Bill Green: I'm delighted that all of you could fight their way through and come here because this is a special moment in journalism. The mainstream media in this country is suffering from a seizure of ethics. They are in the midst of self examination, all stemming from the Clinton/Lewinsky mess in Washington. This self examination by the media may be the best thing that comes out of all these scandals.

The Committee of Concerned Journalists says in the early reports on the Clinton/Lewinsky thing, 41 percent of the coverage was based on opinions, not facts; a third of the coverage came from anonymous sources. The press, according to Tom Winship, seems to have "cut loose from its moorings." The Columbia Journalism Review says the coverage was "passion run amuck."

Now these, ladies and gentlemen, are the words of the press criticizing the press; and this is a phenomenon. This is an industry which is notorious for its failure or its refusal to cover itself, and so this is so rare that like Halley's Comet, we may never see it in our lifetime again. All over the country small and large groups are meeting and asking how it happened. How is it that the New York Times and the Washington Post and the National Enquirer were all running the same stuff?

[T]his creates an extraordinary moment for us to hold this conference. It is a golden moment. We have assembled a panel here which may have opportunity to participate in something that they may not have opportunity to participate in again. That is the press feeling, do we dare say, vulnerable. Maybe that's an overstatement. Ashamed, embarrassed? Possible. But it may create an opportunity for the press to hear its critics, to listen to its critics, rather than dropping into a defensive crouch and reaching for the First Amendment protections as it usually does.

Our subject is what should American citizens demand of our news media? What do citizens require and expect from journalists, particularly those reporting on state and local issues? How does coverage, or the lack of it, affect democratic decision-making?

Our first panelist is Thad Beyle. Thad is familiar, I'm sure, to most of you. Some of you may be taking classes with him. If you haven't, you should. He is Thomas Piersal Professor of Political Science here at Carolina. He was Chairman of the North Carolina Center for Public Policy for ten years, an author, a consultant, frequently quoted, and is currently writing a book with some colleagues on mass media and state politics and government.

Thad Beyle: Thirty years ago Terry Sanford raised a question in his book Strong Over the States. Who in the states can say they understand state government by what they read in the newspaper? I would certainly think we're in worse shape now than we were then in terms of trying to understand what's going on there. This is especially true for the states because they're kind of in that undefined middle of our federal system. We know an awful lot, or we think we do, about what's going on locally. We certainly hear a lot about what's going on nationally because that is covered everywhere. But that middle level, that middle tier, like the middle child in a family, is really hard to define, we don't know what they do. We sure can find out what they do when the legislature goes home before they pass the budget, we suddenly find out that teachers can't be hired and superintendents are going crazy and so forth.

But states are important. My basic perspective is the state level, although I do teach local, too. But I think it's important to understand some things about state governments and how the media addresses state government that we may not talk about in other places.

Let me just talk about, first of all, how the national media covers state government and state policies and politics. It's sort of what Doris Graber calls flashlight journalism -- when all of a sudden something happens, the flashlight goes on in that state about that Governor or about that particular situation, to the detriment or whatever of whatever else is going on in a whole bunch of other states, and even in that state. Right now the flashlight is on the Governor's race in California, because it's so interesting to see someone's going to spend $28 million to try to win the Democratic primary. We haven't had a Governor's race in this state that approaches that, but we've got in California one person that wants to spend that much. So the flashlight is on there. Then occasionally the flashlight will move around when some Governor errs. But it really is to the detriment of a lot of other coverage.

There's another difference I want to talk about that I think is important we need to sort out when we talk about how states are covered in terms of government, politics, and policy. Back in the early 1990s, a graduate student and I sent out a questionnaire to elected leaders across the 50 states -- both state executives and state legislators, trying to find out what was the most important media outlet in the state? Was it the newspaper, was it radio, was it television? We just had all these questions about this and that and the other thing. What we found out when it came back was not what we would think here that the most important outlet in North Carolina is the News and Observer, or if you go to another state that major newspaper. What came back was the Associated Press. We kind of stepped back and said why is that? Because Associated Press wire stories were everywhere. And when the legislators went home and picked up their local paper it was the Associated Press story that was in there about state government.

Another point that needs to be made when we think about the states is they're not all alike; their state capitals are not located in the same places; their media structures are completely different; and what newspapers do in those states sometimes varies greatly. You go to some states where the capital city is the big city and everything goes on there -- the Bostons, the Atlantas and the Denvers. You've got a lot of things going on vying for the attention of the media. When you go to another state, when that's the only thing going on in the state, state government, and the newspaper's right there -- like in Utah and Hawaii -- that is a different type of reporting and newspaper approach. Then you juxtapose all of that to at least two states where the newspaper, the owner of the newspaper and the newspaper itself tries to impose its own views on what's going on in the state to the extent that you see in New Hampshire with the Manchester paper, and you see in Oklahoma with the Daily Oklahoman, which in the latter case covered a Governor and his supposed indiscretions to such an extent that at some point, and they went after the family at some point the son went over the -- his son, the Governor's son, went over the edge and committed suicide. At some point probably the press needed to step back on what they were doing. But I think it's important to realize when we're talking about coverage in the states it's very, very different as you go from state to state.

We happen to be in a state like several where there's a lot of media outlets, where there's a lot of metropolitan areas, where there are many different media markets. So while we may have six, seven or eight, you get out in California and Texas with double digits, it's hard to fit in where the state news is because you've got so many other things going on.

Carolyn Russell, an experienced and influential state legislator. represents the North Carolina House's District 77 made up of Green, Lenore, Wayne Counties:

I have gone through an evolution in my legislative term. I've learned a lot of things. I've learned that there are good journalists and there are bad journalists. There are journalists that I trust and I can be completely honest with, and there are journalists that I wouldn't tell them what time of day it was if they asked me because I cannot trust them to accurately report the facts.

I think that journalism is really unique. I think the role that they play that shapes the politics and the policies of this state is immense.

Every time I go back home I have to do a doubletake back there. They'll say things like well, I read this in so and so newspaper, but I know that's not the real story. Now what really happened up there? That happens more often than you know. So a lot of my time is spent sharing information with people relative to issues or committee meetings or things that are going on in Raleigh.

[I]t's always been my feeling that you need to be completely honest with those people. Whenever I do that I find that for the most part, the right information is going to get printed. I think it's important to have a good relationship with the journalists that represent your district and the folks in the Raleigh area so that they feel free to come in because their hands are tied many times if we do not share information with them and tell them sort of where we're coming from.

There are times that I will read stories in the newspaper and realize that one-third of the debate was left out. It might have been one-third of that debate which clearly outlined the nature of the problem or the issue that we were dealing with. And that would bother me because I think people need to be informed.

I think that journalists and politicians probably have some things in common in that, I don't know, the way political campaigns go now, things are in sound bites. There is no in-depth stuff there.

But as I thought about this driving up this morning, I also thought one of the things that I think is good is for each profession to reexamine itself on a regular basis, and make sure that the compass is aimed right. Certainly the accountability, I'm not sure how much it is there for journalists. I do know we can be voted out of office so there's some accountability to that.

But I do think there is a partnership between the press and politics. One of the things I've also learned is that there is a big gulf sometimes between politics and good governing. And it's my opinion, and if you all help keep us straight on some of those things, then I think that's the way that it needs to be.

So my relationship with the journalists and with the press has been for the most part very good. Once again, when I was first elected every time my name came out in the paper I assumed it was just something horrible and you develop a thick hide. You get beyond those kinds of things so that you're working together and you're sharing information so that we move in tandem towards things that lead us to make better decisions.

Sherry Magill of Jacksonville, Florida, is the Executive Director of the Jesse Ball duPont Fund:

What must voters know? We need&to understand public policy -- health, welfare, education, social security, medicare, crime, and how such policies affect individuals, families, and communities. We need to understand existing policy. We need to understand how that policy is being reshaped and why and by whom. We need to understand how elected representatives are voting on these policies and why and who funds their campaigns.

We need to understand how policies are funded. Who receives governmental contracts, for what purpose, and who administers federal, state, and local dollars, and how. And how the public can have some influence over those processes.

What do we expect from journalists? I would argue almost nothing. In fact I think we expect exactly what we get -- a steady diet of murder, rape, and drug busts covered by local television stations; and in the case of the daily newspaper that I read, a mouthpiece for the National Football League and a booster for the local Chamber of Commerce.

How does coverage or lack of it affect democratic decisionmaking? I would argue directly and rather dramatically.You all might remember the rather high profile, horrific murders that occurred in Miami and Tallahassee about four or five years ago. One was a horrific murder of some German tourists; and one was the murder of a British tourist at a rest stop on I-10 near Tallahassee. Although they probably couldn't prove a one-to-one correlation, the Collins Center at Florida State University has illustrated that the Florida public sense of violent crime immediately following saturation by the news media of these murders was way out of proportion to the amount of violent crime occurring in Florida communities, and we went on a rampage -- building prisons and adopting curfews for teenagers although crime statistics and research illustrates that most crimes committed by teens occur in the afternoon hours, not after 11:00 o'clock at night. So in effect, we instituted policies that have no reason for being, not based in fact, but simply driven by the public's fear, driven by their image of crime in their communities I think given to them particularly by television news.

I would argue that local television news coverage of crime, in effect its incessant recitation of the local police blotter, but with moving pictures, has more to do with American incarceration rates, with our national war against drugs, with the Willie Horton ad, with welfare reform policies, and with the absolute disconnect between people living in our suburbs and those in the inner city than we can imagine.

What do we do about all of this? What do we do about the disconnect, if you will, between what citizens really need to know about and what they're actually fed via local television stations and local newspapers? I don't know. I'm wondering if print journalism can't in some way be an antidote to television journalism.

How should citizens' requirements influence or change definitions of the news? -- that we need less a redefinition of news and more a rediscovery of democracy and what that means. We need to think in terms of citizens, not consumers or taxpayers or clients. We need to think carefully about the proper distinction between things public and things private. I still argue there is a distinction. We need a better understanding of how communities work.

I think basically the public wants more substance and one has to work very hard to get the substance.

I would share the Representative's view that my own experience over the past five years is that journalists are no different than the rest of us, and maybe the rest of us need to try harder to get to know journalists. I have argued in non-profit settings that we all need to take a journalist to lunch.

