The audience for network television news is hemorrhaging. But for me it was best summed up by a woman I met at a focus group a year ago here in Chicago. So there I think is the evidence I can present in this short time for my assertion that there is a long term decline. Many of you already know that. Let me suggest that civic journalism may offer some solutions to the problems I have described.
Civic journalism is an idea, a different way of thinking about the news.
It's a work in progress, it's not an orthodoxy, there is no template, no one size fits all. It is being invented by editors all over the country who have become alarmed by the growing disconnect they sense between their newspapers and their community. Perhaps it might also be useful to give you my definition of journalism. I believe that journalism is about giving people a window on their world. The trouble is that the window of journalism has been located, for the last couple of decades, in such a way that it looks down on the world and the view it takes is of the sensational, the tawdry, the tabloid and the trivial.