Listening to Citizens

REPORTERS KNOW HOW TO ASK QUESTIONS and get answers. Listening is something else again. Many reporters don’t do it well. They are too anxious to get to the next question. They hear what they need for the story they’re working on, jot down the answer, and go on to the next source.

Listening to citizens requires much more. It means giving people the time to talk through their feelings and their thinking. It means giving them the chance to discuss the connections they see among concerns that journalists tend to view as unrelated.

It means putting people at ease, encouraging openness and reflection, getting them to share themselves, their experiences, and their core values, all of which combine to shape their spoken views.

It is a journey of discovery, a search for the meaning behind the "icons" people use as shorthand for the issues that matter to them. It requires an exploration of the connections people make among issues in order to understand how they define those issues for themselves. It means moving the conversation through these discoveries in a way that heightens understanding of why people feel as they do.

Conversations with citizens provide a deeper sense of the issues and valuable insights that can help shape overall campaign coverage. They also can provide plenty of specific story ideas and sharp questions for the candidates. Sometimes those questions are tougher and more blunt than the questions reporters ask.

Getting Started

A good way to listen to citizens is to put together small groups for citizen conversations — informal discussion sessions that let people talk with one another about issues and concerns. Indeed, getting them to discuss issues with one another, with a journalist as a listener and occasional guide, can be most rewarding. They’ll mention things they’d never tell a reporter in a conventional news-gathering situation.

There are a number of ways to select a group of citizens for a discussion. Several media partnerships have assembled citizen panels from those initially contacted in a public opinion poll. People are asked at the end of the survey interview if they’d be interested in serving on a citizens’ panel. A group is then chosen that is balanced in terms of demographics and opinions.

Other news organizations tell people in the paper or on the air that they are seeking readers, viewers, or listeners for citizen discussions. They provide mail and e-mail addresses, fax and voice-mail numbers. Newspapers have published coupons to send in that provide space for demographic and political party information. Those questions also can be programmed into voice-mail messages. Selecting from these responses requires careful screening to keep out political operatives.

Churches, civic groups, and neighborhood organizations are often willing to pull together a cross section of their memberships. These approaches assure interested participants, but may not provide balance in any one meeting.

A more "scientific" approach might be to take a random sample from the voter rolls — if those lists are available. But be aware that many registered voters aren’t interested enough to vote. An even greater number are unlikely to have any interest in taking several hours of their time months before an election to talk to reporters. The Miami Herald once asked the voting registrar to mail (at the Herald’s expense) 400 letters to a cross section of voters. Only 10 responded.

Whatever method is used to find participants, the final number should be kept under a dozen. Otherwise, some people won’t get to talk and their views will be lost. Keep the number representing the media partners to four or fewer, so their presence won’t be intimidating.

Choosing a Time and Place

Generally, evening sessions are most convenient, beginning around 7 p.m., on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays. This avoids weekend conflicts and gives people time to get home from work and have a bite to eat before the meeting. When soliciting participants through published or broadcast notices, you can ask people to indicate when they would like to meet. This allows for some flexibility in scheduling, and may bring in people who might not be able to attend evening sessions.

Find a place that’s centrally located for the participants. If the group is drawn areawide, that might be at the newspaper or television station offices. But if the panel is drawn from a smaller geographic area, find a meeting site close to them. Attendance will be better and media partners will be seen as friends coming to visit and talk about common concerns. Modest refreshments such as soft drinks and cookies should be provided. Anything more will prove distracting to the discussion.

Moderating the Discussion

The moderator or facilitator is the key to a successful conversation. The moderator’s job is to keep the discussion moving, to keep it civil, and to make sure that everyone participates and no one dominates. A few guidelines:

• Control the flow of the discussion while talking as little as possible.

• Encourage everyone to speak and to speak honestly.

• Don’t let the conversation stop at surface opinion. Ask people why they feel as they do.

• Test your own understanding when there is a seeming contradiction or fuzziness. "Let me see if I understand what you’re saying..."

• Take nothing at face value. Ask people to define the terms they use, such as "family values." It’s often different than what journalists and politicians think they mean.

• Make clear that the goal is not consensus, but understanding of each person’s view.

Emphasizing that the goal is understanding helps to defuse people who want to push a point of view or win an argument. The discussion itself should be informal, with everyone talking to everyone, not just to the journalists.

If the panel is convened to talk about issues already identified in the campaign, give the group a chance to set its own priorities, to apply its own weighting. Panelists may be asked to choose the three issues they feel are most important from an existing list (crime, education, aging, welfare, government spending, and the environment, for example). Some quick addition will establish an order for discussion.

If the purpose of the panel is to focus on a specific issue, let the participants know in advance, and then remind everyone at the start. Here again, it’s helpful to hear briefly from everyone first, to get everyone’s first cut on the issue. That makes it easier for the moderator to bring the more shy participants into the conversation once it gets rolling, to highlight differences and get people talking about those differences, and to probe for the "why" behind the "what."

The moderator can help steer the discussion toward a specific outcome, which might be a list of questions to the candidates on one or more issues, or a summary reflecting the range of views on a particular issue. But these are things that should come toward the end, after people have had a chance to talk with one another about those issues as they see them.

Keeping a Record

Audio- or videotape the discussion. Tell people up front that you plan to record the conversation, but keep the taping process unobtrusive — a flat microphone on the table and a stationary camera — so people will forget about it and get comfortable. The video is important for the television partners, the audio for radio partners. A transcript is helpful for all journalists so they can pull out a particular quote or question or anecdote, and it allows for the publication of excerpts.

In the San Francisco partnership, television station KRON-TV videotaped most of the major exchanges between candidates and voters and provided an audio dub to the radio partner. A transcript was made for all partners, including the Chronicle.

Following Up

Get the media partners back together for a quick debriefing as soon as possible after a focus group with citizen panelists. What was new? What were the nuances? How did this group see issues differently? How were their takes on the issues the same and in what ways different from other groups? Is there a broad common ground or significant splintering on the issues? Were there good ideas for stories that haven’t been done? What were the best questions for candidates? Did themes develop you hadn’t heard or thought about? Most important, what are the values underlying the opinions that were expressed?

Keep in mind that opinions may change, but core values are constant over long periods of time. If your coverage reflects the concerns that emerge from those values, it will be on target.

-- Reprinted from the Poynter Election Handbook: A Guide to Campaign Coverage.