With the old news business changing this is an exciting time of opportunity and threat, said Paula Ellis — a news, corporate and civic leader and currently a Fellow at the Kettering Foundation. Paula joined John McKnight and Peter Block in a video conversation on changing the narrative for community leadership and what’s possible in emergent news models.

This conversation is packed with inspiring ideas and examples of places that are pioneering new ways to collect, create and distribute news as the mass media transforms into a series of niches. Paula described the concept of relational journalism where a journalist with an empathetic perspective brings connection and relation to the stories they tell. Watch:

https://www.facebook.com/AbundantCommunity/videos/560786541034958/

In this video:

  • Current state of the news business (4:40 – 5:30)
  • More voices but potential for tribal loyalties (13:30 – 15:00)
  • Introducing relational journalism (17:40 – 20:00)
  • What’s possible for neighborhood news? (25:20 – 28:00)
  • How to cultivate relationships with journalists (31:30 – 33:00)

Quotes from Paula Ellis:
“. . . Everybody has voice and everybody has an opportunity now to get their voice out there from a distribution point of view. What we have now is a war for attention, and so people are working very hard to aggregate attention.”

“But with the means of production being democratized, we have a chance to tell more complete stories. The challenge is how is it going to aggregate up.”

“I know people don’t believe this when I say it, but news does not have to be a business. It could be a gift economy.”

Click here for a transcript of the entire conversation.

Examples Mentioned:

 

Full Transcript:

For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work.  All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.

 

Changing the Narrative for Community Leadership:

Conversation with Paula Ellis

 

November 27, 2018

 

Becky Robison: Paula Ellis is focused right now on civic entrepreneurship, and she has an extensive career as a journalist and has worked in both profit and nonprofit organizations.

John McKnight: Paula, it’s wonderful that you could join us. With the kind of background you have, I think we’re going to learn an awful lot. I know that you have edited newspapers and been a key person in a major foundation, the Knight Foundation, and you’re a senior associate at the Kettering Foundation and have more credentials I’m sure that I don’t know of. But with that kind of a career, I wonder if we can start by asking you to tell us, having that kind of experience in the newspaper world and the media, how it’s affected where you stand today in your understanding of the media and its role.

Paula Ellis: First of all, thank you both for inviting me. It’s really a privilege to be in a conversation with you two gentleman who I’ve learned from all along in my career. It might be useful if I just say a few words about myself that may help to see that we’ve been living in parallel universes in a sense.

I was raised in Washington, D.C., in a progressive Catholic family, and had the benefit of reading a columnist, a guy named Nicholas Von Hoffman, who wrote pretty endlessly about this place called the Woodlawn Organization, which sounded pretty enchanting. I have an undergraduate degree in government and politics, and my journalism career has always been one where I’m very interested in who has power, who doesn’t have power, and how the world could be jointly shaped. I also had the great good fortune to work 26 years with a news organization called Knight Ridder where we really talked about community well-being and how our newspapers could be an agent of community well-being. I know that’s not always apparent to people. So, it’s an orientation that I’ve had for quite a while.

What I would say about the current state of affairs is the industry or the news business, whatever you want to call it, in many ways is not a business anymore. But is that a pretty significant inflection point? Some would say, “Oh, this is a platelet shift. Everything we want is new. It’s dramatically changing.” Others might say, “New species are emerging.” But it certainly is a wonderfully exciting time, which brings with it opportunity and threats. And I think we see a fair amount of all of those. My personal hope for whatever I can do to help in the world to nudge things is to see if the systems that are emergent can be better than the ones that are being destroyed.

Peter Block: Could you be specific about emergent and destroyed? How would you name those two domains?

