Those three Boston media outlets, with significant audiences in population-rich southern New Hampshire, had banded together in the fall of 1995 to find a better way to report the Granite State primary. They started by listening to voters, specifically to the voters of Derry, a town whose population and demographics closely resembled the rest of the state. From the first day, they knew that despite the state's low unemployment rate of 3.2 percent, the deep recession of the late 1980s had left painful scars, and people were worried about keeping their jobs and their health benefits in an economy undergoing wrenching change. Listening to voters may seem like a simple, even obvious exercise, but for all too many even-numbered years voters have been left out of the political dialogue. The public feels excluded from that discourse.
Public journalists have something to offer here.
Indeed they do, as the Globe and its broadcast partners demonstrated in their coverage of the New Hampshire campaign. Many news organizations adapted the civic or public journalism approach to campaign coverage. The AP partnered with The Telegraph of Nashua and New Hampshire Public Radio and Television in a another new civic-journalism partnership for the state's primary. The forums gave ordinary voters the chance to confront the candidates with questions rooted in theirs and their families' concerns. No, they clearly frightened candidates like Steve Forbes, who preferred paid ads on television, and Bob Dole, who ducked them all, preferring tightly controlled photo opportunities.