Civic Journalism: Six Case Studies
TALLAHASSEE, FLA.
"The Public Agenda"

The station followed the kick-off of "The Public Agenda" with an hour-long special in December based on interviews and the first community dialogue. WCTV6 also covers many "Public Agenda" events as news while news director Mike Smith searches for ways to integrate the project even further into the newsroom.

"Newspapers, I think, look for something different," Smith said. "For us, it's just another story. It's more in line with what we do already. The uniqueness is the organization and the concept behind it, not necessarily our reporting."

Meanwhile, readers of the Tallahassee Democrat keep track of the activities through a "Public Agenda" page on the front of the Sunday editorial section and through news articles about the project and weekly calendar updates. The Democrat also publishes profiles of citizens taking responsibility for building a better community.

"The Public Agenda" page got off to a good start immediately after the first community dialogue, but the paper failed to meet its initial goal of publishing the page once a month. The page appeared only three times in the first six months of the project. Concerned that the page was not appearing often enough to underscore the project's importance or support any momentum, the editors, in June 1995, decided to speed up the pace by publishing a "Public Agenda" front every three weeks.

"We just thought they weren't frequent enough to give people a sense of where the debate was going," Associate Editor Bill Edmonds said. "Like most things that are new, it turned out to be a little more cumbersome to shepherd into the paper." Edmonds and others at the paper hope that more frequent publication will not only make it easier to plan for the page but also raise its profile.

The editorial page also has published its first in-depth series about issues raised by "The Public Agenda." The topic: teenage pregnancy.

Public radio and some other Tallahassee media organizations have run announcements and news reports about the project, even though they are not official partners.

Both the Democrat and WCTV6 have met with some resistance when they sought to cover "The Public Agenda's" small discussion groups. Some of the groups worried that media coverage might inhibit discussions or draw publicity before they were ready for it. The newspaper has been allowed more access, but has been challenged to figure out how to cover a group of people sitting in a room and talking.

Keith Thomas, even though he is now a member of the editorial staff, still covers "The Public Agenda." "If you are a news reporter and you go cover this meeting, you go back to your city editor all excited. Then he says, ' When are they going to have this workshop? Who are they going to bring in?' Now you're thinking what a dud of a meeting."

The lesson learned was not every meeting would produce a story, but reporters who attended the meetings often discovered other stories. Bob Shaw sat in on a discussion about underemployment and returned to the newsroom with a cover-story idea for the business section.

The Tallahassee Democrat has not been very successful at integrating "The Public Agenda" into the newsroom, said the newspaper's executives. Shaw calls it the biggest mistake the paper has made. "I think it's seen by the staff as a two-reporter project. I don't think it's really sunk in. I've been disappointed at how few reporters have bothered to show up at [Public Agenda] meetings."

Thomas' new position has added some focus and energy to the editorial page's efforts and may give Bill Edmonds a chance to concentrate on the paper's efforts to give the project a stronger presence on-line.

"The Public Agenda" is only part of the way home. Another round of research is surveying both those people who have gotten involved and those who have not and will provide some quantitative measures of success. Many of the accomplishments, however, will remain unmeasurable.

" 'The Public Agenda' was created as a way to enlarge citizen's capacity to intelligently shape community affairs," said Heldman. "We've succeeded in focusing widespread attention on the need for involvement, but fallen short of our goal of getting thousands of citizens committed to ongoing dialogue.

"That's our challenge for the coming year."