The Pew Center works closely with news organizations in developing civic journalism initiatives, in evaluating these projects and in training journalists in the techniques of civic journalism.
The Pew Charitable Trusts are a group of seven individual charitable trusts established between 1948 and 1979 by two sons and two daughters of Joseph N. Pew, founder of the Sun Oil Co., and his wife, Mary Anderson Pew. The Trusts, a national and international philanthropy with a special commitment to Philadelphia, support non-profit activities in the areas of conservation and the environment, culture, education, health and human services, public policy and religion. Through their grant making, the Trusts seek to encourage individual development and personal achievement, cross-disciplinary problem solving and innovative, practical approaches to meet the changing needs of society.
George B. Autry President, MDC, Inc.
Barbara Cochran Executive Producer, CBS News Political Coverage
John Robert Evans Chairman, Allelix Biopharmaceuticals
Peter C. Goldmark, Jr. President, The Rockefeller Foundation
Michael Janeway Dean, Medill School of Journalism Northwestern University
Sam Kuczun Professor, University of Colorado
Suzanne W. Morse Director, Pew Partnership for Civic Change
Warren Mitofsky President, Mitofsky International
Adam C. Powell III Freedom Forum V.P., Technology Programs
Richard M. Schmidt Jr. Partner, Cohn & Marks
Roberto Suro Reporter, The Washington Post
Frank Sutherland Editor, The Nashville Tennessean
The Pew Center is seeking to help news organizations introduce the techniques of civic journalism to their newsrooms and their communities. The center helped to support 17 projects this year. Funded activities have included sampling citizen issues through polling or focus groups, fostering discussion and debate of issues in town meetings or other forums, using coordinators for community outreach.
The deadline for entries is Oct. 1, 1996. To receive a copy of the funding guidelines, call the Pew Center. Proposals should be outlined in a three- to five-page letter on letterhead, with the contact person clearly identified. They should be sent to the Pew Center, 1101 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 420, Washington, D.C. 20036.
Call Jan Schaffer for more information. 202-331-3200.
TO QUALIFY:
1. Your proposal must entail doing journalism, reporting and news coverage -- not such things as community organizing, block parties, newspaper in education projects.
2. You must have a plan to obtain citizen input on issues or determine the citizens' agenda in your community. Techniques for doing this can include polling, focus groups, survey research, working with existing public opinion data, convening task forces of citizens.
3. You must have other media partners. Your media partnership can be an agreement with other news organizations, preferably the dominant daily newspaper, or commercial television station, or public television and radio, or newspapers, or city and regional magazines.
4. The Pew Center believes it is in the best interests of the public to encourage the broadest practicable participation in any partnerships it helps to fund, consistent with high journalistic principles and sound practices. News organizations receiving Pew Center funding may not exclude for competitive reasons other qualified media partners who ask to join their initiative.
5. You should include a training plan for your newsroom that will help reporters, editors, producers get involved.
6. You should include a budget showing how money would be spent.
7. You should propose how you might evaluate your efforts, in terms of trying to measure what impact, if any, they had on the community. Tracking letters, e-mail, fax, computer clicks, attendance at town meetings, voter results, circulation results, etc.
8. All proposals should be presented via a three to five-page memo or letter, on letterhead.
€ The Charlotte Observer's "Taking Back our Neighborhoods," a 19-month in-depth series on crime in nine city neighborhoods, was called "an unprecedented community/newspaper approach to fighting crime," by the board of judges.
€ The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D., received the award for "A Community on the Rise," which followed citizens' year-long efforts to rebuild the town of Tyndall. It set "an example of what a small daily can do in inspiring a rural community in pursuit of a common cause."
€ The Kansas City Star's "Raising Kansas City" was credited with a "bold and creative leap in building a year-long work of journalism around the exploration of core values that drive society and how those values have been distorted in modern times."
"The central question of democracy is: 'What shall we do?' The journalism in these cases helped citizens to answer that question better," said the Batten Advisory Board, chaired by Tom Winship, former editor of The Boston Globe and chairman of the International Center for Journalism.
