JOURNALISM THAT MATTERS
A national conversation
“Journalism provides something unique to a culture –
independent, reliable, accurate, and comprehensive information that citizens
require to be free…At stake is whether, as citizens, we have access to independent
information that makes it possible for us to take part in governing ourselves.”
– Bill Kovach & Tom Rosenstiel,
The Elements of Journalism
The forces
affecting journalism today are many and varied.
They range from recent issues of media access in
To meet the
needs of a healthy society, it is time to bring together the many faces of
journalism to re-conceive its role by revisiting its purpose, its potential to
serve the public and how it can best fulfill its promise in this new
century.
The proposal
outlined initiates nationwide conversations, using methods such as Open Space
Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, Dialogue and Conversations Cafés that have
proven highly effective in other industries.
It proposes engaging the entire system of journalism – reporters,
editors, publishers, camera people, photographers, and audience, from
newspapers, radio, television, online media, including both mainstream and
alternative sources – about the changing nature and definition of news in order
to recommit to what is fundamental and to reinvent the means for connecting
news with its audience.
Journalism
stands at a crossroads. It can adapt to a volatile world and remain a vital and
vibrant force, or it can stumble and risk failing as a socially important
enterprise. The time is overripe for a series of national conversations among
the people who are involved with the news to engage in a meaningful examination
of storytelling. Learning how to tell stories in new ways, can lead to
discoveries that will help ensure that journalism has a compelling and valued
future. Through this process,
participants will discover new ways of thinking and working that will renew the
bond between audience and journalist.
THE POSSIBILITIES
For some years now, journalists and
others have engaged in sporadic, sometimes contentious, often angst-ridden
dialogues about the future of the craft and how effectively it serves public
needs in an age of instant communications, corporate amalgamation and
technological shifts. Out of these discussions have emerged some important
experiments and possibilities, including widespread discussions of professional
credibility, centers on journalism excellence, various forms of civic or public
journalism, and on-line extensions of newspapers, television stations and other
media.
One study, “Telling Stories: Building Community by Improving
Communication" (see www.goodnewsgooddeeds.org),
found that communities yearn for news media to reassess their role in a
community's communication system. Accordingly, journalists might benefit from
picturing a time …
… when journalism serves public needs in a full and
interconnected way
... when stories of how and why decisions that affect a community are made are
available to citizens in an easy-to-understand format
...when diverse voices and innovative experiments in any community are
routinely covered
... when news media show the community possible futures
… when everyone in the community can see the web of relationships among government, businesses and civic organizations that causes projects to flourish or wither
... when journalists hold institutions (of education, arts, government) accountable in ways meaningful to the public and to the institutions themselves
... when stories are told in a way that offers journalists and their audiences
time and space for reflection and learning
... when journalists play a role that is seen as vital to their communities.
Imagine some of the possibilities that might emerge from a thoughtful dialogue
among journalists:
* learning from various experiments in new approaches to journalism
* applying skills of reporting and editing to new media in ways that build newsroom morale and capabilities
* discovering ways to make coverage even more local and useful
* connecting more authentically with young people and other traditionally overlooked or underserved populations
* seeing ways to tell stories with multiple voices that make complex issues more understandable
* redefining "community" in ways that go deeper than "market segments," yet at the same time deliver more readers to advertisers
* making newsgathering processes more visible
so that community members value this work.
The universe of possibilities is unlimited. By bringing together journalists at the grass roots, considerable energy and insights can be brought together to improve the practice and practical value of journalism.
THE
In some ways, American journalism has never been stronger. Every year, it builds on its traditions and notable moments by preserving free expression, checking otherwise unrestrained power and holding institutions and public leaders accountable for their actions. At this moment, many news organizations are enjoying record returns, even as dot-coms, once feared, have lost their luster on the stock market. Readers, viewers and listeners affirm that they value the watchdog role of the press.
But all is not well. Readers, viewers and listeners also communicate a broad dissatisfaction with the news media, which is reflected not only in surveys but also in the fragmenting and declining audiences for newspapers and broadcast news. This in turn has created anxiety among owners and managers of news media enterprises, who worry about the financial health of their companies, and among working journalists, who worry about not reaching or effectively serving their readers, viewers and listeners. Meanwhile, the digital world continues to evolve and grow, attracting talented journalists and advertisers. Like the Chinese symbol for crisis, journalism is at the intersection of danger and opportunity. It is the time to reconceive journalism.
