Could Civic Journalism Have Helped Journalists Get Election Coverage Right? - 0 views
-
Tom McHale on 13 Nov 16"It didn't take long for civic journalism to move from election experiments to deep enterprise work on major issues plaguing communities - race, drugs, education, the economy. Techniques involved listening to how the communities framed their problems and convening conversations about how they might be addressed. Yet major differences emerged between civic journalism and traditional investigative journalism. Unlike traditional investigative journalism, civic journalism's enterprise projects, "didn't have bad guys attached to them," Friedland said. Rather they mined the muddy swamps of tough issues enveloping communities. These projects focused less on measuring the nature of the engagement and instead focused on outcomes. The most systematic and deepest research into civic journalism was undertaken in 2002 by Friedland and PhD student Sandy Nichols. The Pew Center opened its files on 651 civic journalism projects that had applied for funding or for recognition in the Knight-Batten Awards for Excellence in Civic Journalism between 1994 and 2001. For months, Nichols read every project and coded them by engagement strategies, outcomes and story frames. You can read the final report or the executive summary. Among its highlights: At least one fifth of all U.S. daily newspapers - 322 of the nation's 1,500 dailies practiced civic journalism during that time. They hailed from 220 cities in all but three states. But, the authors said, the real number, if you included projects that didn't cross the Pew Center's transom, was much higher Newspaper editors asserted that their civic journalism increased public deliberation, civic problem solving, volunteerism and changed public policy.a 96 percent of the civic journalism projects used an "explanatory" story frame to cover public issues instead of a more traditional "conflict" frame, which often reports two opposing viewpoints. "The clear shift to explanatory frames is perhaps one of civ