"The winning entries all illuminate the basic attribute of civic journalism: Doing journalism in a manner calculated to re-engage people in the process of public life. But each of the winners takes a slightly different path toward that goal. This, the selection committee felt, demonstrates that civic journalism is not a formula or set of techniques, but rather is experimental and open to varying approaches."
"The common thread is that each of these entries demonstrated the impact journalism can have when it moves beyond detachment and the mere chronicling of problems. In no case did the newspapers and broadcast stations set or carry out an agenda. Rather, they gave citizens a way to have a different kind of conversation with each other and to connect with each other in new, more deliberative and useful ways."
The awards were presented May 14 at the annual James K. Batten Symposium in Washington, D.C. (See page 8).The winners were selected from 100 entries by the board, comprised of prominent journalists.
The board also gave special recognition to two other initiatives:
Dallas Morning News' "The We Decade, Rebirth of Community," for cutting-edge reporting on civic re-engagement, a new national trend that is crucial to the revival of public life. The lead reporter was Nancy Kruh.
"We the People, Wisconsin," for fostering public deliberation on issues important to the people of the state. The is an alliance of the Wisconsin State Journal, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, Wood Communications Group, and WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate in Madison, Wis.
Charlotte Observer editor Jennie Buckner said her newsroom, startled by soaring crime, sought a fresh look at an old problem, when it embarked on what would become "Taking Back our Neighborhoods."
"We wanted to offer readers more than another documentation of Charlotte's mean streets," she said.
So her team of reporter photographers and editors asked residents of crime-ridden neighborhoods to help report their story, to identify the problems as they saw them. They sought success stories in Charlotte, where solutions were already in place. And they offered readers itemized lists of ways to get involved personally. More than 1,000 people volunteered to help city officials razed unsafe buildings, a bank built a $50,000 community center, law firms volunteered to sue to shut crack houses.
"Along the way," Buckner said, community "perceptions changed about our coverage of crime -- as did our perceptions of how to cover it."
The Argus Leader's project began when the newspaper wrestled with how to counter the growing disdain and distrust people have of government and politics and how to help rural in the state that were in serious decline.
Then, said Managing Editor Peter Ellis, "the solution became obvious: Get a group of rural South Dakotans from one town together and let them solve their own problems."
To avoid a conflict, the paper enlisted a professor at the University of South Dakota who heads the country's only rural entrepreneurship program to work directly with the townspeople. The paper profiled three communities that were prospering then asked readers to nominate their towns to be the "Community on the Rise."
More than 500 people nominated 56 communities and Tyndall was selected. About 1,200 residents attended the first gathering. "Throughout this, the townspeople alternatively worked together well and fought like crazy. And it is those conversations that mark the biggest success of this project. We got people communicating and cooperating. Talk is the cornerstone of democracy."
By the end the year, the community had created a Tyndall Ambassadors program, to bring their ideas and help to other communities.
In late 1994, The Kansas City Star looked at the new challenges America's children were facing as they confronted new family structures, new technologies, expanding cultural diversity, and increasing violence. And rather than shy away from the political debate over "family values," said Managing Editor Mark Zieman, the paper decided to embrace the debate.
It invited a panel of 13 people to meet and after rigorous discussion they settled on a dozen values considered "most important to instill in young people." Then The Star went to work, reporting on one value per month. More than 50 reporters and editors produced more than 200 stories. Courage -- and how it's interpreted cynically by the media and marketers. Right from Wrong as demonstrated by the young men in "juvie hall." Awe and Wonder, Love of Learning, Proper Use of Money, to name a few.
By the end of the year, the effort had turned into a metrowide movement, Zieman said, as thousands of readers, including teachers, joined the discussion. More than 3,000 people turned out for workshops on such topics as children's discipline, children's literature, children's self-esteem.
And the paper found it couldn't end the project in December, 1995, so efforts are ongoing. "Public pressure to extend it into 1996 was "consistent and intense," Zieman said.