Tom Lambeth is Executive Director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, a former aide to Governor Terry Sanford, and a former aide to Representative Richardson Pryor: Let me share with you all two thoughts about North Carolina stories -- one potential and one a story that is ongoing.

I have an idea, and it may be a very dry well, but I have an idea that an enterprising journalist could go out and do a pretty good story if they went back to the activities of the Committee to Reelect in North Carolina in 1976 and saw if there were connections with the generosity of Richard Mellon Scaife then forward in North Carolina, both in political contributions and in charitable activities. If there's a web there of activity that might be revealing. It may not be anything there at all. I have an idea that that's a story that nobody's working on. It again, may be a dry well.

I've also had the interesting experience recently of being involved in the legislative study commission that's looking at the possible conversion of Blue Cross from a not for profit to a for profit status. That is a story that was written very little at the time that it was most critical in the development of that legislation. There's a good bit being written about it now. But it's a story in which something that has great impact on the people of North Carolina, the possibility for what may be as much as $1.5 billion of money that everybody apparently now agrees is theirs, what happened to it, it almost was decided with no coverage at all, and I should acknowledge the fact that there are a couple of newspapers represented here in at least one case of which did a good job. But there was very little written about it at the time.

In my work, giving away other people's money, I go all over North Carolina, and I must tell you that in meetings with people in places like Charlotte and Greenville and Asheville, but even more in Bergol and Sparta and Bernsville and Fremont, I'm constantly amazed at the fact that the story of something very important that's happening in North Carolina that impacts on them has never been written.

It's important to a private foundation like the one that I represent with a mandate to serve the quality of life of the people of North Carolina that there be a very active press in the state dealing with government and politics. Most of the things that we're involved in funding are issues that have an impact on the lives of people, of where they are every day. The press is a very important partner in the effort to make the right things happen. That's the reason that foundations in North Carolina, some of them, have had to fund alternative forms of journalism in recent years, like the Fund for Investigative Reporting in western North Carolina.

It's a simple matter that in a democratic system like ours, the people's business requires constant debate, the constant rub of opposites, and a silent press or a press unaware or uninvolved endangers the kinds of choices that ought to be made; the kinds of wide options that ought to be there.

It's important that we build community in this state, and I think an active press is a very important partner in that kind of role.

In response to some of the questions that are in the papers that we have seen here for this conference, I'm not certain that the requirements of the press are any different than the requirements of other institutions in democratic society, presumably honesty, fairness, a willingness to be engaged, and a mutual presumption of innocence. The lack of competition in the print media in this state, the lack of competition in ownership, for instance, it seems to me raises the press to a new level of responsibility. The disenchanted or the aggrieved can no longer go out and buy their own printing press and create their own newspaper -- a safety valve that was always there in some romantic past.

Every reporter, it seems to me, should have one or two stories that they never wrote because of some issue of compassion or sense of common good. One or two. Not very many.

Given a choice between a passionate journalist who occasionally makes mistakes and a dispassionate one who never makes a mistake, I'll take the former.

Journalists, like all professionals, should have time once in awhile to think a lot about exactly what it is they do while they're not doing it.

Howard Lee is a businessman, a member of the faculty at UNC, represents the state's 16th senatorial district, and is a former Mayor of Chapel Hill:

I, frankly, would like to have reporting that relates to real life problems that informs and clarifies for the reader what options, or possibilities, or hope, or inspiration or desperation that can be generated from those real life problems.

The thing that has struck me through the years is that there appear to be reporters who decide what is true and set out to prove it; as opposed to going out and collecting facts and then determining what is true and what is not. Like many of you, I sometimes get approached and I'm asked the question, for example, not whether or not something is true, but how do I defend what has been determined, predetermined to be true, and no matter what I say ends up being wrong and it's hard to know how to approach responding to that.

I had a conversation yesterday, for example, and I guess this is starting to disturb me somewhat. A group of us were talking in the Senate and someone talked about a story that was being written, and the question came up as to what is the reporter's politics? What is the reporter's politics? I thought back years ago, that was never a question to be asked. No one thought about a reporter's politics. No one thought about a journalist being partisan one way or another. But unfortunately now we live in a society where it appears that politics is also a guiding force not only among journalists but maybe even among judges.

Sometimes I feel like we're being impacted with entertainment journalism. I become very disturbed about national morning shows on television, for example, they come on with a very interesting subject and they put it on for five seconds, and you get interested in it, and you'd like to know more, and it's gone.

Negative reporting bothers me. I don't know whether that's in response to society or just because it sounds good. I've always been disturbed, and this is just one example of stories which will say that one out of four black males is in prison. And I've often asked why doesn't someone right a story that three out of four are doing well and they're not in prison. So by that reporting, one creates a stereotype which is implanted in a negative fashion in the minds of people.

I think the press has done a reasonably good job in presenting a subject which is now before the legislature, that of the children's health care plan. I believe the stories I have read have basically been fair, they have laid out the facts. They have talked about both the House and the Senate proposals as well as the Governor's proposal, and I believe that most people reading those stories could at least come away understanding the positions from which the two houses are presenting their proposals and the Governor is presenting his proposal. It seems to me the public then is allowed to make its own judgments, and believe me, the judgments have been all over the water.

The public has a right to both trust and expect substance from its media. Sometimes the sources of stories create the stories, and I'm thinking of some of my political friends who will use all kinds of antics to simply get themselves in the newspaper. They will be negative toward someone else or say something negative about another colleague or simply put down another person in order to capture a headline or get a story in the newspaper. And they do that because they recognize there are some journalists there who will respond more to this kind of antic behavior than to substantive presentations on issues that may have a great deal more meaning for the public's long term future as opposed to the short term.

Let me make one final point here because my thoughts may not be conventional in this regard, but they are my thoughts and it's been my feeling for a long time. I've often felt that the press over-emphasizes ethnicity of personalities in stories. I find very little value in what the ethnicity of a person is, and I certainly find very little value in continuing to harp on race when it has no meaning for the substance one is presenting.

I used to resent very strongly, and even when it happens today, and it does continue to happen today, being referred to as "the black Mayor of Chapel Hill". I would always retort that I'm the Mayor of Chapel Hill.

I, frankly, recognize that there are some who believe in playing the label game and I know that reporters sometimes are confused as to which label is in vogue today -- whether it's black, African American, Afro American, or whatever somebody else has created next. And I recognize that there is a need to try to respond to certain individuals out there who also expect this. But I think it should be done in a way that it adds to the story and not just thrown in because it seems to be "the political thing to do" at the time.

One final point Politicians and the press I think are sometimes very much alike, that we both engage in snippets in our presentations that can sometimes be very destructive to individuals, and in many instances simply do not recognize or even measure that there is no relevance between what we do, our behavior, our presentation, and the intended consequences of where we're trying to go.

I'll stop there Bill, although I've got another page here that I can go over... (Laughter)

Bill Green: You've heard five different points of view on state coverage by local press. It seems to me that what's at stake and the criticisms we make of the state press cannot be overestimated, which is to say the local election that turns out to be a flop because people have not been informed; the local situation which is not surveiled as it should have been; the state government who for mistake or perhaps achievement, that receives no coverage. We're talking here now about a changed nation. The last five Presidents, as you heard last night from Gene Roberts, each has added additional responsibilities to state governments. Now that effect on our lives is enormous, enormous, and daily the debates that take place that mostly affect your lives are in state capitals rather than in the national government.

We're talking here, this issue we have discussed, we're talking here about the very fabric, it seems to me, of the democratic system. Either this information is reported, written, conveyed to consumers of information, readers, viewers, or something vital and irreplaceable does not happen in our lives. The system itself doesn't work if this reporting is less than it should be.

Having said that, John, perhaps you would comment on the panel or make any other remarks you'd like to.

John Mashek: I'd like to be the devil's advocate, if I could. I think we are aware of the sins of omissions the press has committed, and maybe less so [in] North Carolina. I'm wondering how much of the responsibility falls on politicians themselves or the officials who work for state government? (inaudible) forthright, being cynical, think more of a sound byte than being informative. This works two ways. Perhaps Carolyn and Howard would like to comment, but I think people have talked about maybe a partnership that isn't an actual adversarial relationship. But can we build on that?

Howard Lee: John, I think that's an excellent point. We in public life have a tendency on occasion to want to play things close to the chest and give it out bits at a time when it's to our benefit and when it "helps" us as opposed to always being prepared to respond to the public's right and need to know, in my opinion.

One example of that occurred during the last session of the legislature. We had to deal with something called the "open meetings law" that related to the university. There were feelings here within the university system where the administration felt meetings were too open and that the press would be destructive given an opportunity to come in. I think most of us recognize that administrators need to do business. I think we recognize that to continue to pursue a further restriction of access to the press, to activities in public institutions would simply create a great deal more suspicion of our trying to hide.

The second point I think we came to recognize is that the more we restrict from the press, the more the press will be creative in reporting something. So it's that creativity, it seems to me, that tends to pull one toward reporting without fact. So I do think, without going on and on. I could cite many other examples, that we in the public, those of us who hold public positions, should try to be a little more open.

Then I'll just say finally, certainly there are relationships that should be established with the press that can be trusted. For example, I may be prepared to reveal to a journalist activities that are in the planning stage just so he or she can have access to this information, but I may request that you not put it out immediately so as to destroy what I'm trying to accomplish. Of course when a reporter does not honor that, and I don't know if they're bound to honor it, that's why I preface my remarks by saying trusting relationships. Then that causes me to want to shut down and not say anything until I'm absolutely ready for the public to know.

It seems to me there's enough blame on both sides that does go forward in creating greater mistrust among the two sides, and I think we in public office play a major role in contributing to that.

Carolyn Russell: I think you're right about that. I think there are several things that sort of bother me. Number one, your statement, there's a natural adversarial relationship between politicians and journalists. Why does that have to be?

I mean I didn't mean to answer your question with a question of my own, but before we get away from here explain that to me, why it has to be that way.

John Mashek: It's adversarial only in that we're not out to [carry the water].

Carolyn Russell: If I want my water carried, I'll let you know, here.

I know. I think that is true what you've said, but let me tell you how that works. If you have a better relationship the press... And I talk to most of the press and I try not to dodge questions, but there are some, like Howard just said, about some information that you really don't want to be public right now. Sometimes that really does help in order to explain where you're coming from; and sometimes I'll think through a process with a reporter who will ask me about a question. I'll say that my mind isn't made up yet, but I'm hoping that he or she isn't going to go out there and print some definitive statement based on a more informal conversation that we have.

