Back to Citizen EngagementFrom Measures and Milestones: The Conference Proceedings
pp. 41-57, published 1997
George W. Graves is executive director of the Kentucky Center for Public Issues, a private, independent, statewide public policy organization based in Frankfort. The Center is a partner with the University of Louisville in various ventures, including a new live, hour-long public radio program, "State of Affairs." Mr. Graves is the on-air host of the show, which is broadcast live over WFPL 89.3 FM in Louisville (and taped on KETZ) and focuses on current issues. The Center also publishes the bimonthly Kentucky Journal, cosponsors the Shakertown Roundtable, arranges internships at the Legislative Research Commission and elsewhere in state government, conducts a legislative performance survey, organizes political debates, and establishes policy councils to tackle some of our toughest statewide issues such as constitutional reform, selection of judges, and health care. During a 23-year journalism career, Mr. Graves was a reporter and editorial writer for the Louisville newspapers and a writer and editor at The Hartford Courant in Connecticut. He has a graduate degree in management, and he held a fellowship at the University of Michigan. Mr. Graves teaches English part time at the University of Kentucky. He has traveled and studied in Europe and Japan.
Bill Bishop is associate editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader. He writes a column three days a week on the paper’s editorial page. Mr. Bishop graduated from Duke University in 1975. He worked as a reporter at The Mountain Eagle, in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and as a freelance writer in Louisville. He and his wife owned and operated The Bastrop County Times, a weekly newspaper in Smithville, Texas, from 1983 until 1987. He came to the Herald-Leader as an editorial writer in 1988. Mr. Bishop taught a course in rural development at the Sanford Institute for Public Policy at Duke University, where he was senior journalist in residence, and, in 1996, he was the Ford Foundation writer in residence at MDC, Inc., a rural development think tank in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Judith G. Clabes, a newspaper editor since the 1970s and more recently a corporate executive for The E.W. Scripps Co., is the president and chief executive of the Scripps Howard Foundation. The foundation was created in 1962 to promote excellence in journalism through scholarships, grants, and an annual awards program. The foundation also financially supports literacy and volunteer programs in communities where Scripps does business, and administers the corporate giving program. Mrs. Clabes joined Scripps in 1971 as coordinator of the newspaper in education program at the Evansville (Ind.) Printing Corp. She later was community affairs director and associate editor of The Evansville Press before being promoted in 1978 to editor of The Sunday Courier & Press in Evansville. She became editor of The Kentucky Post in Covington, Kentucky, in 1983. In 1995 she moved to the Scripps corporate headquarters in Cincinnati and became special projects director for the newspaper division. She has been a trustee of the Scripps Howard Foundation since 1990.
Thomas E. Gish, a native of Letcher County and a resident of Thornton, is editor and publisher of The Mountain Eagle, a weekly newspaper published in Whitesburg. He has won a number of awards, including the Citizen’s Advocate Award presented by the Ralph Nader Foundation, the University of Arizona’s John Peter Zenger Freedom of the Press Award, and a special Environmental Policy Institute award for contributions to the reduction of strip mining and other environmental issues. Mr. Gish is a member of The Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame and a University of Kentucky graduate.
Rita Mitchell is a 1976 graduate of Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky, and holds a BS degree with a double major in journalism and speech. From 1976 to the present, Ms. Mitchell has been employed as a journalist/photographer for The Fulton Leader in Fulton, Kentucky. Since 1985, Ms. Mitchell has also worked as a freelance public relations provider. In May 1997, Ms. Mitchell was a presenter at the Tennessee Valley Authority Quality Communities Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. This fall she was one of four Rotary Foundation Group Study Exchange team members from Rotary District 6710 visiting District 1220 in England. Since November 1995, Ms. Mitchell has been a member of the Blue Ribbon Committee, which carries out the TVA Quality Communities Initiatives program in Fulton. She was a two-term president of the Fulton-South Fulton Chamber of Commerce. Ms. Mitchell was a co-recipient with her husband, William Mitchell, of the Chamber of Commerce 1997 Industry of the Year Award for Fulton Publishing Company. She is a member of the First United Methodist Church and has two children: Ben, 16, and Morgan, 10.
Moderator, George Graves:
I’m the Executive Director of the Kentucky Center for Public Issues, a private nonprofit, independent public policy organization, based in Frankfort. This is one of the things I get to do as part of my job and I take great delight in it. I’m also a former journalist or, as some people have encouraged me to say, a recovering journalist, as though you never completely get away from journalism and maybe Judith Clabes has something to say about that, too.
I realize we are up against a couple of things here. You are probably feeling just a tad sleepy, maybe a little overrelaxed, concluding this is Thursday and you probably don’t have to go back to work today. You’ve driven a long way. You got up early.
I’m here to let you know that we don’t intend to show you any overheads or slides or to be talking heads up here. We want to have a conversation with you, and we will call upon you if necessary. I think I recognize enough folks out there to give you a hard time. What we want to accomplish in the next hour is to acquaint you with this panel, and it’s a very diverse panel in many ways. I encourage you to take a look at the brief biographies in your packet and as you do that, I’ll reacquaint you with these folks.
