In the 1990s, I was part of a national experiment that foreshadowed some of today's "new journalism."
I was news director at KPLU-FM in Seattle-Tacoma. I was invited by NPR and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies to join in what we were calling "civic journalism" projects.
The two main features of the projects were 1) to partner with other media in our market to form a coherent media campaign, and 2) to engage citizens in the journalistic process to better address their needs.
"...if you do it right, the professional journalist remains instrumental."
Sound familiar? Even if you never heard of civic journalism, today you can't do journalism without directly inviting the public to become active participants in the process. Nor is the prospect of forging a media-partnership the least bit foreign. Both ideas were rather new then.
What we learned in one of the most studied efforts, in 1994, was chronicled by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism (which helped fund many of the experiments). Below are the six pages (saved as pdf files) that summarized "The Front Porch Forum" -- a collaboration between KPLU, KUOW and The Seattle Times.
At the time, the most contentious thing was whether reporters -- by taking direction from regular folks -- were somehow abdicating their roles as definers of issues, sorters of facts, and deciders of stories. The answer then is the answer now: no, not if you do it right, the professional journalist remains instrumental.
"it should be noted that our efforts failed in one significant way."
However, it should be noted that our efforts failed in one significant way. If we had done a better job of *listening* to the public, we would have seen that year's republican landslide coming. (This was when Newt Gingrich and his "Contract with America" overtook the Democratically controlled House of Representatives two years into the first term of President Bill Clinton.)
But reading back over these results, I'm more amazed at the other trials and tribulations that presaged the challenges of today.
Among them: how to form a good partnership and sustain it. We rejected a TV partner back then because we felt the commercial stations couldn't set aside their sensational ratings-driven approach (which we feared would have translated into "horse-race' style political coverage). However, we did manage to forge "a truce" between competing NPR stations. And though the culture of the Seattle Times was a bit arrogant at times, it showed a newspaper made a decent partner with radio.
The other real harbinger of the challenge still today is how to engage citizens, how to pull what's meaningful, and how to translate that into news content with strong interest. Because our "conversation with the community" itself was so unique, we featured it as a selling point. Today, you wouldn't. But back then, just listening to people and featuring their voices and views (outside of the common "man on the street" format) was unusual and compelling. What was especially powerful then and remains powerful today is how we took citizen demands and relayed those demands directly to the candidates for elected office.
I left KPLU in 1995 and it looked the project was finished. I remember the sinking feeling I got when I checked the Website that we set up (another cutting edge tool at the time). A forlorn citizen has logged on and was posing a question. Only no one was monitoring the project and his voice seemed to trail off in silence. Hello? Anyone listening to us anymore? (Lesson: don't raise people's hopes about being there for them unless you can sustain it!) Later, the partners found a way to continue the Front Porch Forum for a few more years.
One final note: If you look online you'll see a new outfit in New England has borrowed the name Front Porch Forum for a community-connection effort. Good for them. I hope they learned from us.
ShareThis