Five Key Challenges
There are at least five challenges facing journalists in every community. A rich, national dialogue on these issues, held at sites across the country, would address:
· The challenge of purpose: Journalists speak anxiously about values, the rise of competition, what is happening to their world. At the heart of this anxiety is uncertainty about the purpose of journalism in the current mix of information and technology and amidst social, economic and political transformations.
· The challenge of audience: Parallel to anxiety over purpose is anxiety over the appropriate relationship between the journalist and her or his audience. Journalists are anxious about when to treat their users as citizens, when as consumers and when (if ever) as equals and partners in efforts to understand the world.
· The challenge of craft: Even as journalists as a whole are becoming more proficient in craft skills of reporting, writing, editing, photography, graphics and design, questions about how each craft skill serves the purpose and mission of journalism keep arising. What are the best ways to report and present stories, given the shifts in society and in the media landscape? How can journalists clarify standards of news judgment – standards that journalists, citizens and communities can fully support as useful and important? As journalists adapt to multimedia platforms and media convergence, will the standards and values of one medium become those of other media? What might be gained or lost with such convergence?
·
The challenge of limits: Journalists constantly bemoan the limits
they face: limited time to work on stories, limited resources for travel or
research or staffing, limited newshole or airtime –
or unlimited cyberspace with limited resources to fill it. The emphasis on dailyness (and now hourliness and
minuteliness) reinforces the primary roles played by
reflexes and routines in shaping a journalist’s work, rather than reflection
and fresh approaches. How can journalism remain timely and alert to breaking
news as it also becomes reflective and inclusive in defining newsworthiness?
How can journalists match their limited resources to news with a global,
seemingly unlimited, scope?
· The challenge of joy: Where does the passion, spirit and delight of journalism come from now? How can we sustain it? How can journalists measure, celebrate and reap the rewards of their contributions to the individuals and communities they serve?
THE POWER OF
STORYTELLING
An effective way to address these challenges is through something journalists know well: storytelling. Indeed, stories shape the purpose and audience of journalism.
The old stories of how things work – the image of life as a giant machine (that just needs fixing), of relationships as "two halves make a whole," of government as the necessary parental authority figure – no longer convey how things really work. Marriages are failing, politicians can never satisfy us, and problems generally can't be solved by any one simple action. Yet these old stories continue to be told and retold by most of our news media. A more sophisticated approach to storytelling that embodies diverse cultures is more likely to reflect what's really going on. The Internet makes it possible for more people to tell their stories directly. But who is there to authenticate those stories – or to draw attention to them? Who can we trust? Where is the truth in an era when nearly everyone (in government, business, and especially the media) is seen as a slippery spin-doctor?
Any culture's storytellers are among its most influential
people. Journalists have held that trusted role for generations, but now there are
questions about who will be the storytellers of the future and how those
stories will be delivered. Between the new possibilities and the current state
of journalism are at least three creative issues that can be reckoned with in
ways that strengthen journalism or diminish it. These issues provide a
jumping-off point for the conversations.
All journalists know that really good
storytelling is powerful. In fact, the stories that we tell – about our world,
about ourselves – shape our future.
The future-shaping power of how a "story" is
framed is evident from recent research in various fields. In medicine, placebo
studies show that the attitudes of doctors and patients toward a medication's
likelihood to work increases the medication's effectiveness for one-third to
two-thirds of patients – even those taking a placebo. In education,
the "Pygmalion" studies show that students perform radically better
for teachers who are told they are stars (even though such star status was
assigned randomly). In athletics, studies have shown that world-class athletes
perform better when they keep a strong image of success in mind. Perhaps most
compelling is Polak’s[1]
study of a variety of cultures through the centuries. When a culture no longer
holds a compelling picture of its future, he found, it declines and fails.
Reflecting on the proven power of storytelling, journalists
can ask: Are we telling stories in the most productive ways for society? Is our
designation of what's newsworthy creating a glossy patina of surface glory or a
spiraling well of defeat and victimization? What might it look like if we
covered more of the full-spectrum process of life rather than just the highest
highs and lots of the lowest lows? What if more journalism read like The New
York Times' recent series on race rather than like political 
horserace
coverage?
This diagram depicts the public’s sense that journalism focuses primarily on life’s low spots and occasionally on its high spots rather than on how life progresses between troughs and peaks.
Is the story of journalism itself being told in the most productive ways? Ask most journalists why they entered the business, and most likely you will hear highly personal stories about a desire to make a difference, to unleash truth, to preserve and protect the right by illuminating the wrong. Ask mid-career journalists if they are realizing their passion or goals, and the most likely answer is no.