Another thing I think that makes a difference is the fact that you have to be careful over who's going to sue you. I have seen that come up, it seems to me, more frequently in the last year than I've ever seen it before, so sometimes you find yourself being a little bit more careful about what you're going to say because of some legal thing going on out there. I don't know whether that's just, whether it's gotten worse or whether it is... I think it's gotten worse, I really do.

But I do think the relationship between the politician and the press, I think it's critical, I really do. I've worked with some wonderful journalists who have made a real effort in order to put the information out there, and if you're honest and if you trust them then you can do that. It can be done. There are many times they've been a tremendous help to me. Not personally, but I mean on the issue that I was working on.

Bill Green: Thad, since there is a noticeable reduction in the numbers of stories written about state and local politics in the newspapers are other means of information transfer at work here? Is the Internet a role at all? Seth Effron out here in the audience edits an on-line publication. Do serious leaders, the leadership group or as some of the columns call it, the political class, do they get their information from other sources than newspapers? Clearly television is not much of a player in this.

Thad Beyle: I think they are, and Seth can talk to that better than I, but I see that happening more and more. There's more organizations that have web sites, or you can get to them and get information. I got a whole series of information, several tables, from the National Conference of State Legislatures just by, they set it up, wherever it is out there, and then I pulled it down, and so that was very helpful. So I think that is happening.

I can tell you that the term papers I'm getting now, the number of footnotes that are now to www. and so forth are increasing tremendously, which means I can't find where they stole it from anymore. (Laughter) They're actually out there writing their papers. So the future leaders are very well attuned to this, so I think that is something that is happening, and when you talk about educational reform and the need to have people attuned, how you use computers, how you use this new technology, I think this is part of what you're really talking about that these people kick in to other ways of getting information.

Let me just, a couple of other things. One, when you said are there other ways. I think there's another way that people are communicating about their interests and what's going on in the world, and this is something that Ferrel and I guided over the past year, with the assistance of Tom, sending some other people's money over here. We took a look at, had three graduate students take a look at what's going on on talk radio in North Carolina. Most people have a view of talk radio as people yelling at everybody and yelling about Bill Clinton or what's going on in Raleigh. Indeed, we are past that point now in what talk radio is doing. We certainly have those people, and you can find them, they're in many different places. But what they found is there are more and more of the smaller stations out there in the state, locally owned, the owner, the station manager, some people just opening the lines and talking about local problems, local issues, and not yelling about things, but just opening up the sense of here's what's going on here. We need to talk about this annexation problem, we've got this school districting problem and so forth. And evidently it is much more widespread than we realize. We sit here and think about oh, we can't stand Rush and all that, but there's other things going on.

But there are other governmental things going on. We may be overlooking the very, very important way that people are going around the normal mode of picking up the paper, getting angry, and writing a letter to the editor or something, that they're just being able to pick up the phone and they have a constructive way of interacting, and in a sense, what is being developed is what you might call a virtual community. It's a community that does not have the boundaries around like Chapel Hill does or Carboro does or Pittsboro or whatever. It's a much larger community that people can relate to.

Tom Lambeth: If I can go back, get us out of sequence a little bit, but to the first question, and this is not to offer gratuitous advice to the public servants that are up here on the panel. They don't need this. But I've always been amazed at the fact that people in public life, including people in private foundations, not people in elective office, the inability to accept the possible response to a question from a reporter, which is not to answer it. If there's good reason not to answer it. Or even to do something like say yes, no, and not offer any more.

I will tell you all that one of the most interesting experiences I've ever had in my life in dealing with the press was during a very brief period of time, seven weeks, in Washington, when I directed the investigation of the death of Doctor King and President Kennedy. One of the reporters on the Washington Post that some of you probably know, George Lardner, had a great tactic for calling you and asking you questions, in which he would start by acknowledging that he knew you couldn't tell him anything about this matter he was calling about, some of which by the way actually was covered by national security restrictions, but that he was going to, for instance, read you a list. George knew every Mafia leader in America, as far as I could tell. He was going to read you, he'd heard that a Mafia leader was going to testify maybe in secret, and he would read me this list of people, and I didn't have to say anything, but if I would hang up after the right name. (Laughter) What I always did was hang up immediately. I didn't let him breathe again.

Somebody once told me they'd heard I'd done that. Why did you think about doing that? I said it meant if he got the story he got it from somewhere else. I hadn't violated the restrictions on me, I hadn't told him anything. They said well, didn't you worry that he would get you? Well, maybe I wasn't important enough to get, and I know you always run the risk of the story that says "Representative Jones wouldn't comment." That's what Representative Jones did, if he refused to comment. That's an accurate reporting of it.

But I've always been amazed at the fact that so many people, and we have sessions for private foundation CEOs where there are discussions about what you do if a reporter ever asks you a question. I'm just amazed at the inability of people to realize that they don't have to suddenly go on and on and on and on in answering a question that they don't want to answer.

Bill Green: Some of the tactics Tom has just described will convert you into an anonymous source.

Question: Ms. Magill had some suggestions about what ought to be done to make this relationship better, and I wonder if any of other people on the panel had similar ideas or suggestions about how we might reach what Mr. Lambeth said was a "mutual presumption of innocence".

Carolyn Russell: One thing that occurs to me is that perhaps who's covering a beat in the General Assembly can come over and have a cup of coffee with us before you need something about a story. It could be a new legislator, or just wanting to say I'm going to be covering education this time or something else, and I thought we'd just sit down and chat so that you start out...

Question: On the record or not?

Carolyn Russell: I prefer to do things on the record. If something is off the record, it's difficult for me and it's difficult for that journalist. I don't know what kinds of things we'd be talking about that would be off the record. But little things like that.

Another thing, we have no idea who these people are. Nobody gives us a booklet. We're all in a booklet with our pictures, and when the many press that cover the building... You go up there, and you don't know. You don't know what they look like. They're not people behind those names.

Bill Green: So far the press has got a lunch and a cup of coffee out of this. (Laughter)

Question: I'd like Senator Lee to comment on a couple of things I'd like to mention. One, he talks about the press' overcoverage of ethnicity. At least some journalism (inaudible) in my lifetime was its inability to cover race very well, and the fact that President Clinton did not convene this dialogue on race I think is very appropriate. Until (inaudible), I'm convinced that states like mine, Alabama, and places where I come from (inaudible) the level that it should.

But you mentioned also the negative coverage. You talked about taking a subject like the numbers of black males that are incarcerated and emphasizing one out of four is in prison rather than saying three in four are not. I would say to you, (inaudible) journalism school, that the young people are being taught that the one in four is the news story, Senator. And I would say to you, you're satisfied that three in four are not in prison, but that's (inaudible).

Howard Lee: Just to respond, I do agree that dialogue about race is a healthy process. Using the label just simply to highlight it is not necessarily healthy, depending on how it's used.

I think we make the one out of four the news stories and don't balance it off with the three out of four who are doing the constructive. They never make the paper. You never read about them, even though they're doing something that could very well be a news story.

I'm having a running battle right now with the Department of Public Instructions because we give tests to students. Of course the lead story is always "black students flunk". I think we have so many negative stories about our public schools, why not at some point talk about the successes we're having in those schools and the increased numbers that are going to colleges and universities and who are succeeding.

I'm not suggesting that we back away from recognizing race as a reality in our need to have dialogue, to interact with each other, and hopefully try to raise it to a healthier level, but I'm suggesting that the way it is used tends to enhance stereotypes as opposed to diminish them.

Question: An observation... The observation is that in your very casually but thoughtfully presented comments, you said much more about tone in the media when talking about what you don't like; and much more about content when you talked about what you wanted to change. I wonder if in fact we shouldn't be talking about the change in tone that we want as well.

The second observation before the question, I wonder if policy people and press people, journalists, don't suffer the same two problems articulated once by Rick Carlisle, now Department of Commerce. Both find themselves dealing with hot button instead of continuing issues. Both find themselves faced by the sectoral divisions of their responsibilities, so crime isn't connected with education on the journalist's beat or on the policy expert's beat, either. Education, health, environment, economic development, are very separate spheres when in fact of course they're very closely interrelated.

Now the question. We haven't talked about the sociology of the media, really, and the role journalists' perceptions of their careers and opportunities, futures, play in the ways that they play their stories. The extent to which journalists move from community to community seems to me much greater today than perhaps a generation ago, though there's always been movement. And as a result, instead of a community ethic defined locally, there has to be a professional ethic, and the extent to which that is shared among journalists, this brings us back to tone again, seems very, variable.

The community defined by a professional ethic as medicine is very hard to sustain and I wonder what more work we could do in that fashion.

Bill Green: Your question is pointed specifically at professional ethics?

Voice: I want to thank members of the panel for their participation this morning. We have run over, but I'll guarantee you this. This panel is going to run closer to schedule than any panel you have here... (Laughter)

Audrey K. Bailey, Director of the University of North Carolina Center for Public Television: Good morning, everyone. This is an event that is near and dear to my heart, as Ferrel said. Having covered the General Assembly, I'm very interested in state government and very interested in hearing what Donald Shaw has to say to us this morning.

Donald Shaw is a Kenan Professor of Journalism in Mass Communications, he's the Director of the Center for Research in Journalism and Mass Communication. He's the faculty supervisor of the Carolina Poll which I'm sure you are all very familiar with, the twice a year public opinion survey of North Carolina citizens conducted by journalism school students, and they're proud to be a part of that. He's co-author of Advanced Reporting, Discovering Patterns in News Events, and he's widely known as a journalism historian and widely studied in the field of communications scholarship for his research on agenda setting in the media.

Donald Shaw: I want to thank you for this opportunity to speak to this seminar. It's an exciting opportunity for all of us on the campus -- our students as well as you -- to participate on a topic of interest to all of us. The Research Center, which is part of the School of Journalism, was asked to look at some of these issues quantitatively to see whether or not we could demonstrate some of the things that had been said already, and I'll just sort of sketch out that for you today.

I want to thank Bob Stepnoe and Dr. Dennis Woo who are doctoral students who helped me put this together in the Research Center, and you will see from this outline, I just want to make two or three points to start with, then I'll go directly to the study itself.