Paula: I think what’s being destroyed, the fundamental challenge to, let’s just call it the news organization, is an economic one, which is that the way to pay for the collection and distribution of news is changing dramatically or is eroding. The platforms on which news is being distributed, constructed, are all changing and constantly being reinvented, and what we have today is, for anyone took the time to read the piece that was shared, everybody has voice and everybody has an opportunity now to get their voice out there from a distribution point of view. What we have now is a war for attention, and so people are working very hard to aggregate attention. So, as the sort of uber system that I would say monopolized media for good and ill, the mass media becomes more and more of a series of niches. There’s more opportunity and threat. I don’t know if that’s helpful.

Peter: It is. Very helpful. Thank you.

John: You say in an article that you wrote that the media has shifted from what it was, perhaps giving us information, to taking on roles of inculturation and socialization. I wonder if you could tell us what that means specifically.

Paula:   I won’t go into the history of media. It did start out as opinion and propaganda, you might call it, but it evolved to a point where it was early on almost stenography, almost like an extension of the telegraph, like Ernie Pyle would send us a dispatch because we weren’t able to be there. We weren’t able to know whether it was propaganda or truth. It’s what we had and in many ways we accepted it as truth. And then as communities became more complex, competition got greater, the journalist’s duties moved more to a recognition that we were really instrumental in establishing societal norms. So, let me try to be less oblique.

The current platform for journalism was tools developed out of the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason and that fundamental idea that if citizens have knowledge, they will do the right thing. Kettering would throw in, “They’ll deliberate and do the right thing.” But the idea was that they would do the right thing and/or if institutions weren’t working for us, weren’t doing the right thing, journalism could, in an up against the wall way, expose what was wrong with the institution and cause the institutions to respond for the good. Now the challenges that we face are way more complex than that, and our society is much more pluralistic.

The controversies aren’t about facts. They’re about values, collisions at the intersection. For example, in Columbia, South Carolina, Knight Ridder, the company I worked with, made a corporate decision that we were going to be the first in the country to run same-sex wedding announcements. Now, you can imagine how, in conservative Columbia, South Carolina, what we were doing was challenging a norm, changing a norm. So, the things that appeared in media helped to say who’s in and who’s out, and that’s where we have so much trouble. What’s normative, what’s not normative. It was a mass business.

John: Let me try to redefine what’s happened and see what you think of this. When I was young, we lived in Columbus, Ohio, and both of the newspapers were owned by a very conservative family, the Wolfe family. And their editorial policy was manifest on the front page, all other pages. That’s the information that we received. Incidentally, behind me I have a big rubber stamp that my father had made. If you’ll pardon me, it says, “bullshit.” He would take this rubber stamp and after he read an article in the newspaper, the Wolfe newspaper in Columbus, he’d stamp it with that stamp to certify that it was an inaccurate portrayal of his reality.

Now, in a sense there was one voice back then and now what we have, you could say, in a wonderful Democratic way, more ways for people to give voice than you could possibly imagine. And the victim of that may just be newspapers. So, what’s wrong with the democratization of voices that we have now?

Paula: I’m not so sure anything is wrong with it. I’m not ever going to be a defender of the industry or the business because it was deeply flawed in that so many people were left out. And you’re not talking about just a political persuasion. Women were left out, African Americans, all kinds. It was never a complete picture of society. So, I don’t want to sort of falsely idolize it. And so now what we can see is maybe the First Amendment wasn’t just written for the press. It was written for Americans. And there’s an opportunity for citizens to also fully embrace their First Amendment rights. Now the challenge is that, with this cacophony of voices –– and, by the way, the world is not full of all good doers; I think we know that –– we can see that people that make a lot of money or want to create bedlam and menace often are the first to adopt these tools. But with the means of production being democratized, we have a chance to tell more complete stories. The challenge is how is it going to aggregate up.