On my far left is Rita Mitchell, Editor of The Fulton Leader in far western Kentucky. To my immediate left is Judy Clabes, who has had a very distinguished career in journalism with the Cincinnati papers, a former nationally syndicated, nationally recognized, and honored columnist, and now President and Chief Executive of the Scripps-Howard Foundation. To my immediate right is Tom Gish, who is in his 40th year of editing and publishing The Mountain Eagle, whose motto is "It screams." When The Mountain Eagle screams, a lot of other people scream and best they should because The Mountain Eagle has sustained a long and very recognized, often outside of Kentucky, effort to improve conditions in eastern Kentucky. To my far right is Bill Bishop, Associate Editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, who writes a column that appears three days a week on the opinion page. Bill, I suppose, I’m not talking out of school by also saying you once worked with Tom Gish.
Mr. Bishop:
For Tom Gish.
Mr. Graves:
For Tom Gish. I know Tom Gish isn’t that big on hierarchy. First of all, when we speak about the media, I want you to realize that we have quite a bit of breadth here. We have folks who work for and may choose to be representing small papers in various parts of the state; who used to work for small or medium papers, and are now working for big papers; who may own a paper and edit and publish; or who may have owned a paper in the past. You’ll find all that information in your packets and I encourage you to take a look at it. In a variety of ways this panel has been involved in journalism. I think we bring a fairly broad perspective.
Our topic today is "How and to what extent should the media become involved in community development?" I take that to mean development of a sense of community, not specifically about economic development. I also think we should take a cue from Carolyn Lukensmeyer who brought up the question about the extent to which you all can influence the media. A corollary is to what extent should the media be listening to you as you try to influence the media, to get the full, complete, accurate story told about whatever it is you think the media should be writing and talking about. We don’t want to confine our discussion to the print media, although we, for the most part, are representing print media; but some of what we have to say should apply to other media. I am going to turn it over to Judith Clabes first and the other panelists to talk about how they have gotten involved in their communities, beyond their newspapers. We’ll also be talking about coverage because I know coverage irks a lot of folks: why newspapers decide to cover what they decide to cover and how they decide to cover it.
Ms. Clabes:
I’m not a recovered journalist; I’m an unrepentant journalist. I want to explain to you where I’m coming from, which is several perspectives here today. I was a long-time newspaper editor in northern Kentucky at a time when that region was experiencing tremendous economic growth and development. We sponsored community meetings before it was fashionable to do so, because we saw a need there. I’d like to think that part of what we did contributed to the progress that northern Kentucky has experienced.
I presently serve on the board of a small foundation based in New York City that is specifically aimed at community development and funding community development initiatives, so I have a national perspective. I am a founding member of a board of a wonderful organization in northern Kentucky called Forward Quest. We are in Phase Two of our visioning process; that is, we’ve done the visioning process and now we are in a phase to move that process forward. We’ve identified 43 goals from our broad-range grassroots visioning effort, and those 43 goals have become concrete objectives for us. We are in the process of making that happen. It was a 2020 visioning and we are on our way there.
I am now head of a corporate foundation, which allows me to put real money where my mouth has been. I’ve had this wonderful career progression. Recently I was privileged to be privy to a wonderful speech about community development. The speaker traced the history of community development initiatives from their roots in the 1970s. In the beginning, he said, the concept of community development was limited, focusing primarily on community infrastructure projects such as street improvements, water and sewer projects, and recreational facilities. They were large and nationally driven and financed housing programs and some housing rehabilitation. Some communities used public funds for downtown malls or traditional industrial development projects. Policy was dictated from Washington, the font of big money, with little attention to local needs and little ability to respond to the diverse needs of neighborhoods.
Today, the speaker said, community development encompasses community building with, by, and for the people, not just development of bricks and mortar. Community development now requires community leadership and participation, right down to and perhaps especially the neighborhood level. It is not about finding public dollars, but about leveraging those funds with significant private sector investment and expertise. In short, the concept of community development now encompasses much more comprehensive strategies. It includes the fundamental notion that rebuilding neighborhoods and communities by necessity entails helping create economic value and economic opportunity through job creation, training, and services for those of limited means.
Now, who is this speaker: a 1960s holdover and unrepentant do-gooder? Maybe he is, but I do know he is a central banker: Lawrence Meyer, a Governor of the Federal Reserve. He went on to point out that there has been an explosive growth in the number, diversity, and sophistication of community development organizations, and all players today recognize they must work together in local partnerships. There’s increased emphasis on economic development and jobs as part of a more comprehensive approach and there are more and more public-private partnerships in the making.
Lawrence Meyer said, "As an economist, I subscribe to the principle that free markets work best when information about economic performance of participants including their problems and opportunities is readily available. The more and better the information about market opportunities or unmet needs, the more likely it is that someone will find a way to fill them, at least if there are no external barriers preventing action." Now as a journalist, I like that idea, that more and better information is the key to making things work best. In fact, that is our first obligation as journalists to provide balanced, fair, accurate coverage of our whole community and to provide a forum for comment and criticism open to all. As a citizen and a journalist, I really like the idea of removing barriers to progress that work for the common good.
I also like the idea espoused by your own Michael Childress who said, "Citizen involvement may be the single most important factor in our efforts to improve quality of life throughout the Commonwealth." Any journalist worth her ink simply must believe that citizen involvement is not just a good thing, but a necessary thing. It’s what democracy is and our special kind of journalism in America is the embodiment of that very ideal, and that journalist is absolutely right to do whatever is within the enormous power of the press to do, to ensure, encourage, cajole, or shame every citizen to be involved. So I define a journalist not just as a purveyor of information, but as a citizen who cannot hide from duty.
Isn’t it a bit specious as an editorial voice to tell everybody else what to do and how to do it all day long, while sitting back comfortably on our own laurels and refusing to do any of the heavy lifting ourselves? If we do, we deserve what they say about editorial writers: they come from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded. Are editors part of the community development partnership? Of course we are. As journalists, we have a very special place at the table of democracy, a constitutionally defined role in the community of citizens.