The deadline for the 1997 Batten award will be Feb. 15, 1997. A call for entries will be mailed in the fall. Call the Pew Center to be put on the mailing list or for more information. 202-331-3200.
The Charlotte Observer, "Taking Back Our Neighborhoods."
"The newspaper took an activist role by asking residents in the crime-ridden neighborhoods to report on the root causes of crime, and to participate in the search for solutions. This newspaper effort was grounded on unusually strong neighborhood-by neigh
borhood reporting The newspaper listened to and wrote about people whose voices are rarely heard. Residents all over Charlotte responded, demonstrating that an aroused community can, within the system of public life, take responsibility for its own well-b
eing."
The Argus Leader, "Community on the Rise."
"The newspaper had twin goals: To counter the despair many people have of their government and to help many rural South Dakota towns that are suffering hard times. First the newspaper reported on how three communities had surmounted serious problems and
taken control of their destiny. Then it enlisted a college professor to help one community, Tyndall, address its many problems in a deliberative and public way. The result was the establishment of a model for community discussion and debate over basic va
lues that led to progress for Tyndall, and most importantly, hope for other communities that the process of democracy can work."
The Kansas City Star, "Raising Kansas City"
"More than 50 reporters and editors unabashedly wrote about, discussed and examined 12 basic values, delivering compelling accounts of childrens' struggles and triumphs in a most untraditional way. This was not a polemic; it was a bottom-up enterprise th
at captivated children, parents, schools and social organizations alike. And it was a prime example of how a news organization could connect to its community in a way that engaged thousands of citizens in thinking about their individual responsibility for
making public life go better."
"They attract journalistic notice only when they near the point of getting on an official body's agenda or in some other way come general attention," he said,
Tapping Civic Life, a Pew Center workbook for journalists, is an attempt to map how journalists can enter that messy swamp in ways that will allow them to know about the real issues that concern people before they reach "official" notice. And it is an attempt to help reporters and editors use this information in ways that will improve journalism.
The workbook is based on 18 months of research at The Wichita Eagle, designed by The Harwood Group and funded by the Pew Center.
"The results of this study my reporters is that we learned some new kinds of questions to ask," Merritt told the 100 journalists who attended the unveiling of the book at this year's Batten Symposium May 14 in Washington, D.C.
When journalists locate the unique civic spaces in their communities and listen to those citizens, it adds a lot of value to journalism, Harwood added.
* For one, it helps journalists deal with what Harwood calls "ambivalence," which occurs when citizens are still actively sorting out their thinking on issues as they work toward making a decision. "By illuminating that, you'll get harder-hitting stories, stories that better reflect where a community is; stories that uncover where the real tensions in values are in a community."
* It helps journalists write more accurate stories. "How do we not just get the facts right, but get the right facts. What's the true story here?" Harwood asked.
* It also helps journalists get the whole story. "The difference is between tapping more voices for the sake of tapping them, so that we meet some kind of quota, and hearing different perspectives so that we understand the wholeness of an issue."
The process of tapping into a community's civic spaces, cautioned Harwood, is incredibly messy. "It's like stepping your foot into a swamp and what you come up with a lot times is mud, and goo and a lot of water."
Or journalists will say they are already doing it by going to a couple of town meetings or holding instant polls or running reader "call-in" boxes even though "we don't get deep answers," he said. "And yet, people say we miss what they talk about in their civic life."
In mapping the civic swamp of Wichita, Harwood said he found, like in any ecosystem, multiple layers. Yet journalists, again and again, tend to tap only two of them: the "official" layer, involving coverage of City Council and city agency meetings, and the "private" layers, when we do stories about people's personal lives.
"But civic life actually occurs between those two layers," Harwood said. It happens in "quasi-official" civic association meetings, at the market, in churches and child-care centers, on the sidewalk.
Harwood also found two other important kinds of leaders who "actually make civic life tip," he said. "Connectors" can tell journalists about different kinds of conversations that are going on in a community because they move between various groups. And "catalysts" are those who make things happen by using their influence to get others involved.