So, I’m a big fan of Martin Buber I and Thou and so journalism was what we called a mediating institution, meaning we bridged from the I to the other. ’That’s how we were trained. We bridge from the I to the other and the other to the I, and that the individual can’t know themselves but to know themselves in relationship with community and like that. And that’s what journalism was able to do with many flaws. But as the networks now are falling apart and becoming maybe eco chambers and people not bridging out, that’s the biggest risk. So, there’s a risk that you’re going to have more voices, but what’s materializing at this point is that people generally like to stay in their tribal loyalties, to have their belief systems reinforced. This is the mad genius of Roger Ailes and the creation of Fox News because what they know is that if you reinforce someone’s belief system, they’ll act. If you ask them to bridge out and understand the other, it is too much, often.

That’s why the news systems are going in this tribal way to some degree.

Peter: The major institutions are still very powerful. People say everybody buys online. Well, it’s not true. It’s 21% of the people buy online. They say print books are going out of print. Well, it’s not true. They’re growing. The electronic books plateau. And I asked the mayor of Cincinnati once, his father was a mayor, and I said, “I’m thinking of starting a newspaper.”

He said, “Well, I want the most powerful job there. I want the job deciding what constitutes news.”

When we talk about a narrative shifting, you’re talking about the distribution system, which is very interesting. But I’m wondering when we will shift what constitutes news. When will we get away from saying if I cover the extremes, I offer both sides, and it still feels to me like there’s an opportunity there or a shift in consciousness. For example, is something small and neighborly news? Right now, it’s called human interest, which means if you want something small, local, and neighborly, you write it yourself and send it in and see if they have the space. I have the hope and the illusion and the romantic desire that we decide that what bleeds does not bleed.

Do you have any thoughts about seeing where that shift might be occurring? I know maybe civic journalism was a movement for a while. I’d just like to get your thoughts, Paula, about openings you see or opportunities or …

Paula: Right. You never ask a simple question. I’d like to break it apart.

There are a lot of journalists and there are a lot of experimenters who recognize the destructive nature of some of the routines of journalism, and those are the kinds of individuals I’m privileged to work with at Kettering. Some of those routines are the first one that we recognized today, which is that there are two sides to a story, and then therefore we see the world as polarized. We promulgate polarization, and then we wonder why the world is polarized. Although I will say journalists are acted on by other actors. Journalists aren’t generally the protagonist. They’re usually being acted on by all kinds of other forces.

The opposite of conflict and two sided stories isn’t many-sided stories. It may be something else. And the ideas that I’ve been pursuing and with some others are much more about something that we’re calling “relational journalism.” That connection and relation is important because what we’re able to see is that people are more willing to believe or trust what you’re saying if they’re in a relationship with you of care and trust. If they come from where you’re coming from, that’s very different than being in a fact-based business. So that’s one node of activity.

Peter: Give me just a sample of what that belief would lead me to do. What kind of story would I start creating to build that trust and relationship? Is it a more nuanced story, a subtle story, an innocent story, an experiential story?

Paula: First, it’s probably an orientation before we can even imagine what the story is. So, the orientation, this idea of objectivity, was very dangerous and damaging to journalism. It was an economic idea, by the way. It wasn’t a journalist idea. It was created as news organizations were monopolizing markets. What it created was an orientation of distance and the idea that you had to be distant, objective, scientific, third-person narrative –– alienated almost.

It was like a scientific rationalism on steroids. Once you have that orientation, you experience the world very differently than if you have an orientation that says, “I’m comfortable saying I care about my community.” I can stake ground on that. I don’t get to decide what happens, but I can at least say I care

Now, as a specific example, there’s an organization that we’re working with at Kettering called Spaceship Media, which is truly fascinating. They host dialogues. They do it mostly through Facebook across highly polarized lines, and they’re learning all kinds of things, just about the value of the dialogue. When people ask the reporter for facts, they believe the fact more than if the fact is more dumped on them.

Another huge and growing organization that I think is wonderful to watch is Solutions Journalism. They have the idea that problems are solvable. One of the challenges is that we’ve created this master narrative that stuff will be forever screwed up and cannot be fixed. That’s just not true. And so, they come to an approach of getting examples of communities that have fixed things. One, to inspire them, but, two, some of the ideas are transferable. So those are two examples.

