So Now We Inform AND Form Our Public?   

The press needs to play an active role in the community.

When the editor walked down Main Street to pick up a prescription from the druggist and head on to the Rotary Club luncheon, he might stop for a couple of news tips, hear a complaint about a paper boy, and chat with a friend who was peeved about a school board meeting the night before. On the way back, he (almost certainly he) might say hello to the florist and drop by the courthouse to vote.

That's not Norman Rockwell. That's the way it was. Even in the bigger cities, the scene was pretty much the same.

We have lost, in many if not most places, that kind of community and that kind of connection between an editor and readers. Increasingly it appears that the halt in newspaper circulation growth is related to a decline in people's sense of community, disinterest in voting and skepticism about politics and government. Or call it lack of citizenship.

Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University, says "a restructuring of the newspaper's role in public life is going on." In a speech to the California AP News Executives, he made these points:

"What had earlier been a premise of the newspaper – the existence of public life – must now become a project of the newspaper....It is no longer enough to 'inform the public.' The challenge now is to help form the public....Journalism today suffers from a lack of public purpose."

He believes newspapers must be more active in forming and leading their communities by defining community objectives, and by work that reaches beyond writing, editing and printing the paper, including the sponsorship of public forums and encouraging civic involvement in other ways.

His views, and civic involvement projects at the Columbus (Georgia) Ledger-Enquirer , the St. Paul Pioneer Press and The Wichita Eagle , were discussed recently at a seminar sponsored by the Kettering Foundation and the S.I. New- house School of Public Communications. (Honest disclosure: They paid my expenses to attend.)

The idea that newspapers should lead and consciously set agendas for their communities disturbed some journalists at the conference. In part this arose from the traditional commitment to the separation of news and editorial page functions and a fear that news columns would be harnessed for editorial causes.

But it is time we thought beyond that, and we can without biasing the news columns or biasing them with new and different prejudices. Some of the best newspapers have done this for half a century or more. At best, it seems to me, this has been done through vigorous editorial page leadership in which the paper does not simply react to the agendas of others but asserts its objectives very systematically and repetitiously.

Asserts? Yes, and generates response with space for readers' letters, comments solicited from community leaders, Q and A features with experts, followup editorials and letters, op-ed columns, and an annual adjustment and reiteration of objectives for the community and state. All of this can be on the editorial and op-ed pages. But newspapers also can hold forums and "form the public" in other ways.

Newspapers' self-confidence in leading their communities on the hard issues of public life has faded in many places. One of the prices: less relevance to readers. l