The first one is that of course when you look at local news, this is I guess the historian in me speaking. When you look at local news or state news or national news and you go all the way back to the 18th Century and the 19th Century where I've done a lot of research in my historical part, you can see that newspapers have played a tremendously important part in the growth of the republican democracy. At the end of my remarks you'll see I'll also make one brief, in passing, comment about how communication technology appears to be changing the way which we organize the communities in which we live, which has some implications for what we're doing today as well.

To some extent I'm going to review a little bit of the literature in passing briefly. The literature is mainly scholarly, but also we reviewed Nieman Reports, Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, and other similar kinds of publications, plus we went to the Net, of course, to see what people had said. And by and large, the research shows the following:

It shows that the amount of local news has been relatively constant over the last decades. There might be a slight increase in it -- and that's what our own content analysis shows as well. It does show that the observations made yesterday by Mr. Roberts are absolutely accurate, that the amount of news devoted to state level is somewhat declining despite the fact the amount of money going into that level is going up.

On the other side, that is the journalists, the Nieman reports, Columbia Journalism Review -- it's filled with all sorts of concerns, comments, and so forth about what to do. In general, it's very collective wisdom to say that the local editors, the local publishers nearly always say the salvation for newspapers is in local news -- that's the franchise that we have.

So that's kind of a quick look at the summary of what's there on those kinds of comments.

As for us in this particular study, we decided we would try to give you a look at a sample of newspapers, and this is the sample -- 1980, 1990, 1997. Because we were having a conference in the South, we thought we would pick North Carolina newspapers and Southern newspapers and one national newspaper to look at.

Yesterday Mr. Roberts pointed out that North Carolina and many Southern states have some particularly fine newspapers, so we picked two good ones here to look at, ones of which were accessible in our libraries for us, too, because we did a traditional content analysis. What we did here, looking at 1980, 1990 and 1997, we employed sampling theory, becauseif you're very, very careful about the way you sample; in one year you sample one Sunday, you sample one Saturday, one Friday, one Thursday, and so forth, all the way through the week, you get a very good approximation of the whole year with margins of error that rotate very slightly around it, so we did that.

We sample, for each of these newspapers, a random week. When we went to that random page we looked at the front page and the section front page. We categorized those into a variety of different kinds of news subjects, but mainly for purposes of today we focused on what is the frame of it. Was it national news, international news, was it local news, was it state news, or what. So that's what I want to move to here and during the question and answer session, because I'm treating it somewhat like a workshop.

First to look at the front page, you can see that just on the front page in the bar graph that in 1980 this line right here is local news, local news, and local news. On the front page there appears to be some tendency for local news to migrate a little bit toward the front page in these six newspapers. Conversely you'll see that state news has somewhat shrunk if you look at these for just simple percentages we squeezed everything in one category or another. So the observation, I would say, is that there is some tendency for local news to come toward the front. Perhaps that recognizes these comments by editors that local news is our franchise or whatever.

[I]n terms of doing content analysis, sometimes it's kind of a challenge in a newspaper like Atlanta to differentiate between that which is local and that which is state. That's also true in Raleigh, but we had to work those things out in our content analysis.

For the section front, you can see we decided whatever news tended to be the one that featured local. You can see there was a little bit of a decrease there, but a slight increase in state news on that particular page. So I want to put those two pages together for a moment and see what we have.

If you put those two pages together -- that is the main front and the section front -- local news, whether or not it appeared on the front page or the section front -- you can see that the amount of local news is pretty steady across. It's the bottom part of that graph. Pretty steady all the way across. There is a slight increase in local news in those six newspapers. At this point I made a note to tell you that in our review of the literature, like in journals, like in Journalism Quarterly show the same thing that we did -- a slight increase in local news.

If you look at it across there you'll also see, I think I remember correctly, a slight decrease in state news, and that showed up in our study.

Question: To what extent, for example, [through] the News and Observer did you encounter the fact that they redesigned the paper now, now have a full page every day devoted to state news on page three?

Donald Shaw: How do we do the News and Observer, how do we solve that problem? When did you redesign it? '97? I'm not sure how we did that because that's in the details of the content analysis, but we tried to account for that as much as possible. And there are a lot of decisions you have to make. So what I'm showing here is a broad sketch -- I should say that for sure. It's just a broad sketch.

Question: How do you deal with (inaudible) in and out (inaudible)?

Donald Shaw: We just looked at those two fronts. But I should say also we looked at length of stories. It did appear that stories were getting shorter, but we had to qualify that because we decided later that if we were to redo the story we were counting the story in terms of numbers of paragraphs on the front page of the section front but actually a lot of the stories today have like six paragraphs on the front page and they nearly always rotate in. So I don't think I'm even going to show that. Stories appeared to be getting somewhat longer.

They also, all the way through, tend to be done by local reporters and so forth.

If you look at individual newspapers, there are always exceptions to it. That's one of the challenges of content analysis which is mainly a broad look at it, and that's all I'm trying to do here.

Are there other questions of that type?

I've already mentioned that our story here, a long story, was nine paragraphs or more, and a middle story was five, six, seven, or eight paragraphs. A small story was four paragraphs or under. I've already qualified that to say at one point it looked as if stories were getting shorter, but that's not really actually the case. There's not much change because of the factor I just said, that stories are kind of rotating. They're starting on the front page but they're rotating inside. So I would say not terribly much change in terms of size.

In terms of sources, you can look at that one and see that there are no really dramatic changes there. There's some tendency for, I would say it's maybe a little use of their own correspondents, own bylines a little bit more over time, but nothing dramatic.

I should say at this point that most people who do content analysis find that newspapers tend to be like icebergs. They rotate gradually, slow icebergs, they kind of change slowly.

I had a friend who did a content analysis who was at Syracuse at the time, and he was struck, he wanted to do a content analysis of the New York newspapers so he took a large sample. This time it was 1980. He content analyzed the front page, much like we're doing, of these categories. He said that's interesting, let's compare 1980 with 1970. The correlations, that is how close do they fit, were like 96 percent. That's interesting, we'll push it back to 1970. Correlations remained in the high 90s. Oh, my goodness, I'm going to go back to 1960. The correlations hung up there.

The story of newspapers is one of continuity. Now within the stories... There's the thing you might want to look at.

I should also point out, too, when you go back to where I looked at the decline in state news coverage there is a line of research called agenda setting that argues that the press doesn't tell you what to think, but what to think about. There are many, many studies that would argue if you have an absence of a category it's just as important as a presence. The absence of a category means people are simply not thinking about it.

I think I mentioned to you that one of the articles that we saw called "State News, the Disappearing Level of News".

We wanted to show you a little bit about television and then move to the conclusion.

This was just a study that we pulled off and just made a bar graph of. It's a city of about eight different television stations recently done by a number of schools of journalism of local news coverage. It shows you the category most emphasized is crime.

Last night at the meeting somebody mentioned Andrea Veriacuca's study which she did of local television in North Carolina stations. She found very similar things. In fact I have her data, but I bumped it, I bumped her data for this data because this is more general data. You go down there to government and politics, is the second thing, just in sheer quantity.

If you compare that with our categories you'll see that, I put a little circle around the very bottom here -- you can't see that, but in any event crime and the newspaper coverage of the six newspapers was ranked fourth down. So there's a little bit of a difference in the way newspapers and local television rank order that.

Finally, in conclusion, and of course these figures are available if you want to look at them in more detail. In conclusion we also decided to look at the Net a little bit, so we looked at the Net versions of these same newspapers that we put in the content analysis and we immediately discovered you cannot use traditional content analysis tools because newspapers on the Web have so many different approaches to things, but here's one that does tend to feature local news. If you were a little closer you could see that it does, where people are looking at it. I would think a really fruitful line of research for the future, for those doing research, would be to wonder just to measure the hits. Since obviously we live in, as one author puts it, the feedback age, the feedback revolution, where the capacity for feedback has never been greater so that people in communication can know almost as instantaneously as any other so to speak product, whether or not the product is selling or not.

This happens to be the Washington Post version of it. They're very different, and there's obviously a lot of experimentation that's going on.

I'll move then to my concluding remarks by saying that if you look at the rhetoric and look at the data, I would say the data shows a lot of constancy. It does show a decline in state level, it does show a slight increase in local level, so you have to make your own judgments about whether or not it's the greatest amount of the least amount.

Every time you do this argument, what is the greatest amount or the least amount, you run into a dilemma. I was thinking about this very dilemma yesterday, actually, in a totally different context. If I were to take into account the world's population as a news variable, that would mean that in the world's press about one-fourth of the stories would be about China. If I were to take into account the gender distribution, about one-half of those stories about China would be about Chinese women. In fact it would be like 12.5 percent. If I were to take into account any other nation -- England, their population over the whole -- that would be the proportion, and so fort. So it's always kind of a question in a way, the agenda is always a political issue and it's always a market issue. It's both those. So that's part of the dialogue that's going on.

In terms of what newspapers are doing they are, as many of you know, because many of you are involved in these experiments, they're experimenting with the Web, they're experimenting with public journalism as an example, they're experimenting with all kinds of new beats, they're experimenting with organizing information in new ways.

My concluding thought is that, and this comes somewhat from the historian in me, is that what we're dealing with here... Let me make one little introductory remark. I think it is really very bad news that daily newspapers have the kind of circulation crisis that they have. It's not a crisis on profit like Mr. Roberts said last night, they're still substantially ahead of the Fortune 500 -- about twice as good, actually. And so it's not a crisis in profit, but it's for sure a crisis in terms of audience for the metro dailies. Recently some of the smaller dailies and some of the weeklies have been somewhat imperiled.

It's not just a crisis for newspapers. It's a crisis for the networks. About two months ago on one Wednesday evening, the three traditional networks, and I think Fox was included, fell to the lowest viewing audience ever in the history of Nielsen's. Last year local television news turned down.

So I say it's not good news because newspapers tend to be oriented to local communities, they tend to have beats organized, the focus on place. And in the newspaper readership particularly, the group that they're not getting are the young people, and within that group they tend to be women who are more oriented to magazines. That's precisely the group we're looking at... Wouldn't the cigarette companies be in terrible shape if they were not getting young people and if they were not getting women? Those are precisely the groups they're getting -- young people and young women, right? So we have the exact opposite marketing problem.