Peter: That’s great. I love the language. That’s the idea of poverty is solvable. That’s such a radical thought. If I watch Van Jones, I’m fascinated. He really does try to give voice to, to build a relationship, with people of a different point of view.

Paula: He does. You know there was one other thing, Peter, I wanted to say in response to your question. A metaphor for storytelling is the hero’s journey, right? We’re all familiar with it, and even if you look back in history, and everything’s attributed to Martin Luther King, it takes a lot of us acting, acting sometimes in concert, sometimes we don’t even know each other’s acting, and then things tip. There’s not a journalistic way to tell that story. That’s one sort of a very practical thing I’m trying to think about. It’s pretty easy to look backwards and tell a story and hang it on one person.

Peter: I know, but it’s that spark, something was there long before the spark.

Paula: Right, and it misleads people about how change happens.

Peter: And it leads us to look for the next hero. Which has its own dangers in journalism for the common good. We should be careful with heroes.

Paula: Yes. I’m hoping you guys can figure this out for us.

Peter: That’s why we invited you. I think it’s a big deal because I just love what you’re saying and how you’re thinking about it. Kettering’s supporting it. Because I know how I see you determines how I treat you. As John has demonstrated for 40 years, if I see you as a deficiency, then I will try to fix you. If I see you as a gift, then I will try to join you. And everything shifts in that. Your profession is such a participant in how we see each other, and the fact that all the things you’re saying are just beautifully radical and compassionate, all at the same time, and I really appreciate it, Paula.

John: I think the relational idea, the connective tissue, is critical. The Asset-Based Community Development Institute that we’re associated with has always had that as the sinful question.

I want to ask about a function that newspapers have or could perform from a neighborhood perspective. And it’s this: I remember some years ago gathering most of the news of the neighborhood organizations in Chicago. We had a day-long discussion, and the question was, what would newspapers report if it was helpful to you? And then you could see that at the end of the day there was an agenda of what people need to know if they’re going to be effective citizens.

It struck me that that function of something called the media is really critical for local people. I wonder what you think about where we are going in our neighborhoods to get that kind of information that will allow us to know what’s coming toward us, know what the possibilities are?

Paula: I don’t say this glibly, but I think you might have to grow your own. And I say that with all respect because there hasn’t been an economic model to underpin news production, certainly news production of that sort has not been found.

I mean, the most expensive news was local news. Local, local news. So, I think that we might take some of the ideas that we talk about at Kettering with John and others, like a real co-production idea, and point them toward our own community systems. News does not have to be a business. It could be a gift economy. It could be all kinds of things. It was a business for a while, but it doesn’t have to be. And the fact that there’s not revenue to support it is a challenge.

But then it has to be networked so that you have journalists or others who can get into the power positions to find out the secrets that city council has before they’re about to land a toxic waste dump across the street from your house. There has to be some kind of a networked approach. I worked with some folks to try out some of these ideas on something called the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Network. It continues. It goes on. I won’t get into all the ins and outs of it, but I spent a lot of time working with them in five challenged, difficult communities where all the master narrative about them was always something horrible. You know the stories.

So, one piece of the challenge is, what’s the story we tell ourselves about ourselves? What’s the story we’re feeding to ourselves? What’s the story we’re feeding to each other as a group? What’s the story we’re feeding to each other as a neighborhood block? Getting a handle on those stories is really important. The Neighborhood News Network was trying to do some of that –– to identify what are the resources, the talents that we have in this community, and then write about them, show them. It becomes a contagion, and before you know it, optimism is spiraling up rather than down.

This work goes on. What was really important was that the community members were like, “Oh,  you can identify and frame news based on what’s relevant to you and what you care about?” But what people mostly wanted was the acknowledgement of the bigger whole. They wanted the correct narrative about them in the Metro Daily. They were still grieving deeply about their misrepresentation. All of which reminded me of the power of just giving witness –– journalism witnesses things, and maybe we’re witnessing kind of the wrong things.