As our national
storytellers, journalists are at the heart of our society’s communications
system, essential to a free society. We
now know that telling stories is as much
an intervention as “making news.”
Just as quantum physicists have learned that the very act of
observation affects and sometimes modifies what they see, so journalists
telling stories shape the story and what we pay attention to as a community.
These stories in turn shape their audience who use them to form images about
the truth and make life-affecting decisions based on that.
Journalists abjure "making news" themselves. They want to avoid being
accused of triggering newsworthy events the way police want to avoid being
accused of entrapping criminals by inducing them to commit crimes. And yet
journalists rarely address the fact that their choices about how to tell
stories and which stories to tell have as much impact on our sense of the world
as the events that naturally catch the journalists' attention and therefore
become "news." By acknowledging that there is no such thing as a
neutral observer, journalists have an extraordinary opportunity to reconceive their role in helping people make meaning of the
confusing shifts in society.
In education, health care, the legal system and every other domain, experiments
are testing better ways to live and work. Many are succeeding. These stories of
hope and possibility are not told as aggressively as stories of despair.
Journalists, as our local and national storytellers, are positioned to be a
catalyst toward health in society as they chronicle successes as well as
failures, as they show the full complexity of changing communities and apply
their skills to new digital arenas such as the Internet.
Despite their skills as researchers, reporters, observers and authenticators of the truth, journalists may lose their place as important storytellers to those with fewer, less reliable skills.
Journalists have considerable street smarts, on-the-job
training and often academic preparation related to their work. They know a lot
and bring considerable value to the stories they tell. What's more, they have
editorial skills that are increasingly in demand in the age of infoglut and infotainment.
Stories that are obsessively negative or irrelevant may be part of what is
driving readers, viewers and listeners away. They turn instead to other sources
of news and information that may be more emotionally satisfying but less
reliable. Furthermore, by doing things the way they've always been done,
journalists risk losing out on potential new applications of emerging
technologies to enhance their newsgathering and news delivery.
If journalists reconceive the purpose and practices
of their craft, they can renew their value to society. This can be a powerful
motivator for journalists to join in these national conversations.
HOW THIS PROJECT FITS WITH RELATED INITIATIVES
This proposal recognizes and builds upon the work of other organizations involved in journalism reform. Several organizations, many underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the McCormick-Tribune Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation and others, have put forward important ideas. The Committee of Concerned Journalists has held a series of meetings around the country on what ails journalism. This proposal honors these initiatives, but is also fundamentally different. By tapping the state Associated Press (AP) associations, conversations about reinventing storytelling can reach journalists from all 50 states. In addition to having ties to all 1,500 AP member newspapers, this project also has the potential of reaching the AP’s hundreds of broadcast and on-line members. The conversations will be oriented to grassroots, working journalists, not just those from metropolitan newsrooms or journalism schools. They will have a direct, practical application, moving from aspirations and values to specific approaches assigning editors and reporters can use the next day at work to tell a more meaningful story. These will be workshops that craft useful next steps on the spot rather than issue further calls for changes in how everybody else does his or her job.
DESIGN
We propose conversations that cover all 50 states using approaches such as Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, Dialogue, and Conversation Cafés that have demonstrated success in organizations and communities. These conversations will happen in many forms, some initiated at the grass roots using a “do-it-yourself kit” available via the Internet, while others are hosted by national media organizations, such as Associated Press Managing Editors (APME). The concept is to enable conversations to happen wherever the energy to pursue them exists. A “journalismthatmatters.org” web site can become a “gathering place” for people to learn from each other what works in holding these dialogues and enable the conversations to continue online, enabling activity to migrate anywhere in the world. The focus of the project is to reconnect participants individually and collectively with the meaning and purpose of journalism so they can reconceive how their work can best contribute in these changing times.
Key elements of this design have been tested with the APME. In January 2001, the APME board participated in an Appreciative Inquiry into journalism as its best. Based on the success of this process, the APME national conference included a Conversation Café, and an Open Space gathering on “Journalism that Matters.” More than one person said, "I got more ideas out of this morning [the Open Space] than out of the rest of the conference." Many said this was conference's highlight for them. Two APME board members volunteered their states as sites for additional conversations.
Here are the highlights of the proposal:
To ensure broad-based and open participation by members of the journalistic community, the project will:
· Host one evening, 2-day workshops through state AP member organizations and other interested journalism organizations to explore new ways of storytelling. The overarching purpose of the workshops is to help participants reconceive their industry, rethink storytelling, and renew ties with audience. These events could precede regularly scheduled statewide meetings, overlap these meetings, or be the agenda for these meetings.