If you look at it historically, it does appear that when newspaper evolved, at least in our studies in the Research Center, that newspapers have and remained the custodians of place, and if you do history of journalism, it's the kind of place in newspapers -- 1700 to 1870. But the next era is an era of magazines and early film, it's an era of class -- that is women, farmers, socialists -- interests that are not identified with any particular place. The next era, 1930 to 1980 about which we have done research and writing at the Center is the era of mass media and also mass dictatorships -- Hitler and Stalin. The last era is the era of space.

Last year at a convention I heard somebody who lives in New York say it's finally happened. He was giving a speech like this. It's finally happened, it's finally happened. A wedding story in the New York Times, a very prominent couple, who listed their address as an e-mail address. They had no address -- they lived in space.

All of these remain important areas. The place remains vital and important, we know that from Keith Stamm and other studies of the role of the local press and the local community. Where there's a strong local press, people identify with it, it gets issues solved, we know that strongly, that remains strong today even in the age, so to speak of place, of space.

So place, class, mass, and space. That's going to make a nice title to this book -- the four ages of American mass media. You can see it's all kind of involved with this, and you can make your own judgments about whether or not we have enough space devoted to state -- I myself would say no. But it's up to you.

Audrey K. Bailey: I guess you all will agree that if nothing, this information may be a bit disheartening. As someone who works with a state-wide organization where we take our responsibility as one to provide coverage of state issues, listening to what Mr. Shaw has to say, I don't know. I'm sure you have questions and comments, but we're going to give our panelists a chance to respond.

Place, class, mass, space. Jennie, we'll start with you.

First let me introduce, I have to do that so you'll know who these very talented panelists are.

Jennie Buckner is editor of the Charlotte Observer and has been so since August of '93. She's responsible for all news and editorial content for the paper. Before Charlotte she served for four years as the Vice President of News for the Knight-Ridder, overseeing the news and editorial operations of the ten largest papers in the company and the Washington bureau. She's married, has an eight year old daughter. Is chair for the American Society of Newspaper Editor Readership Committee. I noticed you were the only one in your bio who gave your e-mail address. I think that speaks volumes.

Jennie Buckner: It's an effort to get myself in space. I'm not fully there yet, but I'm reaching out.

Audrey K. Bailey: We have to all go there.

We've heard these somewhat disheartening comments from Mr. Shaw, Don if I may, and I'm just curious, I'm sure you had already things prepared, but just your initial response to what he had to say.

Jennie Buckner: I thought the numbers were very interesting. The only thing -- I'd love to, of course, know more about our numbers, but I would caution that numbers can be a little misleading.

For instance, one of the things we try to do a lot is bring stories home and let readers really understand what it's going to mean when the national policy effort comes down to our area, and the same to statewide stories. So we may frame a statewide issue of public concern in a more regional frame. We may start that story out with local people or regional people in our region, and we really cover about 15 counties, of how they're dealing with this problem. So I'm not sure whether that would be locked into a local story, a regional story, or a statewide issues story. Sometimes it's one big combination.

Donald Shaw: One of the reasons that the lines are drawn on the difference in state and local news was that it was our best guess from the content analysis, I had to make that very division, but it is often quite challenging. It's probably not quite right. At first we had them combined, state and local, because it often flows together, and indeed, much news does flow together. So any content analysis is somewhat arbitrary in breaking it apart. It should never be taken too literally except just trends.

I certainly didn't mean to be negative. Actually, I'm quite optimistic about the opportunities for newspapers myself personally.

Audrey K. Bailey: We're going to have more chance to talk with you about your comments, but let's have your presentation.

Jennie Buckner: First off, I really want to thank the folks that put this together. There's a lot of soul searching going on in journalism circles these days, and self examination I think is really generally a good thing. So we are here doing good and I thank the hosts for letting me be included.

But as we begin I would like to throw down a big yellow caution flag. You can tell I'm from NASCAR country, right? A caution flag. I think we really need to be careful to keep our perspective on what's happening in the press. There is a lot that troubles me these days. Certainly the tabloidization, the trends toward a trivialization of news and all of that. But as we turn the spotlight on ourselves and as I sse us writing about ourselves, I am reading gross oversimplifications. I am reading about a complete crisis in confidence in newsrooms. I'm reading about despair in our business. I'm reading about a collapse of values. And that was just in one article in Columbia Journalism Review. (Laughter)

I've got to say that's not the reality that I know. I'm beginning to feel like the panelists who write about, who talk about how it is to be written about. It's not squaring with reality. Yes, there are problems, but for all the problems I see, I see a tremendous amount of innovation, renewal, and effort to get it better. So a caution, that big yellow caution. Let's not go tabloid on ourselves, for goodness sakes.

Peter Drucker, the management guru and writer, once said that the best way to predict the future is to create it. I don't know what the future of news is going to be -- especially as we launch out into space. But I do know if we want it to be something we're proud of we have to work harder than ever to create a future that is good and right and good for our communities. Instead of despairing in our newsroom, I think we've got a lot of folks that are busily about trying to create that positive future, and I see a lot of it around in our business.

The papers that I see that are succeeding, and the ones that are standing out, have one thread in common to me. That is that they are clear on their purpose. That in the midst of all the change and ferment and self analysis, they have kept purpose clear and in focus and that purpose starts with service, service to citizens, the ordinary guy or woman who puts her quarters in the rack. And that perspective stays clear and weaves its way, I think, in all that they do.

There was a mention of declining readership and difficulties in reaching younger readers, and that is of great concern to me because I think newspapers play such a vital role in our democracy. But there are newspapers that are bucking the trends. There are newspapers that are not only growing readership and circulation, they are growing circulation penetration. They are gaining share in their market.

For last year, and half of our circulation area, our RTZ area which is our sort of outer area, we were able to grow penetration. That was no small accomplishment. But there are a number of other newspapers that are doing that.

In my year as chair of the ASNE Readership Committee I got to know more about the papers that were success stories. Some of those growing papers are papers like the Sacramento Bee that's been doing it for multiple years -- growing circulation penetration; the Riverside Press Enterprise; and a number of smaller newspapers -- some of them in the Carolinas, the Myrtle Beach Sun News, for one. At all of these papers one thing that is in common, local news, regional news, reigns supreme. Those papers are really investing in local news. The journalists there are not ashamed to say that they care about their community and are trying hard to listen and learn from their readers.

Another thing I was able to learn from myself in that year of ASNE Readership focus was from some research we did, a national media survey on all kinds of media usage, asking readers and citizens what they expected of the media and what they thought of what they were getting.

Of course we all know how unhappy people are with media performance and this sinking of credibility, and that's part of the story and a very important part. But the other thing that was fascinating to me was how high people's hopes for the media still are. How much they still expect of us. They haven't given up on us. I think that the successful papers are really living up to people's expectations of media -- not reaching down.

So quickly, I would just like to run through six things that I see successful newspapers doing, and I would point out that not one of these six things requires a journalist to shuck her values or to sell her soul. These steps do require, I think, investment -- investment by owners in quality and substance because quality doesn't come cheap. But just as important and what we should expect of media owners these days is what we should expect from journalists themselves inside their hearts and inside their minds, and that is the complete commitment to change, to grow, and to be open to what readers and communities are telling them.

So number one of those positive steps, I would urge papers to be more local, but not parochial. What do I mean by that? I mean bring it home, as I said. Understand that the large trends and issues that are sweeping through our countries need to be made relevant and brought home. In the ASNE Readership survey it showed that local news and community news is the highest priority, what people really expect from newspapers. Local news is number one. But that's a huge gap between the expectations of the community and how they grade newspapers -- about a 12 percentage point gap. To me that gap says give them more and give them better. Bring it home and people will read.

Number two, be relentlessly useful. Readers really want news connected to them, and they want breakout boxes of where to write for information. When we write about a bill and public policy now in the Charlotte Observer, we put in a little box that says if you want to know more, if you want to talk to your senator who's involved with this, here's the phone number, here's the address. That way we not only make it useful, but we send the message that your participation in this democracy counts for something, and we think of you as a citizen. Here's a tool for you, here's a phone number, here's an address.

Readers want, I think, their most basic questions answered. We need to be careful that just having more stories on government isn't necessarily better coverage of government. We used to write, I think, sort of your inside baseball stuff too often.

I talked with Jim Morel who's been covering government and politics in this state for a long time, and he remembers back in '85 when he was up here in Raleigh, he said the press corps really measured its success by being first on process stories. I mean get a lot of them and get them out there first. Now he's directing our government coverage and he has a different measure of success, and it really is making it most relevant, making it most meaningful, making it most understandable, and oftentimes that means giving up a process story and going out into a neighborhood and understanding what the implications may be so that you can again make it useful.

I think it also means doing the controversial public journalism thing. I sometimes want to avoid that term because I think it's gotten in the way. I tend to think of civic journalism or public journalism as just good journalism. But to me that means making sure election coverage tells citizens where the candidates stand on issues that matter to the citizens, so you have to find out what's worrying people and then ask questions about where the candidates stand.

Number three thing to do better is to investigate harder and to provide more depth. Readers highly value newspapers and their investigative efforts. On this national survey investigative work was one of the top four news priorities. They say be a watchdog for us. Get out there, dig, find out things we can't on our own. And no medium was meeting expectations when it came to depth or seriousness of purpose.

Number four thing to do better and the thing that papers are trying, search for solutions. While we're investigating, let's not forget to investigate solutions to society's problems. People know that their world is awash in trouble. What they don't know is what the community might do to take on its problems.

At our paper and a number of papers, we're trying to find out not the ultimate solutions, but possible approaches. I'm not talking about feel good, puffed, happy talk journalism. I'm talking about sophisticated reporting on public policy issues and some successes that have been tried and things that might be working.

So, for instance, we are going out and looking at neighborhoods which have experienced a great drop in crime. What have they done there? Has neighborhood policing played a part? We found it has. Has neighborhood involvement been central? We found it was. Writing about that served our community better. Other neighborhoods are picking up models.

We're going out and looking for stories about schools in the state or elsewhere that have dramatically raised test scores and are doing a better job of educating kids. How are they doing that?

We've been visiting places that have tried different kinds of transit solutions because traffic is a huge problem in Charlotte and we're about to embark on figuring out some answers to that. In the old days we might have just gone to the transit hearings or just covered the meetings. That's not enough anymore. We must look beyond meetings.