I’ll say one other thing, John. Right there in your city, in the city bureau is an astounding man, Daniel Holiday. Every time I talk to him, my head just wants to spin around. He’s so smart, and what he’s got is what he calls monitorial journalist –– a network of people from communities who he’s training to do journalism, and then they’re moving up the engagement chain so to speak. And so they’re also using journalism as an on-ramp to civic participation. That is doing journalism as a civic act.

Paula: And then there’s Milwaukee Neighborhood News Network which is currently based permanently at Marquette University. It was a highly collaborative set up between foundations, the university, and local media.

Becky: There was a question that had come in on the chat early that perhaps the three of you want to discuss while we’re waiting for other folks who want to comment or ask questions.

The question was, “How do journalists go about building relationships with people who follow them?” Any thoughts on that?

Paula: I think maybe there would be different relationships. Journalists, over time, became more aligned with experts, institutional leaders, people who nominate themselves to speak for large groups of people. Whether you know they do or not, they’ve nominated themselves to be the spokesperson. So, we know those people. They’re all in the Rolodex. What it takes to develop the relationship is just to cultivate a list. Journalists are generally approachable human beings, and they got into the business to make things better. In terms of cultivating a relationship with someone, it’s not good to only call them when you have something that you want them to do for you, and then if they don’t do it, you’re ticked off. That really doesn’t work well. The cultivation is not just about your business or enterprise or your NGO. It’s about the world broadly. It’s to be an informed source for them, help them go into places and understand things that they can’t know without a wise guide, to become that indispensable source. You might not be named very often, but then when you want something, you’re likely to get it.

Peter: There’s a reporter named Lucy May in Cincinnati, and I didn’t realize what I was doing until I just listened to you, Paula. But when I see something, I just call her. That’s it. If there’s something going on with public housing, if there’s something going on in the neighborhood, I call her and she shows up and does a story, I just so appreciate her. I did it by accident because she showed up first. But I think that’s a great notion to build those relationships without even having an objective. It’s just to help them see what you care about.

Paula: There’s no quid pro quo. You and I both are trying to make our community better, and I just want to share with you some things from where I walk and talk.

Becky:  So, Paula, as it relates to cultivating relationships, have you found that there’s one channel that’s more effective than another? I’m sure journalists are inundated with email, a lot of journalists use Twitter or they’re on Facebook, or they’re on LinkedIn. Do you have any sense from your experience about the best ways to approach that relationship building process?

Paula: Nothing replaces face to face human contact. Nothing replaces that as a foundation for building relationships, and I know it’s not always possible. But it’s probably more possible than we think, and as for emails, people just get a bazillion emails. They don’t know you from anybody. So I would say try to do it in person. Invite the person out for a cup of coffee or something. If they have a lead and you know where they’re going to be, go there. If they’re not on deadline, talk to them afterwards and say, “Hey, I’d love to do a follow up with you.” And then once you have a relationship, then it’s easy to exchange by email and all the other media.

John (caller):    I always show up to these just because I’m always stimulated and inspired and challenged. My passion is actually something a little different, which is trying to change culture within corporations. But something that really inspired me was the idea that problems are solvable and changing that narrative. So often we hear big corporations are always ruthlessly profit driven and don’t care about communities, they don’t care about their own people that work in them. I guess I’m saying thanks for that inspiration about the importance of changing the language and the narrative and thinking about how to do that with our internal media.

Sarah (caller): Paula, it’s lovely to be able to hear your stories from your huge experience in journalism, and I am really struck by trying to understand more of what you mean by relational journalism, and perhaps to help make it concrete. I’m curious if you have examples about journalism that has been written from someone who’s strong, competent, confident in their “I care” position. What does that actually look like when you see it in print, and can you give us examples of that kind of journalism that you’ve witnessed or you know about?

