Sponsoring news organization: The Spokesman-Review
Founded: 1893
Location: Spokane, WA
Owned by: Cowles Co.
Community engagement initiative launched:
Publisher, SpokesmanReview: William Stacey Cowles
Executive Editor, SpokesmanReview:
Software used:
It's all glasnost, all the time at The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, WA, where they've pushed the boundaries of newsroom openness. Editor Steve Smith calls it the "transparent newsroom," a departure from "Fortress Newsroom, the walled enclave where journalists practiced their craft in a "just the facts" environment, using selective notions of objectivity and artificial forms of balance to shield themselves from the consequences of their work."
How much do they believe in it? They put a webcam in their own editorial meetings.
But will journalistic glasnost have the same consequences for newspapers that it did for the Soviet Union? Can openness coexist with the control an organization needs to operate and survive?
"We tend to forget that journalists always have control over what they publish, and with courage they can always say "no" to citizen-generated coverage that just won't work," said Smith in an essay he penned for Pressthink on the transparent newsroom at the Spokesman.
The challenges and responsibilities of that control were lighter, at first, or so it seems in an interview with Ken Sands, online editor at the Spokesman, who talked about the paper's efforts to build a database of readers' email addresses of readers. The readers were asked to accept email from the paper that would ask for their input on developing stories and features.
The response they got seemed relatively easy to sift: what was publishable and what wasn't was relatively clear, and the payoff was good, as Sands relates here: "Sometimes it's difficult to find people who are affected by a touchy, controversial subject, or to get them to talk on the record. In Spokane, racial profiling by police is accepted as fact in the small minority population, and greeted with skepticism by the vast white majority....When the issue surfaced in 2001 a reporter spent a great deal of time and energy -- without success-- trying to find someone to go on the record with complaints...So the initial stories didn't have the RH (real human) factor. I stumbled upon an email list of about 200 members of the minority community and sent them a message asking for their personal experiences with racial profiling...the quantity of the response was low, but the quality was outstanding."
If editorial decisions on the net's informational gifts to the paper started out easily enough, it got more difficult in a hurry, when the paper hired a forensics expert to investigate rumors about Spokane mayor Jim West's double life -- by day, a socially conservative Republican politician and mayor of Spokane, and by night seeking encounters with young men he met online (read the investigative series). The Spokesman's investigation proved how difficult it could be to use information gained online, since the net and many of the people on it weren't providing information in ways that conformed to journalistic standards about getting the facts. Case in point was the West investigation, where the only way to begin tracking the mayor's behavior was to interact with him online -- which meant using an online forensics expert to pose as a young man in a chatroom.
By the time the West report was published in June of 2005, the paper was already deeply linked to the community online, via email and increasingly via weblogs. In 2004, Ken Sands started collecting local blogs, and created a page linking to around 50 of them, featuring 11 of the blogs as exceptionally interesting and quoting what the bloggers had to say. The list is still online and being updated. See Blogging in the Inland NW.
Only weeks before the paper broke the West story, the paper began the Daily Briefing blog, which billed itself as a sort of reader's guide to the twice-daily editorial meetings, which were open to the public and began being webcasted in [DATE]. Simultaneously, the paper launched its News Is a Conversation blog, where a selection of readers -- eight men and five women -- wrote about and asked questions about the paper's coverage.
The paper's challenges about information coming through the net now extends to how to treat information coming to the paper from the wider blogosphere of which the paper is now a part. The paper recently ran a story on
Further Reading:
- Ken Sands on using email to cast a wider net for community input and sources
- An article on citizen journalism by two University of Wisconsin-Madison professors, giving particular praise to the SpokesmanReview
- The SpokesmanReview is a finalist for General Excellence in Online Journalism, in The Online News Association's 2006 Online Journalism Awards
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