Number five, engage the reader. Become more relevant. Again, it's going out and bringing the story home. We need to deepen our bond with readers, though, not just by doing neighborhood reporting and going out and bringing it home, we just need to make what we write more engaging, more exciting, more relevant. We need to be better at our craft. A lot of the newspapers that are growing and that are doing better have put a huge focus on training, on development of the journalists and helping them improve the level of their work.

Last, number six, we've got to become more credible. All of us need to reemphasize the basics, accuracy, fairness. We've got to remember that credibility is more than just getting the facts right. It's about getting the right facts and putting things in proper context, which is where I started out with all of this.

Context, balance. There's a lot we can do. There's a huge amount that journalists can do and there's much that is being done. It won't happen, we won't reform ourselves if we remain in a defensive crouch, and it certainly won't happen if we stay in a state of despair. But it will happen if we get out and listen to our readers, listen to our communities, and get honest with yourselves, and then get on with change.

Audrey K. Bailey: Thank you very much. Very interesting. Very good.

Seth [Effron] has truly embraced the technology of news. He serves as the Executive Directive, Chief of Content of the Nando.net. Before that, he launched and still serves as Editor of the Insider, faxing news of state government to hundreds of grateful and influential subscribers. Before that, he was Raleigh correspondent for the Greensboro News and Record. He's won awards, many of them, and still finds time to be a great husband and father of two, and active in his church and PTA.

I hope you're going to talk a little bit about the technological advancements, and space.

Seth Effron: I'll talk a little bit about that. I just want to make a couple of what I think are important points about covering government and politics.

I think that despite the current trends, process is important. That it's how we cover it that becomes the issue. Simply covering the process by going to a meeting, regurgitating what did or didn't happen there doesn't help the readers, doesn't help people who want to know about the issues, reach their own resolutions.

For example now in Raleigh the taxpayers have spent better than a million dollars to keep the legislators in session. There is an issue of process there that I think is worth writing about. Why are there no meetings of a conference committee. Why? What are those people doing? Where are they going? Where have they been? Why aren't they talking about it? This is what we elected people to do. We work in a little "d" democratic set of institutions, yet there have been a couple of stories about where the issue of providing child insurance to needy kids has gone, but really nobody's examined, and it's been an ongoing, developing issue in the General Assembly for the last ten years probably, most of us woke up and recognized it five years ago, that in fact there is no effort at consensus.

Meetings that should be held just never happen. We keep writing about a conference committee, we keep hearing about well, resolution of this issue or that issue is about to come yet we don't know who's talking to who. We don't know if we're reading the newspapers what those issues are that are being discussed and where they're being discussed. Yet our state laws, our processes within the legislature say there are institutions, there are ways that people ought to be meeting. These things are relevant, I think, to readers who want to see government solve problems that they have. I think that to a very significant degree we've blown of process because either we're cynical about it, we're cynical about legislators who every day we see, and I'll acknowledge, some of them aren't very bright people. But you know what? That's what we're stuck with. We elected them and they're there.

I think part of our job as journalists and particularly daily newspapers is to say how is the process working. When it doesn't work, to point out that one, it isn't working, which I think that has been done. The legislature's been hanging around in this specific instance longer than probably appropriate. But also more important, and I think the way that process journalism can become lively, is why it isn't working.

I think sometimes we fail even in simple things to provide that kind of context for readers that I think takes a story beyond just a bulletin board issue and provides some context to it. In today's Charlotte Observer there's a headline on the local front, "Judge Faircloth tried scare tactics." The Minneapolis paper had a day earlier broken a story something about this. Carol Lioni's a very good reporter, was when she was covering Raleigh one of the best and continues to do a great job. Yet in this entire story there's a bit of context that I think isn't a big deal in terms of writing, but is a big deal in terms of what we bring to reporting that I think is relevant, which is this judge who Lauch Faircloth's aide quips is a "cranky old Democrat who is still upset that he couldn't get Whitewater thrown out," which is a fine quote. But the story never puts the political context of this story beyond that which is, in fact, that Lauch Faircloth is a Republican running for reelection and never mentions that he's running for reelection.

Now this is relevant. This is relevant because it may have a broader context than to what Democrats are trying to lay the ground for and may pop up again in reporting. There's a simple phrase that ought to be reported that I think gives readers a greater context of the story, that in fact this is happening in the course of a reelection.

To talk a little bit about technology, the News and Observer recently described the Insider as a publication that "reaches a limited audience of lawmakers, lobbyists, journalists and policymakers." I think that's in fact what it is. I'm not competing against the Charlotte Observer or the News and Observer. On occasion I break something or the Insider breaks something and that's helpful. It helps keep me relevant to my readers. But in fact a lot of what the Insider is, for those of you that are familiar with it, a small part of it is the news summary, but a big part of it is the process. Where meetings are going, when they're happening, and what's going on.

What I found in starting this was that state government has exploded, and even those people who make a living at following it were no longer able to keep track of it. They had no place to go to find out as state government had grown into new branches, into new agencies, and taken on new responsibilities, who was doing what where.

To give you an idea of the growth of state government in North Carolina, in 1984 the entire state budget including federal funds was $6.7 billion. Today it's $20.4 billion -- that's a 204 percent increase. The number of state employees was in 1984 180,000; today there are 243,871 and that's in an era when the growth of government has been -- at least the rhetoric has us controlling it.

What I discovered was that people whose job it was to be advocates, whether they were lobbyists, social advocates, were not able to be where they needed to be, whether it was in the legislature or something else, and newspapers weren't providing it nor, quite frankly, a lot of what I do should newspapers do. They've got other things to do with their space. What really the Insider turned out to be was a lot of information that I would look at before 10:00 o'clock in the morning and throw away. Meetings that were going on, and that sort of thing.

But one of the things that I think has made the Insider more relevant to those people who use it is that in fact I think a lot of newspapers and a lot of reporters have become fairly cynical about what they do. They've become cynical about politicians, they've become cynical about the ability of government to provide solutions to people's problems.

I'm not going to sit here and suggest that government possesses all of the ways to do that, but in fact people call on government to solve problems.

When the hog farm next to your house sends waste into the river, you don't call up the local private non-profit, you don't call up the John Locke Foundation to fix it. You don't call up a private investigator. You say to the government, and rightly so, this is a problem. Fix it. We expect the government to do this, and we need to look at how these solutions are achieved.

What I had to do as an ex-daily newspaper journalist was figure out how can I get all this information out to people, and that's where the technology came in. And I think it's probably the biggest change that is going on, is the fact that the ability to do this has become more economical. In 1985, if I chose to start a fax publication similarly, it would have been impossible. People didn't have fax machines, those cruddy thermofaxes cost $1,000 apiece. Now you can probably get a good used one for $50. People now in their homes don't think about having two phone lines for all of the things they have hooked up. I couldn't have imagined having two phone lines seven years ago.

So on the one hand that has expanded the ability to get news and information out. On the other hand I think one of the things that publications like the Insider have done is also expanded people's command of information. More people will be in more of a position to know what is going on, for example, in the state legislature by 7:00 a.m. than they used to be able to know about because of a publication like that where in 1989 Al Adams and Sam Johnson -- two of the highest paid lobbyists in the legislature would spend 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. down in the legislative cafeteria with a big box of bills looking up what was going on in a committee, now there's a publication that serves that purpose and they can spend their high priced time being stronger advocates for whatever their issues are.

One of the things that broadly I think is important in what newspapers in particular, and I am, despite the fact that I now make my living in the alternative media, I am a big believer in newspapers. I don't think they're dying, going anywhere. I think that newspapers, particularly the good ones, are going to continue to grow and grow pretty rapidly. They have a good financial future.

One is the notion within newsrooms that politics isn't irrelevant. I think that once upon a time the best jobs at newspapers, the best jobs in North Carolina were the ones where you were the correspondent in Raleigh, where you looked to go to Washington. Those are no longer, in most newsrooms, the best jobs, the ones to get, the ones that people aspire to.

I think that the look at government and politics... This is where I think that civic journalism has had the right effort, is to look at government and political and human elements using real people, real programs, real proposals. I think that at times the venture into civic journalism has meant that those other good things that newspapers did get short shrift and people miss out on them.

I think that government and political coverage is best when we approach it as consumer reporting from a reader's perspective, explaining the role of politics and government in people's lives, how government might change what we do, and how people can have an impact on government.

Also the recognition that we serve a broad range of consumers -- Governors, legislators, bureaucrats -- while again we call that sometimes inside baseball, we do also report for them as well as for teachers, prison guards, shopkeepers, homemakers, and retired people. One of the areas that I'm often surprised the News and Observer has not embraced more aggressively, and maybe it is or isn't, is in fact the notion that within its circulation sphere, I would say that there is a tremendous percentage of its readers who either work for a state agency or state government -- that being literally a state agency, a public school teacher or something like that -- [or] who have a spouse or close relative who is connected to those, the last of which has someone connected in a public institution. A kid in school, unfortunately maybe someone in prison, a part of a program that has federal assistance. Yet that paper has never, to my knowledge, embraced the notion that, for example, the Washington Post has with the Federal Page where there's a reporter assigned who on a regular basis either through a column or special coverage, reports on the lives of state workers -- things like what is happening to their benefits?

Again, the last weeks of the legislature we're all writing about what's the pay raise going to be, what's the impact, and that kind of thing. But on an ongoing basis saying here is, for this particular group of people who state government affects very, very directly, how it affects their lives.

Thank you.

Audrey K. Bailey: Thank you, Seth. As a state employee, I think that's a wonderful suggestion.

I want to talk with you a little bit later on about this issue of cynicism, but we want to move on to Edward Fouhy who watches the reporters as Executive Director of the state's Policy News Initiative which examines news coverage of public policy issues at the state level. Before that he was Executive Director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. Fouhy has more than 25 years of reporting in the electronic media and has won five national Emmys for hard news. He's married with two grown children. Now we'll hear from my side of the world.

Ed Fouhy: Thank you, Audrey. And don't worry, Ferrel. You give a TV guy ten minutes, he'll deliver ten minutes. I used to be Eric Severeid's editor, and Eric only got three. So I'll struggle through with ten.