Paula: I don’t have any at the ready, but I think you see them whenever you read an article or a magazine piece where you can feel how empathic it is. I personally, in all the years I was hiring journalists, thought the most important characteristic was their ability to have empathy. The rest is like auto mechanics. I would be happy to find some articles and share them. And on this idea of relational journalism, I’m just working it out in my head and starting to work it out on paper. Two co-authors and I have a contract to write a journalism textbook, and we’re trying to articulate a new normative theory for journalism, and this is one of the elements of it that I’m still trying to work out.

But one thing about it if journalism were relational, it would be framed in a way that was useful to you, where you would recognize the issues. Currently, things are generally framed from experts or in the language of policy. They’re written in a language that is not recognizable to very many people. We used to have a cliché: “Write as if you’re writing a letter to an intelligent friend, but they don’t speak all that jargon.” I think relational journalism would mean to fundamentally change where we begin when we’re starting a new story, to listen really carefully to the way people in the public think and talk and frame an issue, and come at it from there versus the way policy wonks talk about it. That would be a big shift.

Mary (caller): It’s great to see you all and hear you, particularly Paula. Fascinating insights to the world of journalism. What I wanted to share is building on your points about cultivating relationships with journalists. In Derry, Ireland, about six years ago, with the benefit of being in a small place where we have been able to get to know our journalists in both news, print, and radio and also television, the issue of cultivating relationships came up in a campaign, which was very short and sharp.

The powers that be had decided to spend some unexpected money that had come into the city ahead of us being the first UK city of culture in 2013. This money had come in to upgrade our streets, and in their wisdom, they decided they would spend the money pulling out our old, historic cast iron streetlights, lamp posts, and put in new modern, galvanized steel lamp posts. And we were able to feed them facts on the value and significance of these old lights. They were the only collection of historic streetlights left in any city or town in Northern Ireland and possibly on the island of Ireland.

And to cut the very long story short, we are fortunate to have a BBC radio station in Derry, BBC Radio Foyle, and its afternoon discussion program carried a 10 minute interview in the street, which then started a domino effect with different journalists and newspapers, one of whom was a neighbor of mine who was able to get the story onto the front page of the regional Belfast Telegraph. It was then carried by the local papers in Derry over a period of about three or four days. Local television turned up. It went out on television across Northern Ireland that Sunday, and two more heavyweight interviews from one of our leading investigative journalistsreally put the thing to bed. So, within about 10 days, the two government departments involved had done a complete U-turn and we ended up saving the cast iron streetlights and repairing five of the ones that had been pulled out.

It’s just a little story, but I was gobsmacked at the effectiveness of these journalists who all came together. It was like what Jane Jacobs talks about as a ballet on a sidewalk. Well, this was a ballet of journalists.

Paula Ellis: I just wanted to say, Mary, that was a beautiful story, and you perfectly described how news moves through the ecosystem of news. A little goldfish moves and then a bigger guppie moves. So that’s how they often grow and become big stories.

Peter: I think the story of what’s happening in journalism is a mesmerizing story. The questions you’re raising and the language you’re introducing is an amazing invitation to those of us that are working in communities. I once felt that I had to take it on myself, and I did for a while, and then I backed off at the last minute because I felt I didn’t have the commitment to do it. But knowing now that you can be just 5 or 10 people, I can imagine a GoFundMe structure around news and neighborhood stuff.

Paula: The world is catching up to your idea, and I always remember Steve Johnson when he writes about innovation, one thing he talks about is spare parts. The challenge is, you can have an idea long before the parts to pull it together exist.

Frankie Lee (caller): That was one of the most easy to understand representations of journalism as I’ve experienced it through my life and I’ll turn a lot of people onto this broadcast as a result.

