reflect a current application of many of the values asserted by the earliest civic/public journalism theorists and practitioners. In 1989, a long-term readership crisis motivated James Batten, CEO of Knight-Ridder, to advocate a renewed sense of public service, with the daily metro newspaper entrusted to connect communities and engage citizens in public life. Studies then had shown reader migration to the suburbs and eroding loyalty to place, competition with commercial television, and the failure of profit-centered newspapers to reinvest in newsgathering and innovation, all coming together to spur the crisis. In response, Batten recognized that newspapers had intellectual and economic resources to rethink their practices.
Batten found an intellectual framework in the research of the Kettering Foundation, particularly Rich Harwood’s Citizens and Politics report (1991), the work of scholars James Carey and Jay Rosen, and editors, such as Jack Swift, Cole Campbell, Buzz Merritt, and Tom Warhover. A conversation between Batten and Rebecca W. Rimmel, president of the Pew Charitable Trusts, led to the formation of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, headed by TV network journalist Ed Fouhy.
Schaffer, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her business reporting with the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined the Pew Center, later becoming its executive director when Fouhy left for work on another project.
The civic journalism movement, as the above narrative suggests, emerged from collaborative relationships and networking of passionate editors and journalists, theorists, educators, and foundations, drawn together to conduct innovative experiments.
Early public journalism experiments pioneered practices that helped news organizations to “move beyond the limited mission of telling the news to a broader mission of helping public life go well.” as Davis “Buzz” Merritt describes in Public Journalism and Public Life. (1998). “When public life is going well, true deliberation occurs and leads to potential solutions.”
Rosen describes how journalists began “moving about in civic space — in their imaginations and their work” to begin “public work” that included asking what kind of map citizen-readers needed, and helping the public to recognize common ground. Gibbs recalls that Harwood’s 1994 report, Meaningful Chaos: How People form Relationships with Public Concerns, was pivotal in her own rethinking of journalism and public life.
Harwood worked with Campbell and Warhover at the Virginian-Pilot and Buzz Merritt at the Wichita Eagle to develop a mindset, practices, and reflexes that centered on supporting “community conversations” and problem-solving.
Inspired by the cultural ecology of David Mathews, Merritt and Harwood collaborated to examine how ideas move through communities. In their assessment, “newspapers didn’t know how to get into communities and neighborhoods to find authentic stories, without a story in hand,” Harwood recalls. Merritt and Harwood’s approaches for mapping and tapping civic life were then synthesized into a workbook, edited and published by the Pew Center. The workbook supported several rounds of seminars that began in Denver in 1999, when journalists and editors newspapers gathered to learn how to map the layers of civic life.
Past, Present, Future
At the 2008 AEJMC convention in Chicago, in a pre-conference panel sponsored by CCJIG, Lambeth stressed that civic and public journalism is still equipped to play a leading educational role, focused on “the really big topics that people are concerned about,” and helping to “break the public policy deadlock.”
On the same panel, Jay Rosen described how the story of civic and citizen journalism depends on the frame that we use: “In the 300 year view, the episode of civic journalism is part of a continuing struggle to bring more people into the political process–to give them roles as participants; to open up politics and discussion beyond the confines of a limited class, ” Rosen explained. From the view of 1988, Rosen added, civic journalism is an “early warning system ” that foreshadowed present conditions.
Today, from a civic and citizen view, the question still remains how traditional news organizations and hyperlocal sites will navigate the “whys” and “hows” of providing needed information, context, and connections for their communities…putting community first.
Thank you to Ed Lambeth Jan Schaffer, Rich Harwood, Cheryl Gibbs, and Jack Rosenberry for conversing with me to prepare this piece. Thanks, too, to Aaron Leavy of the Harwood Institute and Anna Tauzin at J-Lab.
Recommended reading:
Mar. 12, 1009 Civic/Public Journalism Bibliography by David Shedden, Library Director of the Poynter Institute, available at http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=1223
Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists for? (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999).
Edmund B. Lambeth, Philip E. Meyer, and Esther Thorson, Assessing Public Journalism. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
Theodore L. Glasser, Editor, The Idea of Public Journalism (New York and London: Guilford Press,1999)
Cheryl Gibbs and Tom Warhover, Getting the Whole Story (Guilford Press, 2002).
Carmen Sirianni and Lew Friedland, Civic Innovation in America: Empowerment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal (University of California Press, 2001)
Rich Harwood, Making Hope Real (2007)
Five key factors for creating transformative change in communities.Tanni Haas, The Pursuit of Public Journalism. (Routledge Publishing, 2007).
Jack Rosenberry and Burton St. John III. Public Journalism 2.0: The Promise and Reality of a Citizen-Engaged Press. (Routledge Publishing, 2010).