For the last three months I've been looking into the subject of this panel today which is coverage of state and local government. I've looked at it, as all of us who live in the District of Columbia tend to do, from a national perspective and I can tell you that it has changed as profoundly nationwide as everything else in journalism has changed recently. Here are a few things that I've learned:

Congress considers 9800 legislative proposals every two years, and about five percent of those pass. At the state level, 185,000 bills are proposed and about 25 percent of those become law.

There are 8500 credentialed reporters, more or less, in Washington, D.C., many of them highly professional and deeply experienced. Often more experienced in the subjects they're covering than the people who are actually performing the job. At the state level, I don't have to tell you the press corps is much smaller, and as we'll see later, much less professional.

One of the most dramatic examples of cutbacks in statehouse coverage nationwide is occurring right here in Raleigh, North Carolina. According to Rand Cobble, as one who's last name is often mispronounced, I apologize if he's in the audience, he's the Executive Director of the North Carolina Public Policy Center. He told me that the full time statehouse press corps here has gone from 65 to 25 in the last ten years. In Boston, the former statehouse bureau chief for the Boston Globe, Dave Nian, says "The broadsheets walk the plank every day with a tabloid dagger at their backs." That's the way we talk in Boston. (Laughter)

Only one of the five news stations in Boston -- television news stations in Boston, which bear in mind is the largest city in America that's also a state capital, only one station has a full time statehouse reporter. And this is a General Assembly that is in session full time.

Coverage of state government has nearly disappeared from local television nationwide. UPI has collapsed. The Associated Press is in the process of profoundly changing the way that it approaches the coverage of state government. The trend in newspapers today is to avoid so-called process stories in favor of personal and trend stories.

There doesn't seem to be any national database on all of this which is why the work of Mary Walton and Charles Layton who are sitting here in the front row is awaited so breathlessly by those of us who are interested. But the reporting that we've done in some states indicate that fewer reporters are covering fewer state government functions at the very moment when more money and more power is being shoveled furiously from Washington to the state capital level because of devolution.

There's another equally worrisome trend, and that is the changing reward system in journalism. Covering the statehouse is no longer considered a prestige assignment. The result is that the average length of service has been reduced. Journalists don't want to stay on the beat forever, as they once did. Again, the figures are shaky, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that reporters on average stay on the statehouse beat about three years. Dr. Keon Shee, who is one of the leading analysts of state policies at the Council of State Governments says that the reporters he talks to daily need extensive background information before he can give them the information that they need. He believes that that's because they no longer spend the hours in the committee hearings, covering the committee hearings, in the early stages of the legislative process, and are not familiar with the pros and cons of policy innovation.

His counterparts at the National Conference of State Legislators agree that the reporters that they deal with on the state level -- the state level now. The national level is quite different. They are not well educated about the major issues that are facing the states today -- issues like electrical utility deregulation, HMO reform, school finance alternatives, children's health, and so on. The result is that the lobbyists, as we call them in Washington the spin doctors, are more powerful than ever before. As term limits take effect in the 27 states that have term limits, and they will begin to do so this year, veteran members of state legislatures will be leaving in very large numbers. Meaning that even fewer experienced hands will be on watch, fewer knowledgeable sources will be available to the journalists who are covering state government.

The staff, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. The staff and the lobbyists will be the repository of knowledge about policy innovation.

You combine those trends with devolution, which as I said, has placed far more money and far more power in the hands of the states than they've ever had before, and I believe you have a recipe for a very unsavory stew of official corruption and deepened citizen alienation.

Now reams of information -- more than ever before, megabytes, gigabytes of information about what's happening in state government, are now available on-line. The National Conference of State Legislators, the Council of State Governments, the National Governors Association, to name only three of the most prominent, have made their policy analysis available and their work handy at the touch of a mouse. But I think it's ridiculous to believe that citizens, except for that tiny committed few, will avail themselves of all that information that's out there in cyberspace. More than ever before I believe that journalists are needed. Journalists are needed. To validate, to find, and to present in digestible form the information that people need in order to govern themselves.

I don't think I need to belabor the point in this forum, certainly, but the act is that the engine of democracy is fueled by information -- information that is uniquely provided to the public by independent journalists committed to the highest principles of their craft. Principles like accuracy and objectivity. But market forces are tearing down the old structure of state government coverage at precisely the time when the states, which have always been the laboratories of democracy, in Judge Brandeis' memorable phrase, have become more important than ever before in people's lives. Their importance is, of course, tied to the Tenth Amendment and to the diminishing role of Washington. The Cold War has ended and the globalization of capital movement threatens the very authority of national governments.

Further, there is a trend to extreme polarization in Washington. Little of substance can be accomplished in the legislative field for a variety of reasons, in addition to that polarization, most having to do with the anti-Washington feelings that have been fostered by decades of demagogic rhetoric by members of both parties. Add to that the increasingly partisan and ideological nature of the current debate, and the profoundly corrupt system of campaign finance that leaves Congress awash in special interest money. In the words of one state policy advisor, everybody in Washington is running for sheriff.

As usual, David Broder said it best in a speech recently at the University of Denver, and I quote, "If devolution proceeds as I think it will, and the coverage of state government does not get more serious and more substantive, the next generation of reporters is going to have something like what gave the muckrakers at the turn of the last century their great opening -- scandal upon scandal of unexamined government decisionmaking and the most corrupt use of money witnessed in this century. You put that much money and that much power in the hands of people who essentially know that they're not being watched at all, and this is guaranteed to happen."

I believe that the fox is eyeing the chicken coop while the corporal's guard of journalists stands watch. So we not only confront the real possibility of massive corruption, but I think an even more insidious trend -- citizens alienated and disengaged from the community because they're uninformed in the early stages of the debate when their voices really need to be heard. Therefore, they're unable to participate in that debate, which I would submit to you is a very unhealthy condition for a self-governing society.

Audrey K. Bailey: It seems to me, Jennie and Seth, that you are both on the same page, that the key to all of this is to make the reader, or the viewer as the case may be, understand and care about what's in it for them, that old "what's in it for me" adage, to have them understand that they need to pay attention to what's going on to those leaders and what they're doing, or as you said, Seth, not doing. But how do you do that? The Charlotte Observer has been very good in presenting those stories that give the behind the scenes, that tell what's going on in the community. You've won awards for that, community policing and so forth. But still, how do you truly engage the reader to get them to care as well as understand? Which comes first? Caring or understanding?

Jennie Buckner: That's a good chicken and egg. I'm not sure I know whether caring or understanding comes first. It's easier if people already care, that's for sure. If people already come to the table saying I am eager, hungry to know about something, you don't have to jump over as high a bar.

I think the difficulty in so much of state government or any other kinds of coverage that may be complicated, difficult for the average person to grasp, and maybe process oriented, may seem like it's just moving through slowly. The challenge on us is greater. So then we have to make people care. I think you come back to the tried and true things that I know of -- find out who it affects; explain how it's going to translate to their kids; help them understand the connection between what's happening up there and what it's really going to mean over time. Get people's voices in so that they can identify with it.

It takes a lot of skill, it takes a lot of sophistication, it takes a lot of craft to do that well. It is frightening. I think what has happened, when people's eyes start to glaze over, a news director's first impulse or an editor's first impulse may be to say let's don't give them that anymore. They're not interested. I think the challenge is to say we've got to get them interested if we think it's important. That's a tough order. But if we have good people and we say we care as leaders, as editors of the paper... My job is to say this does matter and it is worth the extra effort and we can get people to care if only we write it well enough, think it through smartly, find the connection points.

Seth Effron: I think a big portion of it is sort of where we as journalists start. If we start believing that government and political coverage is castor oil that we have to force down the readers' throats, then it's going to come out like castor oil in our newspapers. But if we take to it the kind of vibrancy that a lot of us who cover it feel, then it's really going to reflect that to the readers. The readers are going to see, just as they see in any wonderful article that's written in the newspaper or piece broadcast on TV or radio, nine times out of ten, or probably even greater, the kind of pieces that get the most incredible reader response are those that bring through the excitement of the reporters and editors handling it.

And really, it does come down to us. If we're not excited about what we're doing, if we don't feel there's career advancement, if we don't find it relevant to us, we can have all the graphics, all of the newspaper processes of putting in who to contact and how, which are all important and great developments -- I don't mean to minimize that. But then they're just going to be matters of habit, matters of fact like the little graphic in the corner of USA Today that readers now probably don't look at with once the great enthusiasm they used to because it's just there everyday, and probably the people who are doing it say geez, we've got to come up for a graphic in that corner of the front page today.

In fact, bring that kind of energy that I believe people who are covering a lot of this have, and have it reflected in the reporting.

Ed Fouhy: I think understanding has to presage caring, I think that's the way it works, particularly with the more complicated issues that face the states at the moment. Take the case of utility deregulation. There are eight states that are grappling with that. Is North Carolina one of them?

Jennie Buckner: Yes.

Ed Fouhy: I think in the other 42 states, people don't care about that issue because they don't understand it. But the utility companies are all too eager to help them understand it from their perspective. What journalists have to do is to give a balanced, objective expository treatment.

But I think this goes back to something that Jennie said, and which I know she believes in passionately as I do. That is there's an enormous difference between treating readers and viewers as consumers and treating them as citizens. When you start treating them as citizens, you change everything. It's a profound change. I think as with so much of journalism, when state government is framed as a dialogue between people who are governing and people who are governed, and we are the intermediaries, that that changes the way you do things and it makes your coverage relevant and interesting.

Audrey K. Bailey: Seth, you talked about the cynicism that exists within the hearts and minds of many reporters. How do you combat that?

Seth Effron: I think that there are a couple of things. One is that maybe there are people who aren't doing the right things that fulfill them in their jobs. I've always been lucky enough to work in places where my bosses were attuned to that and wanted to make sure that I was doing what it is that fulfilled me because they knew I'd do a better job for the paper.

I think there's a generational change. Again, at 45 I feel like a fuddy duddy saying this, but there's a generational change of people who are working in newsrooms, and this isn't all of them and certainly I don't think a majority, but a significant number who are covering and working at journalism as a job and not a calling.

I happen to believe that journalism is a calling. That you can't do a good job in this particular profession... There may be other ones where you can, but I've probably not done those, and the ones I've tried I haven't been very good at. Because I haven't felt that kind of passion. I think that's an important thing.