I have crossed over now, living in over 200 homes in seven and a half years on the road after 20 some years growing the story of the art of living, and the notion is that we’re the artists of our lives. When we looked into a living model for a project called Circles Uniting, we’ve been narrating the story in small ways towards taking it to a larger form. But rather than talk about that, the reason I wanted to call in was that it really does work with the principles that we’re speaking to today. It’s about showing process, actually the living of our lives and what it takes to move into community and to orient to what’s right about our being together. The sense is that Peter is an artist of life, and that makes possible that someone else is as well. Someone who lives in their gifts who contributes naturally and who is supported in it in life and that we can be creative about where we’re coming from with one another, different than circumstances delegating things that we simply can deal with. So, it’s a way to bring consciousness into the mainstream in a way that’s very, very practical and proven. Because this many people, six states, 200 homes, seven in a half years, and I’m still standing to tell the story.

Gary (caller): I want to start by saying I’m not a big-time journalist, I’m not even sure I’m a little-time journalist. However, I have a lot of experience with writing locally for our neighborhood newsletter, and sometimes I struggle with that because I’m an engineer, I’m not a writer. But it does come out. I just throw out here what somebody advised me: When writing a newsletter, try to make it personal for the person who’s reading it by including, for example, pictures or an actual quote that somebody said. It makes it more grabbing for somebody to hear your message when it comes across that way.

I was also reminded how at church we often have somebody who stands up and makes announcements, makes announcements for your project and everybody else’s project. Thinking about the difference in how those announcements sound when the person who’s in charge of the project makes the announcement –– doesn’t that come across with a lot more enthusiasm and meaning instead of somebody else just reading it? I think about that when writing locally, to try to be personal with it.

Peter: Any final thoughts, Paula? Anything that strikes you from this conversation?

Paula: I think that as you can tell I’m just sort of foraging for partners. So, for folks for whom these ideas are striking nerves and how journalism might be able to help create the generative space for people to solve problems, we are very interested in that. And then there’s the simple fact that I was thinking as Mary was talking is that journalists only know what people tell them. That’s it. They’re regular people who are trained in a certain way with a certain set of disciplines. But what we know is what people tell us.

So that’s it. That’s the currency of the trade is the relationships.

Peter: I did have one thought, Paula, talking about relationship journalism. I think one of the things that I’ve learned with John is the word “hospitality,” which is the welcoming of the stranger. And John talks sometimes about the tribal nature, and having a welcome at the edge

What I was hearing is you talking about telling stories that have a welcoming at the edge and treat the stranger as somebody I need to understand, otherwise I’ll never be surprised. The word “hospitality” has a lot of meaning for me, so that even in a neighborhood gathering, I always had people sit with a stranger, and they’re always irritated because they came to be with like-minded people, but if you make eye contact, they’ll do it. Then they have a different experience, and I think that’s what you’re about, which is helping us get connected in that way, that communal way.

John: In the couple of minutes we have left, I want to ask Paula, because it’s so important everybody who’s a listener should follow up on it. Paula was at the Knight Foundation,  and they did a study called the Soul of the Community, and I encourage you all to go and look at that. But, Paula, can you tell us in a couple of minutes what are the main factors that reflect whether or not people in a community feel attached to the place and each other?

Paula: This attachment is a psychological and emotional attachment, and what we were trying to discover was, is that an essential precondition for taking action in your community? And so the three elements that attach people to their community are: number one, is it an open and welcoming place; number two, what are the aesthetics of the place, the built environment and the natural environment; the third one is something that we call social offering and what that means is, are there places where we can meet, ways that we can kind of exchange and get to know each other?

These aren’t necessarily in rank order but those are the three. Is it an open and welcoming place? Is it aesthetically pleasing? Does it have social offerings? And this research was done with 46,000 people surveyed over three years, and we invented a new language to get the ideal of engagement out of the highly connotative areas that it was in and to really just talk about psychological and emotional attachment potentially as a precondition for doing stuff.

And there were about 16 things, including news, that didn’t create attachment.

 

 

 

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