THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504090055
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Editor's Notebook
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
On Friday, President Clinton spoke to the annual meeting of the American Society of Newpaper Editors in Dallas. He stressed the need for civil dialogue between Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the White House, in the spirit of citizenship, not partisanship.
Gil Thelen, executive editor of The State in Columbia, S.C., asked the president what advice he would give newspaper editors about how they might contribute to better public discourse and community building.
The president's answer shocked me, because it sounded as though he had attended a Virginian-Pilot retreat on this same issue exactly one week earlier.
The retreat - held March 31-April 2 at the Oceanfront - involved 41 Virginian-Pilot journalists, along with a handful of colleagues from other institutions and other parts of our parent company, Landmark Communications. We met to accelerate newsroom efforts to frame our news coverage more from the point of view of citizens than of professionals - whether in public administration, politics or journalism.
In the course of 36 hours, we developed a model for marrying two traditional journalism approaches with this new concept. We came to call the model the three-legged stool: All three legs are needed to keep superior journalism upright.
The first leg is the fact-finding, or investigative approach. Here the journalist aggressively covers - or uncovers - what happened and tells readers about it. Like clients of other professionals, readers are free to act on or ignore this information.
The second leg is the story-telling approach. Here the journalist uses detail and the elements of a story: A character who faces a complication, works to resolve it and is changed by or effects change in that effort. This approach treats readers as spectators, showing them what happened and hoping they will experience an ``aha!'' - a moment of insight and revelation into the nature of humans and their institutions.
The third approach - the new one - is a conversational model. Here the journalist works to give readers a way to talk about news - among family, friends and associates, and among members of a larger community. This approach looks at readers as actors - people who have a stake in the news, who want to see the possibilities behind often-troubling developments, who want to participate in solving shared problems.
You can see differences in the approaches in how each frames an election campaign. The first frames it as a marketing effort: Here are the facts; now you choose whether to ``buy'' a candidate based on what the candidate's selling in his or her platform and promises.
The second approach frames the campaign as a saga of struggle, in which we watch one candidate ultimately overcome another.
The third approach frames the campaign as a job search. In this approach, you the citizen have a vital role in writing the job description, determining the relevant issues to be discussed and choosing a candidate based on the way you evaluate the candidate's job application, letters of recommendation, reference checks and job interviews assembled by the newspaper.
And so when President Clinton answered Gil Thelen's question, it was as if the president was using our three-legged stool.
First, he urged newspapers to publish stories setting out the facts and positions of political players, as Newsweek did recently in a story on the role of government as seen by Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Second, he recommended using real-life stories - as the Dallas Morning News did in a portrait of a family on welfare - to move policy debates ``from rhetoric to reality.''
Third, he said, ``You should consider sponsoring conversations in your communities among people of different political backgrounds, races and other styles. . . . My experience has always been that the differences among us, except on a few issues, are smaller than we think.''
He also said, ``The information revolution has made us all actors.''
Pretty spooky.
This isn't about political agreement but about agreeing to engage each other as citizens. David Mathews, a Cabinet secretary in the Republican administration of President Ford, recently said: ``If Americans are to reclaim and reinvigorate their political system, they will need a big assist from journalists who are concerned about the drift of politics in the character of public discourse.''
We are concerned. Today's front-page box on Sen. John Warner's position within the Virginia Republican Party is part of our efforts to improve public discourse. We'll keep you posted on other experiments in democracy and citizenship, and in a week or two we will publish a report on our retreat. The report will be written by Pat Richardson of Virginia Beach, the director of a new community leadership training program called CIVIC, who attended our retreat as a citizen-reporter.
Maybe we'll send a copy to the White House.
Cole C. Campbell
Editor
KEYWORDS: THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT AND THE LEDGER-STAR PUBLIC JOURNALISM by CNB