VALUES SESSION MORE RESTRAINED THAN MEETINGS

Intensity that marked editors' meetings absent, but panel members encouraged editors to re-create them at their newspapers with staff meetings and focus groups

By all accounts, discussions of the Journalism Values Institute were sometimes vigorous and mind-bending, often passionate and nearly always heartfelt.

The ASNE convention panel presenting the JVI's findings failed to stir emotions or spark contention, doubtless because the panel format didn't allow real engagement on critical values issues.

But the panel did manage to lay out a case for the JVI's conclusion that newsrooms across America need to engage in noisy, passionate and heartfelt values debates of their own.

Editors attending the morning discussion seemed to accept that case without much argument, generally agreeing that newspapers must re-engage or reconnect with their communities in the process.

Richard C. Harwood, president of The Harwood Group and consultant to the Ethics and Values Committee, facilitated the JVI discussions and stated the case for the panel.

There is a deep belief among Americans that institutions in public life, including newspapers, have lost their way, Harwood said. Newspapers need to "reclaim their public mission" and their sense of values.

"People don't want journalists and newspapers to sweep away traditional values. What they want is for journalists to reach back to their own traditional values and bring them into a new era of change."

What needs to be done relates to the "core of journalism itself, not the peripheral stuff, but to journalism itself and to journalism values and how those values are practiced on a day-to-day basis."

It is the consistent practice of traditional values, redefined and expanded for the times by the 30 editors participating in the JVI process, that will help newspapers recapture lost credibility and standing within their communities, Harwood said.

Furthermore, newspapers must demonstrate a deeper understanding of their communities, and even an affection for their communities, he said. While people expect journalists to remain independent of outside influences that color news judgment, they also expect journalists to have an interdependent relationship with their communities.

But it's still not precisely clear what that interdependent relationship looks like, Harwood said.

Gil Thelen, executive editor of the Columbia (S.C.) State, said that his paper's "culture and the conventions have developed in such a way as to insulate the newsroom from the community. ...

"A clear-eyed friend of the community is, I think, where newsrooms should be positioned in doing their job," Thelen said.

Max King, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, said, "In the Inquirer newsroom, I don't think we think of ourselves as the friend or enemy of anybody. We guard our independence fiercely. ... The price that we pay for taking that position, sometimes, is we are so careful of that independence that it leads to a cynicism about the community and the various contending forces within the community."

Journalists must figure out how to be engaged in a community's issues and struggles enough to feel those issues deeply, King said, but without sacrificing their independence.

"It is clearly an art and not a science and one that has to be enunciated very carefully," he said.

"Reporters who are on the front-line on their beats need to be on the front-line of their communities," said Karla Garrett Harshaw, editor of the News-Sun in Springfield, Ohio. "They have to be doing real people kinds of things."

In the Q&A that followed the panel presentation, voices from the audience seemed, in general, to agree.

Cindy Stiff of Florida A&M University, said newspapers should compel reporters and editors to "go beyond their daily lives - because we have become increasingly isolated in our daily, upper middle class lives - and volunteer in community organizations."

Ted Holmberg, editor and publisher of the Kent County Daily Times in Rhode Island, suggested that the culture of large news organizations and large newsrooms contributes to the separation of newspapers from their communities.

"How does one build roots into a community or understanding of a place if the publisher is pulled from the community at the end of two years, if the editor is moved in three or four years, if reporters are moved?" Holmberg asked. "The publisher can join two or three community booster groups, but if she is moved, the community sees through that."

Panel moderator Chris Peck, editor of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., asked how a newsroom's deeper understanding of or even involvement in a community might affect that community's perception of journalistic bias.

King said it is important for editors to acknowledge that journalists do have an individual bias and that newsrooms have a collective bias.

"When your newspaper is criticized and you deny that, you have lost your credibility right there," King said. "I think you start out by acknowledging that there are a lot of strong feelings and there is a collective group mentality on some subjects in newsrooms and you ought to be structured to account for that. You ought to have levels of editing and some deliberate thinking on that subject in the editing of your newspaper."

Thelen said newsrooms that have a deeper understanding of their community can better define the many stakeholders in a story, making sure those stakeholders see their feelings and concerns reflected in the reporting and writing.

Less clear, panelists agreed, is the extent to which newsrooms should exercise leadership in their communities.

"I think where we (JVI participants) came out was that the leadership role comes through in getting the community beneath the surface, understanding the issues, challenging the community with difficult issues - where discussions are stimulated and connections are made," Thelen said.

Focus group participants said newspaper leadership is expected, said Cyntihia Tucker, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Constitution.

"Within the editor group there was some wrestling with whether we should be leaders, if we even had the right. But for people (in the focus groups), they said, decidedly, 'You are expected to be a leader in your community.' "

The issue for editors, Thelen concluded, is how far to go.

Peck urged editors who are wrestling with this and other complex core values issues to spend time with the values handbook, distributed at the convention and available from ASNE.

Smith is editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph.