Digging Deeper and Understanding Your Community:
Q&A with John X. Miller

Q. You emphasize holding a dialogue with the public. How does that work?

A. I think dialogues are different from focus groups, because in focus groups you’re listening for a different thing and testing an idea. With dialogue, you can either convene conversations or let them happen naturally. The aspect that’s critical is allowing people to speak their mind without being intimidated to do so. The truth looks and sounds different when someone believes they can say it how they feel it.

You need some ground rules with dialogue – ones as simple as be respectful, talk one at a time, make sure you make eye contact, call someone by their name, no profanity. These ground rules are the key thing with dialogue.

Q. What if people don’t get along?

A. You should expect misunderstanding, contentiousness and disagreement – so you need to plan for this so it doesn’t simply turn into a debate where no one wins, they just get their point across.

Everyone’s a participant and they gain from listening and hearing others’ perspective, thinking over that and then replying, not necessarily replying just as a reflex to someone’s argument.

Q. As the community affairs director, how are you helping newsrooms understand and connect with citizens?

A. One of the things I’m trying to work on is to have our building be a place for a company to come and hold its meetings. I say, “We don’t have the money to fund this scholarship or program, but what is just as important is making a connection.”

We establish our location as a listening post and then we can invite in who we want, as often as we want, and help direct that conversation.

We’re looking to do this with groups of people where we don’t already have robust connections. We have a growing Latino community and we didn’t know these people before. We just had a meeting with a group of Hispanic MBAs, so the journalists could come by at the end of their meeting and have a meet-and-greet – a networking experience.

We have the meeting space and a great cafeteria. All we ask is that there’s a 45-minute networking time at the end so business cards can be exchanged.

Q. What are other ways to build trust with the community?

A. I think trust is a function of believability – people have to believe what you’re telling them and the more transparent you can be in how you make decisions increases that believability. Some of the things the Covering Communities site talks about are understanding communities and framing stories. You can accomplish these by having authority, authenticity, accountability and affection. Trust is a combination of those things.

Newspapers automatically have authority, but authenticity derives from accuracy and truthfulness. Newspapers need to be as transparent as possible so they can be held accountable – I’m afraid that many newspapers don’t have that and aren’t very interested in having that. We want to hold other people accountable, but who holds us accountable?

Q. People don’t always associate affection with journalism. How does it fit into community journalism?

A. Affection is the last thing that makes up trust. How does a newsroom convince the community that it loves the community it serves and is there to report in its best interests? It needs other vehicles to tell the community what it does – to validate itself. We have to prove to the community that they should like us. Even if they have a negative news story, they’ll trust us a bit more if they know that we run a charity that helps the community out a lot or they’ll remember the story that actually helped the community last year.

You have to have an affinity for helping the community. We need that capacity in the newsroom. When we’re arguing about what we do, we need to argue with all the ammunition that we have, including our good stories.