· Host comparable on-line workshops, enabling international participation
· Engage a variety of journalism organizations from all media: (e.g., Online News Association, Society of Professional Journalists, Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), and alternative media organizations).
· Draw on the full diversity and expertise from across the industry (e.g., writers, editors, photographers, camera operators, publishers, academics, industry analysts, consumers), as well as on diversity in ethnicity, age, geography and other critical disciplines (e.g., futurists, organizational development specialists, Wall Street analysts, etc.). We will provide travel grants to members of smaller news organizations that otherwise could not participate.
· Provide materials via the Internet for do-it-yourself conversations,
· Provide access to facilitators familiar with the project for grass roots participants who wish to initiate larger, more complex gatherings of journalists and audience
· Be as flexible as the new approaches to journalism it hopes to stimulate.
· Run several pilot workshops through interested organizations.
· Use the Internet as an on-going means to supplement interaction that occurs through statewide and grass roots meetings.
· Conduct a three- to four-day national summit prior to a 2003 national conference to reinforce new thinking and behavior in assigning, editing and reporting stories. The summit is a place for participants to share specific examples and synthesize ideas that emerged from the statewide meetings. The summit would be open to any participants in the statewide or online meetings.
· Engage participants of the national APME meeting with the philosophy and work practices that emerge from the summit.
Workshop practices
Workshops will employ change methods that have proven successful in transforming businesses, organizations and communities. These approaches (see appendix) focus on what individuals find has most meaning and purpose for them. Participants also can adapt them to explore what has most meaning and purpose for their communities and how their work can best serve that.
For example, participants will engage in interviews and affirmative questioning, producing a collection of powerful stories. Another approach will enable diverse groups of any size to come together around complex, divisive issues and uncover surprising possibilities. And we will use several methods that give groups more capacity to think together productively about complex, important issues.
Support
To keep this series of conversations on point, we will:
· Create a 10-15 person Advisory Council composed of people from key roles in the industry: journalists, editors, publishers, audience, etc., to make the key project decisions. Ensure that the Advisory Council includes people able to make decisions on behalf of their organizations. Ensure diversity in multiple dimensions: age, ethnicity, gender, geography, medium (e.g., newspapers, radio, television, new media) and other factors deemed critical to reflect the industry at its best.
· Engage a full-time project director, two organization consultants skilled in the proposed practices, two consultants from the industry, and a full-time logistics person to support the extensive travel and administrative requirements.
· Develop a network of organization consultants familiar with these practices to support the meetings that cover all 50 states and provide counsel to the Advisory Council.
· Invite interested people in the journalistic community to act as an as-needed “sounding board” to the Advisory Council.
· Provide for ongoing participation through the Internet.
· Engage related journalism and technology organizations in ways determined by the Advisory Council
Communication
Discussion summaries will be disseminated via a “Journalism That Matters” web site, publications and websites within the industry such as AP Industry News and Poynter.org, and other channels as the conversations unfold. A project summary will also be created.
Evaluation
The Advisory Council will develop specific evaluation processes to assess the value of the conversations to participants and the tangible outcomes of this project (e.g., shifts in the nature of stories covered, the relationships between journalists and their local communities, perceptions about journalists by consumers, etc.).
BUDGET
Available upon request
BIOS
Chris Peck holds the Distinguished Chair in Journalism at
Southern Methodist University in
Peggy Holman
is a writer and consultant who works with organizations to help them achieve
cultural transformation. She emphasizes high involvement by participants
and a whole-systems perspective in her work. Her clients include AT&T
Wireless Services, the Washington State Arts Commission,
Stephen Silha is a communications consultant, writer and
facilitator. He has reported for magazines and newspapers including The
Christian Science Monitor and The Minneapolis Star. He has worked with a range
of philanthropic and nonprofit organizations, including the Charles Stewart
Mott Foundation, Libraries for the Future, Children's Express, and Digital
Partners. He co-convened the first national symposium on the Media and
Philanthropy, which spawned the local research project Good News/Good Deeds:
Citizen Effectiveness in the Age of Electronic Democracy. He also serves on the
faculty of the Institute for Creative Development.
Cole C. Campbell
is Fellow at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, based in
APPENDICES (available on request)
· Sample workshop format
· Whole systems change: an introduction
· A snapshot of 3 whole-system change methods
o Appreciative Inquiry
o Open Space Technology
o Dialogue
· Whole systems change: an example (Washington State Arts Commission)