Our first obligation is balanced and fair coverage information delivery. Our second is strong editorial voice that advocates, leads, persuades, exposes, encourages; it’s a voice with many cadences, tones, and inflections. But underlying all that is citizenship, and that’s an obligation we cannot escape––not as journalists, teachers, truck drivers, or farmers. As good journalists and good citizens, do we want jobs for our neighbors? Of course, we do. Do we want opportunities for our children? Sure. Do we want safe and clean streets? Yes. Do we want to see our communities grow and prosper? Certainly. Do we want good schools, safe neighborhoods, affordable housing, clean water, and recreational facilities? Yes, all that. Do we want to help create the atmosphere for good government, good citizenship, and good works? We must. Are these things that only everyone else should do? Absolutely not.
Whether we want to admit it or not, there is power inherent in what we do. Power can be abused in many ways, and one of those ways is not understanding it or, worse, pretending we don’t have it. Today, as more and more communities are one-newspaper places, I think we have an even greater obligation than ever before to be involved in our communities. There is indeed a great debate in our industry as to whether, or if, editors should be involved and to what extent. We are conflicted over a notion called civic journalism, and every editor in America falls on a very different place along the line that is drawn. I’m not afraid of civic activism. I think objectivity as a journalistic concept is highly overrated, if not downright circumspect. There are some things we simply can’t be objective about: democracy, and all those other good things related to kids, schools, neighborhoods and jobs. Given our special power, and our increasing monopolies, we have special obligations to be strong proponents for the things we believe are for the common good in our communities. Thank you.
Mr. Graves:
I have asked each of our panelists to talk a little about how they are involved outside of their newspapers, and we want to get around to talking about to what extent they should be involved, what line they feel they should not cross in terms of personal involvement. I think Judy gave us several things to think about there. A citizen cannot hide from duty. Some other members of the panel may be thinking they can’t get involved in some specific project because it might become newsworthy and, therefore, their paper might write about it. Then people in the community might think that particular activity or project is getting favorable treatment because they are involved. You might also want to explore some sort of working definition of civic or public journalism because I know, even among news people, it is a widely misunderstood or variously interpreted term.
We want also to move quickly into your questions, so hang on just a few minutes. Tom, since you are working for a small newspaper in a community that is not necessarily served by other media outlets regularly, you may feel perhaps a greater temptation, or obligation, to be involved in your community than someone who is in Louisville might.
Mr. Gish:
I went from Frankfort where I was a reporter for a decade to Whitesburg in 1957, and I arrived and took over The Mountain Eagle the week of the huge 1957 flood, which came close to wiping out most of our county seat towns throughout eastern Kentucky. Letcher County was very hard hit by it, as were Perry and Harlan Counties. There was such a disaster that it more or less halted all kinds of activity for a very long time and there was no apparent way to put eastern Kentucky back together again. It took several months for the shock to wear off, and for people to resume anything like a normal community life. One thing that showed, though, was that Kentucky as a state was not prepared to deal with disaster situations. There was no effective federal help, and eastern Kentucky more or less drifted.
I gradually realized that one of the reasons we were not bouncing back was that at the same time the coal industry had more or less fallen apart and we had something like half our coal miners unemployed. Our economic situation got to be extremely bad. We entered into a period in the late 1950s and early 1960s in which we had a lot of really hungry people, actual starvation, where people starved to death. We had people freeze to death in their homes in wintertime because there was no coal or wood to burn. We got involved because we had to; there was no choice. What the paper and I tried to do was put the situation before the state and the nation and to ask them to come to eastern Kentucky’s rescue.
One thing after another led to a gradual awakening of interest in Washington. President Kennedy got involved in the early 1960s in response to the formation of what came to be known as the roving pickets, the automobile caravans of 600 or 700 cars filled with unemployed coal miners who would move from county seat to county seat to demonstrate and protest the fact that they had been jobless for some years and that their children were starving.
Out of all that came early emergency relief put together by President Kennedy, who initiated an effort that led ultimately to the formation of the Appalachian Regional Commission and the establishment of the "War on Poverty" and specifically, the Office of Economic Opportunity. The eastern Kentucky plight was central to both of those developments. My paper, I think, played a significant role in helping create an awareness of the severity of the problem.
While all this was going on, we also were going about the business of routinely covering local government. We found that our city and county governments and our school systems were not accustomed to reporters and they did not believe that reporters had a right to attend meetings of fiscal court, city council, or their school boards. One by one our city governments, fiscal court, and two school system boards all passed resolutions banning The Mountain Eagle and its staff from attending those meetings. So for about a decade we fought an ongoing battle simply to have the right to attend and report on, and quote public officials at public functions on public issues. We stuck at it and the general outcome of that is that today if The Mountain Eagle fails to attend a fiscal court meeting and write about what took place, we get immediate and severe criticism from subscribers and readers, so we are expected to do today what we were barred from doing early in our career.
Just by the nature of our very deep and complex economic and social conditions, we got involved and you can hardly name a problem the paper has not tackled in some form or another. Usually, we have proceeded out of ignorance; I hope always out of concern. We have fumbled and failed on far more issues than we have succeeded on. Since this is a group concerned with long-term planning and development, I want to make a couple of observations.