"So the challenge is how do journalists get beneath the quasi-official layer to really hear what's going on," Harwood said. "Depending on where you tap into your community, you will hear fundamentally different kinds of conversations. "
To order a copy of Tapping Civic Life, call the Pew Center, 202-331-3200. There is no charge.
"All shared a common assumption," said Stanley Cloud, who directed the project, "that something was radically wrong with political journalism in America and that if journalists themselves didn't do something to correct the problem, they might awake one morning to discover that their fellow citizens were no longer paying any attention to them at all."
The 38-page CEP Case Studies booklet takes you behind the scenes of these efforts in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and California -- plus a ground-breaking on-line initiative in San Francisco and a poll watch experiment -- to explore their successes and failures.
"In general, the Citizens Election Project was a major success when it came to gauging the views of the voters and helping them (as opposed to the politicians and the media) set the agenda for the campaign," Cloud said in the introduction.
"Failure occurred in some areas when the partnerships were forced to rely on the candidates' cooperation. As you will read here, a few town meetings either had to be cancelled or scaled back when the front-running candidates decided, for reasons best known to themselves, to boycott them. The events were citizen-driven, completely non-partisan and unscripted -- and it appears to have been precisely those elements that scared away the front-runners.
" In this era, when candidates believe that the ticket to victory is to do and say as little as possible, it may be naïve to assume that they will cooperate simply to help raise the level of political discourse."
The Case Studies book was released at the Batten Symposium in May, during a panel on covering the 1996 elections "From Citizens Up."
"What I have learned from working with these partnerships is that the voters feel that the press not only doesn't know what's on their minds, but doesn't care. I think that that's the most important bridge we can build," Cloud told the gathering.
"The time has probably come when we need to go beyond town meetings. Not to eliminate them, but to not make them the be-all and end-all of our efforts. To try somehow to incorporate into our newsrooms the idea that civic political journalism is something that shouldn't be just compartmentalized and reserved for special events, but should become part of the very warp and woof of the culture of our newsrooms.
"When we do that, I think then we can drop the civic part and just call it journalism again."
To get a copy, call the Pew Center, 202-331-3200.
The Center was created in 1993 as the centerpieces of the Trusts' initiative, "Renewing our Democratic Heart," to explore the media's role in helping to re-engage citizens in community issues.
The Center works closely with news organizations in experimenting with civic journalism techniques, in evaluating these efforts and in sharing the results through the Center's growing stable of publications, videos, and training workshops.
To date, the Center has helped launched 34 projects in 24 cities. Participating were 22 newspapers, 24 television stations and 20 radio stations. The Center created the 1995-96 Citizens Election Projects and has worked closely with NPR's Election Project s. Last year, the Center launched the $25,000 James K. Batten Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism.
"The news media have such extraordinary power -- to manipulate or motivate, to play to people's cynicism or increase their commitment to participate in community life," said Rebecca W. Rimel, president of the Pew Charitable Trusts. "Civic journalism is o ne way to re-engage people in seeking solutions to their local problems. Under the leadership of the Center, it is becoming the way to do business in many newsrooms across the country and the consumers of news are beginning to respond."
Ed Fouhy, the Pew Center's executive director, said he is grateful for the Pew Trusts' continued support, which will maintain the Center through September, 1999, and he is excited about the opportunities for working with some of the most creative edito rs and news directors in the country in developing new journalistic models.
"The renewal comes at a time when demand for information and training from journalism practitioners and academics is soaring," he said.
"The Center is already moving ahead, planning many more publications and workshops to help meet that need and to help produce journalism that not only engages the public, but subscribes to the most basic definition of good journalism."
Major partners in the Pew Center's work have been National Public Radio and the Radio and Television News Directions Foundation, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the University of Maryland College of Journalism, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, PBS's P roject Democracy, and the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. The Center's grant is administered by Tides Center of San Francisco.