I'm sure when each one of these people who does hiring for people, that's what they look for, one of the key ingredients they look for in an employee.

The other part of it is really aggressive curiosity. The kind of curiosity that says not just is there a scandal at DOT, but in the course of covering things, why are those people wanting to be on that board? How far are they looking down the road? Where are they going?

When Rusty Goode sat on the Board of Transportation ten years ago, now let's look around with his interests. What has happened in the ten years and how did that affect what he did, and why was he there? Or a fellow named Peeden in Raleigh who had occasion to go to one of the training centers that was a building he owned that I think the state bought while he was on the Board of Transportation, that's now used by the Transportation Department.

Ed Fouhy: Can I just argue with you a little bit about that? I think there's a big difference between earned cynicism and unearned cynicism. I think when you've been in the business awhile you're earned your cynicism. A lot of young reporters I think have unearned cynicism because that's the Woodward Bernstein school of journalism that the graduated from, and all politicians are guilty until proven innocent. I don't happen to believe that.

But I think there is an earned cynicism from those of us who have covered politicians over a long period of time.

I was, for example, struck this morning to hear two thoughtful state legislators talk, and in general I agreed with what they had to say. But when they talked about "doling out the truth" to reporters, I found that very patronizing.

Seth Effron: I don't disagree with you. But I think there's a difference between, it's not earned cynicism, but it is healthy skepticism. I think that's when reporters become cynics, then that overpowers the kind of skepticism they should bring to their reporting. That, I think, then comes back onto the pages of the newspaper.

Audrey K. Bailey: Okay. Now we're going to give folks in the audience who are anxious to have their say.

Question: (inaudible) Those of us in radio (inaudible). How do you (inaudible) what the public wants, (inaudible)? And (inaudible)... I've heard all three of those things mentioned up there. I wonder how you reconcile (inaudible)... and the future of journalism.

Ed Fouhy: One thing about radio particularly in North Carolina, I remember when I went to the legislature the first time I was a student and there were seven or eight radio stations that had people, at least during the legislative session if not in fact full time, covering the legislature. I think there's one radio station now that coves the legislature on anything close to a regular basis. Most radio stations, as you know, Linda, have given up even having news staffs.

I apologize. I should be talking generically about broadcasting, not television.

I think that's a constant issue that anybody who covers anything who happens to have any passion about what they do and what they see doesn't necessarily struggle with but has to think about. I think where there has been some criticism unjustly of civic journalism in this area is that civic journalism attempts to be advocacy. I don't think it does. I think what it at best attempts to do is gauge what it is is relevant to the people who are reading, listening, or seeing the broadcasting. But at the same time sometimes by doing that too much they miss an important part of the debate.

One of the things developing now in the U.S. Senate campaign is that there are a set of issues that civic journalists have looked at, but what seems to be going on is the candidates are going to be talking about controlling the IRS. So somewhere in there you've got to bring them together to become relevant.

I think that for that kind of journalism, there is advocacy journalism outlets for it in North Carolina, and here in Raleigh you see the Independent and places like that. I think that readers, viewers, listeners, are astute enough to differentiate when they see it.

Question: I have an observation and then a question. You commented this morning about (inaudible) not consumers, not clients, but citizens (inaudible). ...common theme, and I wondered how did you see the trend going back there? I think one of the big contributors to let's think about government like a business was reinventing government. (inaudible) a very good idea, that government should be responsible for citizens. Where I think they probably got it wrong was by saying that they weren't citizens, they were consumers of government.

Do any of you see the trend in that area? Are we becoming more and more... Are people more and more just thinking of government as another business that they get services from? Or do you have a backlash or anything in the other direction?

Ed Fouhy: I was referring more to people as consumers of the goods and services that are advertised on the air or in print. Rather than their relationship vis-a-vis the government. I think most people, at least the limited circle that I know anything about, look on government as citizens. But in the market forces that I referred to, are very much driving us into segmented niches of consumerism.

I did a story some years ago when I was at NBC about direct mail. The direct mail people at that time, which was about ten years ago, had 130 characteristics on almost everybody in America. The left handed Unitarians get the left handed Unitarian newsletter. I think there are many, many market forces that drive us apart. But what must bring us together are the mass media. If they're going to A, be eligible for a continuation of the First Amendment; and B, if they're going to survive as a business.

Jennie Buckner: I think one of the distinctions to think about is are we covering government and politics as a spectator sport only -- look at what those crazy folks up in Raleigh are at now, boy oh boy. Or, are we covering it from a here's what's at stake. Here are the different ways people are talking about going after this issue. What do you think? Here are some different stakeholders' points of view. I call that consumer reporting as well.

I want to figure out as a consumer of government what do I think, and how are my representatives doing, and what do I think of the different points of view? But certainly there are stories that certainly lend themselves, and maybe they are about spectator approach to government.

Question: I want to make just a brief comment, if I could, about your question from radio about the market forces. A lot of times my mind is driven by anecdotes.

I remember during the OJ Simpson trial, ABC News decided that enough was enough. I heard this at a talk in New York. Roone Arledge or somebody just said we just can't be doing this.

I had a friend, for example, who had it taped when they went to the grocery store so they could watch it at night, couldn't miss it. So ABC News says okay, we're going to cut away, but we're going to run on the bottom everything that's happening. If anything at all occurs, we'll come right back to it. Rest assured, we're there. We're all there all the time. So they cut away. It was as if all the toilets in New York were flushed at the same time and the water pressure, the just simply left ABC News. Went to CNN or CBS or the others.

I'm just often struck by that example. The person giving this talk said we'll give that long, careful thought, but it was a clear example of the market, just some drag part of the trial -- it wasn't necessarily an important part of the trial. It's a reality. That's a nice thing about being a scholar. You can look at it from a broad... (Laughter) It's very easy to identify the challenges here without knowing exactly what the solutions are, other than individually.

Question: A question that may be kind of naive, but I have a deep curiosity about it. There seems to be a broad general assumption on the part of a lot of editors that readers are not very interested in government. That, as Ms. Buckner said, their eyes tend to glaze over, that they find it boring. I was wondering how much hard evidence is there for this? And where would you find that evidence?

Jennie Buckner: I think it's a great misconception. In fact readership studies that we have done have interest in government and politics fairly high. I don't have it with me, but it's in the top five categories. Health is huge right now. I think it's a baby boomer thing...

Question: You mean the Charlotte Observer or...

Jennie Buckner: I've seen Charlotte Observer numbers and I've also seen Knight-Ridder numbers, and you can pretty well... They are not drastically different from place to place.

A lot of folks will dismiss that and say yeah, they say that, but we know what they watch. Certainly when I talk to TV news director friends who feel, some of them, pretty bad about what's happening to their side of the business, but they are slaves to the Nielsens. They know what's being watched in little blocks. It's not just for the whole show. They know what's being watched... Ed knows more about this than I do, in like the 15 minute increments and the first five minutes and all that stuff.

So they say yeah, people will tell you, Jennie, that they're interested in government on your newspaper research thing, but we know better. It's interesting to see.

I believe if you do stories well, you can get people interested in lots of things that they would not think they were interested in. If we had done a survey and asked people, rank things down -- how many of you are interested in more stories about the Department of Transportation? It would have come out pretty low. I'll tell you that the investigative work we've done on the Department of Transportation, I'm sure it's true at the NNO, those stories have been very well read. People are very interested in how their tax dollars have been used or some might say misused.

So people can't always tell you exactly what they're going to read, but if you do it well and you do it home -- in answer to the woman's question, do you do what people are interested in --what they want to know or what they need to know? Of course you do both, if you've got an ounce of sense of responsibility about our business. The trick is to make what they need to know turn into what they didn't even know they wanted to know, but by God they do.

Ed Fouhy: Let me just say at a television perspective to that, and I don't have hard data on it, but I interviewed John Miller, the news director at WFAA in Dallas in the course of my work. He pointed out to me that WFAA in Dallas has had a full time Austin bureau for more than 30 years, and that they do a lot of coverage of state government in Texas, as does their sister station in Houston.

What's significant about that is that as somebody mentioned earlier today, the great untold media story at the moment is that local television news, which has been the one growth area of American journalism for a long time, has finally started to get the circulation hits that hit the networks and the newspapers earlier. This is a television station, one of the very few in the country -- probably [one of] no more than a handful in the country -- that's actually had a year over year audience growth pattern, and that sustained again last year.

So I think the news directors who are saying that are listening to consultants who equate government with politics. When politics is always framed as a conflict, obviously people get tired of that and tune out.

Question: Ed, you've talked about the growing power of the lobbyists, spin doctors, and how we may be ignoring them at our peril as we move ahead in state government; and Jennie, I'd like to ask you, and I'm sure the Charlotte Observer has had stories about this, but how do we inform... Not all the work of lobbyists is necessarily nefarious, but how do we report on lobbyists in an informational way without making it too much inside baseball? Can we do that?

Jennie Buckner: I think you raise a good point, and I'm not sure we're doing even close to as sophisticated a job about lobbying as we need to.

We've mostly tried to follow money. We have done a lot of enterprise work on what different special interest groups want, how much they've spent, who they gave it to, and what happened as you're probably aware. But that's after the fact. So it's not satisfying to me, and I would welcome ideas on how to do that well.

Seth Effron: I think one of the things, particularly for reporters who cover that is that we tend not to and probably should do more of in the process of covering legislation or an issue, quote lobbyists. Demand that they... Quote from documents they're giving to legislators and things like that. While, again, it takes some healthy speculation when you look at lobbyists, they sometimes go beyond simply paying somebody off to actually trying to convince a legislator of the right of their argument. Part of what we should be doing more of is watching that part of it.

A lot of times the technology has made it easier for reporters to sit in the press room during a debate and listen in on something instead of being over in the committee room. It's a lot more convenient. And it is easier to do our reporting that way. But in fact what we miss out on is the lobbyist who walks up and whispers something, the lobbyist who passes out a sheet to the committee, and things like that. Integrating that as one of the elements of our kinds of stories probably would do a lot more to bring out the role of the lobbyists more as the process is going on instead of afterwards when we look at the money and things like that.

Audrey K. Bailey: I guarantee that lunch is going to be full of very hardy conversation. It's not fair Ferrel, we didn't start on time, but you're cutting us. I know, we have to move on.

Thank you all.

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