I think the biggest barrier to progress in eastern Kentucky in many ways is the absence of any continuity of effort. Our county governments change frequently as we have elections and new officers are put in place. Our city governments change much the same way. There are no long-term, private citizen-based organizations dealing with social or economic issues in the mountains. I have taken part in probably a dozen efforts to create some kind of area-wide citizens group to pursue various social and economic issues, but always the groups fall apart. Most things fall together by accident, I think. Most organizations that are effective come to deal with one issue and once that issue is out of the way, they fall apart.
Strip-mining protests evolved in eastern Kentucky this way. You lived in a hollow with maybe 25 or 30 other families. You were immune to strip mining for two or three years and then the day came when the bulldozer arrived on the hilltop near your home. You and your neighbors got all excited about it and wanted to get something done. Typically you would come to The Mountain Eagle and demand that we do some photographs and write a story, which we always did.
You can never really get people to organize as a group. It took 30 years for mountain people to come together on the issue of strip mining and to develop the savvy and know-how to persuade the legislature to do something about the broad-form deed. It took a major effort to get the state legislature to enact strip-mine legislation. It took a really major effort to persuade Congress to enact strip-mine legislation, but all those things have progressed only as people have become informed and have recognized both the severity of the problem and that, in combining their efforts and in mutual self-support, things can be accomplished.
The role that we played has been one of trying to disseminate a maximum amount of information on whatever the issue of the moment may be. Right now, for instance, I have been involved in trying to look at what is happening with Medicaid in nursing homes. There is really no effective citizen group in eastern Kentucky to deal with that issue, yet people are deeply concerned about it. Almost no information is available to them, so we just have to muddle through it as best we can.
That’s the way those things happen. The issues change week to week, but the circumstances don’t change all that much. My judgment at the moment is that eastern Kentucky has about a 50 percent unemployment rate. We are extremely vulnerable to federal cutbacks. I really hate to think what will happen as cutbacks in various aid programs develop over the next year or so. Any big cutback in food stamps will be absolute disaster. There is no doubt about that. I’ll be happy when we get a little further along to try to answer any questions.
Mr. Graves:
Thanks, Tom. Next, Rita Mitchell will explain what she and her newspaper in Fulton are involved in.
Ms. Mitchell:
First of all, I’d like to explain I feel like I have a two-fold purpose. I would like to tell you why our local newspaper is involved in community development; then I would also like to step aside and explain a unique process that we used a year ago to gain a great deal of broad-based citizen input for several projects we wanted to complete. It might be something that some of you in small communities could use if you are preparing to launch a similar type of community initiative. First I would like to tell you just a little about Fulton. Fulton County is the westernmost county in the state, bordered by the Mississippi, five hours from this Center.
We really wanted to be here. That’s why we spent five hours in a car to come be with you. Our community of Fulton is part of a twin-city community. We have an artificial boundary––the Kentucky-Tennessee state line––that often joins us, but sometimes divides us as we start to undertake any number of projects. It causes me headaches from time to time being in the newspaper business.
It also provides duplicates of a number of agencies––city, county, and state government. We have dual economic boards, industrial boards, even retail merchants associations, so we are very conscious that we are dealing with one community, but at times they seem quite far apart. Besides the duplicates in our community, there is only one newspaper, The Fulton Leader, celebrating its 100th year this year, and my husband and I make the third generation of the family publishing this newspaper. So we’re not in Fulton for a 10- or 15-year career span.
Our family has a lot of heart and interest invested in the community. We also know that small newspapers in small towns are the lifeblood of those towns. Our people obviously get their national and international news from other media sources, but they depend heavily on us to provide them with that immediate direct news that they need so that they can make informed decisions about the future for their families and, hopefully, for the community as a whole. We want to, by virtue of the very business we’re in, provide them with the most accurate, fair, and balanced information that we can and we are kept on our toes because we are on a state line.
I get much more feedback from both sides of the line than I care to have at some points. We are involved in a number of community development efforts, but, because of the state lines, we fall under great scrutiny. So we take that involvement very seriously. We choose what we lend the Fulton Leader name to, and also our time as individuals.
We are generally eager to have all types of community news. I can’t imagine a small newspaper that does not. We know our niche, to provide the most localized news. We are not going to write about international stories unless there is a local tie. We know where we are and what we are supposed to be doing. We also are involved personally on several boards. I know there are differences of opinion about that because of the public’s perception of what you might do as a member of the various boards. We would not presume to run for city commission, school board, or the site-based decisionmaking councils, but we have in the past served on chamber boards and leadership alumnae boards that sponsor our leadership class each year. We would undertake those types of things.
As Nancy Stone said, as you are embarking on any type of community development project, it is wise to meet and involve the local media early on. If you’ve already started a process, it might be wise to stop and do that involvement right now and then get back to the process that you have begun.
I’m a prime example of what she suggested. I was not involved in civic activities at all, other than providing the local coverage for a myriad of events and projects that are being undertaken in the community. I became involved in a broad-based citizen group that was later known as the Blue Ribbon Committee, which decided to pursue the TVA Quality Committee Initiatives. I could echo everything Nancy said in terms of support that TVA has given our community, particularly Phil Scharre and Tom Forsythe taking us through the process.
Sometimes because of our state line, when we meet in groups, residents have a lot of baggage with them, depending on which side of the state line they reside. And, so often, we need someone to guide us through and get us beyond that, and show us that we have more things in common than we do things that separate us. So Tom and Phil provided us with that, helped us with our vision for the community and some strategic planning.
