First, we as a people, as members of a community, what some call the civil society, are threatened. And second, the news business is in trouble. And I believe those two things are linked. Civic journalism has been accused, ironically, of boosterism, and indeed some early experiments came close to being just that. No one gets it all right the first time.
Experiments are about failure as much as success.
Today, we see many successful civic journalism initiatives that are far from boosterism because they begin with hard, unflinching reporting of the real issues that face a community. The Pew Center for Civic Journalism recently commissioned a research firm to help us learn about them. And the answers that have come back after listening to 15 focus groups in 12 cities around the country are remarkably alike. That leads to what one of my colleagues calls rational ignorance. Plugging into the community is hard.