ABSTRACT
Let’s start with a couple of questions about some of the work you have done with two of the organizations that helped shape the contours of civic journalism, and now citizen journalism. The Pew Center for Civic Journalism helped in defining civic journalism by funding certain projects. When proposals from news organizations reached the Pew Center, what operational components did you look for in deciding that it was a project worthy of funding as a citizen journalism effort? What sorts of suggestions did you give to organizations to help make their work more “civic” in nature? The possibilities for doing journalism that could engage the public in new and different ways expanded between 1993 and 2002, and so the kinds of things we funded at the Pew Center for Civic Journalism also changed and expanded over the decade and they moved away from just funding enterprise projects. We looked for a diversity of projects, a diversity of news outlets, geographic diversity, fresh topics, fresh approaches to covering the topics and new ideas for involving citizens. We started with “convening projects” such as Tallahassee’s Public Agenda project that gathered citizens in the statehouse to wrestle with a future agenda for the city. We funded bottom-up projects like Charlotte’s “Taking Back our Neighborhoods” that involved citizens in framing the root causes of crime in the city as the starting point for the journalism. With the publication of the first edition of our “Tapping Civic Life” guide later in the 1990s, a joint project with Richard Harwood, we began to look for civic mapping projects that made civic journalism a daily (not a project) enterprise that called for going out into neighborhoods, visiting so-called “third places” and talking to so-called community “catalysts” and “connectors.” It’s gratifying how frequently I come across people today still using those terms. By the end of the decade we were funding and rewarding with the Batten Awards for Excellence in Civic Journalism projects that sought public engage-
ment through digital entry points, such as New Hampshire Public Radio’s Tax Calculator or the Everett Herald’s Waterfront Renaissance clickable map. We sought to have the projects operate independently with no intervention from a funder, which in my view is not appropriate.