We initiated that process in November of 1995, and I’m happy to tell you that it is sustained today as recently as a meeting that we had on Monday night. One thing that has sustained us is what I alluded to in the beginning. We used a unique forum to gain public opinion because we realized people typically would not get out at night and voice an opinion at a town meeting. So we took those town meetings to their living rooms via our cable access channel. We did a live broadcast, which now, thinking back, is a scary prospect. I think we probably did not think that through or we might not have done it. It turned out all right, but we did a great deal of promotion, using various forms of media: radio, television, the cable access, and then, of course, our newspaper because that was a newsworthy item, a legitimate news story. It covered the fact that we were going to have electronic town meetings.
We also formed a speakers’ bureau. We made ourselves available to all the civic clubs. We would be the program for the Rotary or Lions Club, explaining what we were going to do. We involved the schools with poster contests, wanting children to show what their visions of the community were.
The town meetings were conducted in a makeshift studio in a public building in our community on four consecutive Tuesday nights in May 1996. We did these live, with a phone bank that accepted viewers’ calls. Each program was designated for a certain topic: community leadership, education, citizen involvement, or city government. During those specific nights we would have people with expertise in those fields, often from other communities. Phil moderated the first effort of our broadcast.
We would take the public’s calls and would not immediately put them on the air, but have them recorded by the people who were manning the phones. We actually wrote them up on easels, so that when the camera panned, people could see their ideas were being given consideration. Then we would have the experts discuss it and have a dialogue about why a person’s idea was important or how it might fit into other schemes or plans that we might have.
We drew in our viewing audience because we involved a number of children. With the children and their posters, we would interview them, ask them why they drew a particular vision of the community in the future and had some insightful responses. That was guaranteed viewership of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends for our broadcast. We tried to do that at every broadcast for that reason. When we got through with the community involvement broadcast on the fourth week, we solicited volunteers. Fifty people agreed to sign up for various subcommittees of the Blue Ribbon Committee and carry out a number of projects that we would later identify.
Two years later, we are still moving on. One of the main outgrowths of our town meetings was that people were very upset about the appearance of our community, which was having an effect on industrial recruitment and on physician recruitment for our hospital. So our city now has a Code Enforcement Board that is very determined to get dilapidated and poorly kept structures cleaned up or torn down to make the appearance of the community look like somebody who lives there cares. We identified early on about 10 projects. As of Monday using 40 junior high students we completed the last project. We were planting 500 bulbs in a downtown landscaping area, but we did want to involve the children.
We have met again and identified some other areas that we would like to work on. Our motto is that we know we cannot do everything, or cure some ills, but we certainly can make a start and we have some people who are very excited about carrying out these types of initiatives and programs. Thank you.
Mr. Graves:
Thank you, Rita Mitchell. I think what you describe can be accurately described as at least one version of public or civic journalism, in which a news organization sets up an organization to accomplish a goal. I know that, even in its most benign form, such as what you describe, that can be controversial in newspapers because it seems to some eyes to blur the line between doing and covering. Again, it raises the issue of to what extent can a news organization cover itself and do so while sustaining public confidence that you are not promoting something that you are doing, even if it is a terrific project.
Ms. Mitchell:
Our newspaper did not initiate the process. It was our economic development group and our local school board that were brainstorming initially. Our newspaper did not get involved until they drew us in and wanted us to help.
Mr. Graves:
Thanks for clarifying that. Bill Bishop, you’re next.
Mr. Bishop:
What I would like to do quickly before we get to questions is set out two general propositions on this area, and then I want to give you the one model I know where a newspaper made material difference in a town over a long period of time. Proposition No. 1 is that I don’t think there’s much of a relationship between the quality of a newspaper and the quality of a town. We don’t control your self-image and because something happens on the front page of the newspaper doesn’t make your life more real. I don’t think you believe that, either. There are good newspapers with bad towns, dysfunctional towns, like Washington, DC. Austin, Texas, is a great town that had a terrible newspaper until just recently.
Proposition No. 2 is that when papers do cover development, they mostly do a very poor job of it because we look for all the wrong things. We overcover plant openings and closings and we don’t cover at all the underlying factors that create real wealth in a region. So, as a result, we fly into a frenzy when Fruit of the Loom closes some apparel plants in this neck of the woods, but we don’t do anything ahead of time to let people know they are living and working in an economy that has a very limited future. Nor do we write about what people could be doing to help themselves over the long run. The next set of stories out of the Fruit of the Loom territory will be about Thanksgiving without a job. What we won’t be doing is talking about the kinds of things that communities do that make themselves rich. In fact, we don’t even know where to begin to write those stories, about how to make communities, businesses, and workers more competitive. We only know how to cover ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings.
Southern politicians for the past 60 years have sold out everything in our region. Low taxes, lax environmental laws, low wages for jobs, and newspapers share the blame for this frankly failed policy. We all demand that governors and county judges "get us a factory" and we want it right now, and development doesn’t happen right now. That gets us to the one great example of where a newspaper made a lasting material difference in a community.
George McLean came to Tupelo, Mississippi, in the late 1930s and bought the town’s bankrupt newspaper. At that time, Tupelo was the poorest town in the poorest state in this country. It also had been leveled by the nation’s deadliest tornado. Over 200 people were killed in the town in one blow. McLean tried to use the tools of the newspaper to change his community. He supported strikers in a labor dispute, and it left the town utterly divided.
He then began to talk to people in town about raising income. He appealed to their self-interest. I don’t think we’ve talked enough about how community organizations should and can be built around self-interest today. His approach was to organize every community in the region. Every town had a development council. The councils cleaned out graveyards and painted houses and schools. With McLean and the paper leading, Tupelo invested in people. In the 1940s, when the rest of the rural south was lowering taxes and offering low wages to northern industry, Tupelo invested in a day-care center.
