COLUMN: Talking back

From Lisa Levenson's, "First Person," Fall '96 From Lisa Levenson's, "First Person," Fall '96Crime was the catalyst, butFrom Lisa Levenson's, "First Person," Fall '96Crime was the catalyst, butreaders shouldn't stoop writingFrom Lisa Levenson's, "First Person," Fall '96Crime was the catalyst, butreaders shouldn't stoop writingsince the crime wave is over. From Lisa Levenson's, "First Person," Fall '96Crime was the catalyst, butreaders shouldn't stoop writingsince the crime wave is over. Work at a newspaper long enough, especially a college newspaper like this one -- with windowless offices -- and you begin to think you're only reporting, analyzing and commenting on the news for your own enjoyment. In January, when I took over as editorial page editor, this feeling became even more pronounced. Every night last semester, I logged into the "Letters to the Editor" e-mail account -- and, more often than not, found it empty. Yet very few people were eager to tell us what stories and columns they liked, hated or couldn't care less about. They picked up our product every day, tore out the crossword puzzle, glanced over the front page and the sports page and maybe this page or the world page during lunch, and that was it. But when College senior Patrick Leroy was shot two weeks ago, all of that changed. The DP's professional staff and our student reporters, editors and Web masters went into overdrive. They put out updated information on the incident as soon as it became available and encouraged community members to talk back to us, to tell us what they thought about the shooting itself, about our coverage of it and about administrators' responses to it. Although tragic and frightening, the shooting proved to be my long-awaited catalyst for reader feedback. For the past two weeks, I've been inundated with faxes, letters, e-mail and voice-mail messages, full of outrage, fear and venom directed at anyone who will listen. I've had to ask for extra space in the paper -- half of page 7 -- three times just to print excerpts of this correspondence in a timely manner, and you'll see still more of it this week. The initial deluge is now giving way, albeit slowly, to a steady stream of calls and letters offering suggestions of what to do about crime in University City. And for the first time in six months, it seems that what I and other editors and reporters do here, five nights a week, is actually being noticed. More importantly, I feel we're making a difference, having a positive and tangible impact on campus life. A week ago Saturday, when editors from six of the eight Ivy League papers gathered at the Annenberg School to discuss "civic journalism," I learned that college newspapers aren't the only publications trying to understand and win back "tuned out" readers. Editors at big-city newspapers like the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle and The Philadelphia Inquirer, who attended the conference, are likewise scratching their heads over this question. They are wondering how to get readers to tell them what's wrong with public life -- and now to get them involved in fixing it -- before they announce their displeasure in the strongest possible terms: by canceling their subscriptions, which they've decided are no longer a necessity. "Civic journalism," also known as "public journalism" or "community journalism," aims to revive the essential connection between newspapers and public life, to put large metropolitan newspapers back in touch with their readers (and vice versa) through increased access to column inches on newspaper pages and the reframing of stories in ways that encourage dialogue, instead of polarization. Everything is just an experiment now, Buzz Merritt from the Eagle and Chris Satullo from the Inquirer repeated again and again. But what these and other newspapers like The Charlotte Observer have begun to do, on a relatively large scale, is what you've seen in microcosm through the "CrimeReport" box on the DP's Web page. We've relied on the Internet to begin providing shared relevant information, from various city-wide sources, to the community. Professional newspapers have done more. They have begun to think earnestly about who they serve and who they represent, planning some news coverage and editorial space allocation around these concerns. Like the Eagle, a paper may change the kinds of questions its reporters ask, pushing for the "why" behind a story and looking more deeply for the middle ground on issues, instead of simply grinding out formulaic copy quoting sources from opposite ends of the spectrum. Like the Inquirer, a paper may hold public forums with ordinary citizens, picking their brains to find out how they've arrived at their political views and searching for ways to capture such civil, small-group dialogue on its opinion pages. They haven't come up with definitive answers yet, although that hasn't stopped some media scholars from dismissing "community journalism" outright as an inexcusable breach of objectivity (which should be called detachment, but that's another story entirely). Journalists won't soon be adding more letters to the traditional "five W's and H" (Who, What, When, Where, Why and How) that constitute the essential components of any news story. In some ways, this reluctance or rush (notice the extremes) to judge the success and future of "public journalism" arises from the fact that, as Merritt says, "public journalism has had journalism done to it." But talk to me in 10 years, Merritt is fond of adding. Then he may be able to explain what happened to American newspapers and their readers -- and why. I hope readers here won't wait that long to talk to me -- or to any of us, for that matter. We are interested in what you think about what you read, because the DP is your campus newspaper. And these days, we're as close as a mouse click or a series of touch tones. What are you waiting for? Drop me a note at letters@dp.upenn.edu, or give me a call at 898-6585, extension 136.