A report summarizing the proceedings of this forum is now available through Partners for Livable Communities. Local officials who participated in the forum in addition to Mayor Johnson were Conference of Mayors President and Fort Wayne Mayor Paul Helmke, Orlando Mayor Glenda Hood, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano and Arlington County Council Chairman Ellen Bozman. Designed to explore how public officials can work with the media to move regional collaboration forward, the November Rochester Forum brought together local elected officials, newspaper executives and experts in urban and regional policy from around the country. Newspapers see value in fostering a metro-wide constituency by covering regional issues and can bring considerable resources to such stories when they see fit. Press coverage tends to follow traditional jurisdictional lines.
Newspapers still cover government and public policy intensively, just as they always have.
However, that coverage tends to follow traditional jurisdictional lines, broken down by city, county, and township. This trend of coverage is reinforced by the fact that most state and federal revenues flow into regions along jurisdictional lines. Metro-wide stories often tend to unfold in a slow and cumbersome fashion. Regional issues often ripple through local news, business, and even sports stories throughout the metro area. But because journalists tend to focus on specific geographical areas or topics, they find it difficult to identify and understand these relationships.