We had a discussion this morning about Dr. Demming and his notions of total quality management. Before Dr. Demming went to Japan after the war, he was in Tupelo talking to them about how to do development and Tupelo followed his advice. McLean convinced the town that development was a do-it-yourself job. So Tupelo has always paid its own way. We’ve had discussions about universities today. There’s only one branch of the University of Mississippi outside Oxford. It’s in Tupelo, and Tupelo paid for it. There is a technical school in Tupelo. Tupelo didn’t go to Jackson, Mississippi, to get that branch built; they built it themselves.
So 60 years after George McLean came to Tupelo, this is a town that today has 2 percent unemployment. It’s the 10th largest town in Mississippi, but it has the second largest bank deposits and the largest rural hospital in the United States. It’s the smallest town in the country to support a symphony orchestra; it passed the largest school bond issue in the state’s history, with 90 percent of the people voting for that bond, and the reaction in Tupelo was, how can we have such a sorry community that 10 percent of our people wouldn’t vote for our kids? Eighty percent of the kids that enter kindergarten in Tupelo go to college. A newspaper publisher led all this. His paper supported these efforts on the news pages, but the real work was done in the community because McLean knew that community development is something that happens on the streets and not on the front pages of the newspaper.
Mr. Graves:
Thanks, Bill. I actually would like to start off our questions with one for you. How did George McLean do it on the streets of Tupelo?
Mr. Bishop:
The Tupelo story is Grisham’s, who is a cousin of John, the author. All the merchants in town were mad at McLean, and he went into hardware stores, drug stores, and began to talk to the merchants. He showed them the census report from 1940. It showed that the per capita income in Tupelo was $600 a year. He talked to the merchants and told them their income was not going to rise until the incomes of the people that shop at their stores rises, and he appealed directly to their self-interest, the one way he found to organize people.
Mr. Graves:
Person to person, and not necessarily making the case on the editorial page.
Mr. Bishop:
And it wasn’t some lofty goal about how we’ll all feel better if we work together, that the community will be happier; it was "you’re going to make more money in your store if the people around you make more money."
Mr. Graves:
Thank you. Carolyn Lukensmeyer challenged all of us to be part of every story told. Let me refashion that a bit. I think it’s realistic for us to be part of any story in which we feel we have a stake, about which we think something. So as you fashion your questions, think about newspaper stories that have given you the impression that the full story wasn’t told and think about how you reacted, what you did, if you picked up the phone, called an editor, or called an ombudsman if there is an ombudsman at that particular newspaper. How did you respond? How did you engage the newspaper––because I hope you are getting the impression that newspeople, editors, people who own and operate newspapers, whether they are in big communities or small communities, are open to suggestions. They are trying to anticipate your concerns. They are trying to act on your concerns, perhaps even before you express them. Questions? And, please identity yourselves and whatever organization you may be associated with, so we can get to know you a little better.
Jim Holt:
My name is Jim Holt. I have been a reporter for 11 years and I’ve been doing community and economic development for 14 years.
Mr. Graves:
And, where is that?
Mr. Holt:
I’ve worked with three communities in the state of Kentucky. Currently, I’m here in Somerset and Lexington, and I appreciate many of the comments that the panelists made: things like balanced, fair, and accurate. I really appreciate that. All those are important. I really like what Bill had to say about Tupelo and it is a great success story. It takes community involvement for that to happen. But, my question is: how do we have a uniform system as it relates to journalism? How do we compare with radio and television stations and raise the same types of standards which these folks are telling us about today, so that there truly is a balanced, fair, and accurate assimilation of information that can effectively deal with helping move our communities toward a reality of the future?
Mr. Graves:
Now when you say standards, are you thinking about the way newspapers gather information and present it, or about levels of involvement?
Mr. Holt:
The Kentucky Press Association or any other group, so that they’ll say what is balanced, fair, and accurate.
Mr. Graves:
It’s a very important question. I think it goes to the very heart of what news organizations are and what in this country we think of as a right to publish, the First Amendment. Let me start by saying that some years ago I had a conversation with a governor whom I was covering, and he said he thought it was odd that there were regulations governing people in virtually every occupation, whether it’s folks who are giving dogs baths or trimming hair, but newspapers and other organizations could do whatever they wanted. They could just run amok, publishing unfair, biased stories. Someone reminded him that there’s this First Amendment and Jefferson said you sort of have to put up with a variety of approaches to gathering and presenting news and not all of it is very defensible, but whenever you start trying to impose standards, you get into some problems.
Now, certainly, government cannot impose standards in this country and go very far because we do have the First Amendment and most folks seem to think the First Amendment is still a good idea. But news organizations, and I want each panelist to take a shot at this as they wish, through the Kentucky Press Association or other groups can voluntarily set standards and hope that their members subscribe to them. Let me start with Judy Clabes because I know she has been involved in various organizations and we’ll just spread this around. It is an excellent question because I think it gets at the frustrations that many people outside the media have and also the frustrations that many inside the media have about what they think is a misunderstanding of the way they operate.
Ms. Clabes:
There’s a real simple answer to your first question: the "can we do." Can we impose standards? No. That’s the simple answer, and that’s because literally anybody in this country can do journalism and you can really define journalism in a very personal way. We aren’t licensed to do what we do. We can buy ink or paper or we can print it out of the basement of our homes and call it a newspaper. There aren’t any standards that everybody must adhere to or some definition of news, fairness, or balance. This is America, and each editor, each journalist, each newspaper has a view, a personality, a way of conducting its business.
Mr. Graves:
I would like the other panelists to take a shot at this, and for all of us to think again about what Carolyn Lukensmeyer said. When you have a problem or frustration with a news organization, how do you go about influencing that organization for the better? Not because you perhaps have a skewed view of things and you know it and are simply trying to peddle that, but out of a sense of unfairness done to you, how do you go about changing what a newspaper, radio station, or television station does?
Ms. Mitchell:
I don’t think there is a way to form a standard, but what I wish newspapers of all sizes would do is at least let the public know the rules by which we are playing. I think there is a certain mystery at all levels of journalism, in all sizes of newspapers. About 10 years ago we published an entire series about our policies, so it would clear up some confusion if at least you knew what to expect. You could challenge those things that you would like to see changed or see if you could not have some effect on the policies of the newspaper where you are located. But I know there is a mystery about it and there are people who just can’t figure out why we do cover some things and why we cover them the way we do. I wish we would be more specific about the policies that we do have on a variety of issues.
Mr. Graves:
Gentlemen, any reaction? Thoughts? Suggestions?
Mr. Gish:
Well, I’ll just make the observation that fairness, accuracy, completeness, and words like that are very, very subjective, and I don’t think there is any way to judge fairness. My view and your view of what is fair in a given story probably are completely different. I don’t apologize for my view. My job is to edit and to make choices. I make choices and I stand behind them and if you don’t like them, you don’t have to buy my paper.
Mr. Graves:
Tom, let me ask you this. What opportunities do you give disgruntled readers, readers who may have a legitimate gripe even in your view, to respond in the newspaper?
Mr. Gish:
You can always respond through a letter to the editor. We also have a telephone column in which anybody and everybody can phone the paper and express a viewpoint on any and every subject and we print it every week, a couple of hundred every week. Many of them are outrageous. Many of them are very frivolous. Many of them are a total waste of time, but every now and then you get some real jewels, and it is a true open forum in which anybody who wants to can say anything they want to short of pure libel which we do cut out.
Mr. Bishop:
There are a lot of bad newspapers out there. But I used to run a weekly and no one brought a piece of paper with a bit of news into The Mountain Eagle office that didn’t go into the paper. And we followed the same policy at our paper and most weeklies are looking for people to write about things going on. Take over the local newspaper; write for it; bring in the photos. You know, get to work.
Mr. Graves:
I think it’s important for us to discuss ways to engage local news organizations.
Audience Member:
He was talking about the assets of continuity related to community involvement efforts and I think part of the reason he is saying that is because he has been continuously in operation within his community for so long that he has an historical perspective and has some cynicism no doubt. I’m wondering from the other side we see an absence of continuity on the side of newspapers in terms of turnover of reporters and people without any history of an issue and so may very naively be reporting on things. I’m wondering if there is a balance there that you can reach between the cynicism that comes with having been in business in the same community for a long period of time and the optimism that might come with naiveté in coverage of community issues.
Mr. Gish:
I don’t like the word "cynicism;" I would accept the word "skepticism." I hope I’m skeptical about just about everything that comes in our mail or into the paper. I think everything needs a healthy examining and questioning attitude. But I get what you are saying. Partly, I realize every now and then that there is a new generation of newspaper readers in effect every 10 years and issues that we would have covered in great depth 10 years or so ago may be totally new to many of our readers today. I’m not always as aware of that as I ought to be and sometimes when you do about the 15th version of the same development you do get a little bit weary. That happens because subjects have a way of forever reappearing and we seem to be stuck in certain channels. I sometimes think that if we write another story about garbage collection we’ll bore the readers, yet we go on doing it because we think we should.
Mr. Graves:
Questions? Yes, Judy, go ahead.
Ms. Clabes:
I think you have identified one of the single biggest challenges we have in the newspaper industry and that is a revolving door. We do not keep people long enough in one place. The idea is that if you are a young journalist who wants to move you have to move around, and I wish we could do something to change that. I think the creative turnover that you talked about is necessary in a newsroom so that you don’t get too comfortable. I don’t think it’s cynicism that you develop when you’ve been some place a long time, I think it’s the level of comfort that you have that you know everything. Nothing new can happen to surprise you or interest you in any way. I think that’s the problem, not cynicism. And the problem with the turnover is that you do not have people in newsrooms long enough so that they do have the institutional memory and that’s where most of the mistakes we make come from. I wish I knew how to solve that.
John Cannon:
I’m Editorial Page Editor of The Daily Independent in Ashland. I’m interested in this because civic journalism and how much we should be involved very much splits our newsroom. We have a current Editor who very much encourages editors to become involved in the community. He is currently Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and our News Editor last year was Head of the United Way campaign. Both those organizations are generally thought to be good things but they are controversial. Not everybody loves the United Way because they hate some of the organizations they give money to. I’m on a number of boards and I have always thought that when I became a journalist I didn’t give up my citizenship. I’ve heard journalists say you shouldn’t even belong to the political parties, belong to church...
Ms. Clabes:
Or, who say you shouldn’t even vote.
Mr. Cannon:
Yes, shouldn’t even vote, I’ve heard that, too.
Mr. Graves:
Or not register with a party.
Mr. Cannon:
I’m a registered Democrat, and I’ve actually voted for people that we didn’t even endorse.
Ms. Clabes:
Good for you. That’s great.
Mr. Cannon:
But, I think the newspaper must always remember it’s a corporate citizen and as the community improves in income, so does the newspaper. I would hope that the people always think that we are always pro-Ashland and pro-northeastern Kentucky because we are. We may disagree on what’s good for that community, but we are all for the community.
Ms. Clabes:
Well, as Bill Bishop says, there’s some self-interest in that, too. And there’s nothing wrong with that. A newspaper does rise and fall with its community. Absolutely. I like your approach.
Mr. Graves:
Go ahead, Lindsay.
Lindsay Campbell:
I’m with the Commission on Women and I have a journalism degree, so I am interested in what’s going on professionally. I have two concerns. One is the consolidation of mass communications and how that is affecting downsizing of reporting staffs in it. As time goes on, issues get more and more complicated and complex, and it is my observation that there are fewer and fewer people covering those issues that have time to do the research to give us all the information that we need to make important decisions.
Related to that question is another very, very big concern of mine that two of our major daily newspapers in the state have an overrepresentation of sports on the front page. I have friends, and my husband in particular, who happen to be sports fans and they still are very critical of the fact that we see too much above the fold on the front page of sports. What is that all about?
Mr. Graves (joking):
Bill Bishop, don’t talk about this now. Two questions; two observations.
Audience Member:
Bill should talk about it.
Mr. Graves:
Bill should talk about it. Yes. Well, let’s talk about sports for a moment.
Audience Member:
We go crazy with sports but they look at the circulation figures and they get circulation gains the days after the Derby and the days after a big UK win, so it sells newspapers. It’s that marginal difference in street sales. But I think the earlier question relates to Jeanne’s question, too. We don’t pay people very well so they move around and we demand productivity out of them. We don’t give them time to learn their issues so we cover things superficially which gets me back to why we cover development superficially.
Ms. Campbell:
One observation: our office is right between The Herald and The Courier bureaus in Frankfort. One of those bureaus has lost two people and only replaced one, and there’s no diversity now. I am really concerned about that because we have people that call our office asking why an issue wasn’t covered. I tell them to call the paper and ask.
Mr. Bishop:
She’s talking about The Courier.
Audience Member:
You can go ahead and say it, it’s The Courier.
Ms. Campbell:
Well, it’s a real concern to me. I think the Frankfort bureau is the most important bureau, and they are losing reporters and not replacing them.
Mr. Graves:
Let me ask you, what response do you feel would be the most constructive if you could write John Curley a letter at Gannett in Arlington, Virginia? You could call up Ed Manassah at The Courier-Journal––and we certainly aren’t trying to pick on The Courier-Journal––but I think it’s important that we think in terms of taking that next step. If I were to ask how many in this room has had a complaint about a news story, whether it was on radio, TV, or newspapers, I suspect everyone, if you knew anything about the issue, might raise your hand.
Then I’d ask, what did you do? Having worked for newspapers, I know there are effective ways to complain and get newspapers’ attention and other ways you come off sounding as though you are a crank. I think newspapers, as Rita indicated, have an obligation to explain how to get their attention, whom to contact. I see more of this happening with newspapers all over the state. I’m not sure many newspapers are willing to invest in an ombudsman, which was a great idea 15 or 20 years ago, when newspapers seemed to have more money to spend on such things. That is an advocate for the public, for whoever is calling in, someone who can go browbeat reporters and writers and tell them they really should correct this, but even in the absence of ombudsmen or ombudswomen, I think you need to think in terms of how to get past the complaint to make something happen. More questions.
Cary Willis:
I’m a recovering journalist myself, having worked for four newspapers in Kentucky and four or five radio stations and a TV station as well, most recently, The Courier. I left after 12 years and one of the reasons was I was starting to feel that cynicism overtake me that I often hear complained about. I really believe some of it’s true. Carolyn Lukensmeyer made a really good point about the negative coverage that the Cleveland paper has perpetuated and how some people have dealt with that.
I don’t know how you get around that, but I know that there are people who have just given up on the media. My next door neighbors, for instance, don’t take the newspaper because they say there is nothing in there but bad news. I think there’s some; I don’t necessarily buy exactly what they say that there is nothing but negative news in there, but I do think there is this cynicism that is rampant in this country today. And, although I don’t often agree with him, Bill Bennett wrote a column recently where he talked about the cynicism and the lack of involvement that people feel.
They don’t feel like they want to get involved with government. I work in government now and I get frustrated with this almost attack mode, a presumption that government is screwing something, instead of taking a deep thoughtful look at some of the things we work on. What do you guys think is the media’s role in trying to convey properly what should be the mood of the country? I think people have a general tendency to want to be optimistic about things. But sometimes the media just breaks down that optimism.
Audience Member:
For example, the Bowling Green Daily News, the week after the Promise Keepers event in Washington, DC, one of the largest mass movements of men on the face of North America, the front page of the newspaper had a picture of a deadbeat dad with a T-shirt. I didn’t do anything because I’m a man, but a lady I know went in and asked why they did this. The guy said, "It wasn’t me, it was one of the guys who works for me." She challenged him to write at another time on the same place the seven principles that make a man a Promise Keeper. I don’t think that he’s done that yet, but this is the kind of stuff that I think is part of the cynicism that he’s talking about.
Mr. Gish:
I want to say one thing. I realize that almost no one in the room would ever have seen a copy of The Mountain Eagle. I brought a dozen or so along with me and our County Judge is willing to pass them out if anybody will raise their hand.
Mr. Graves:
Thank you. Thanks to our panel.
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