Jan Schaffer, executive director of the J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland, says journalists have to change the way we do business if we're to remain relevant.

I spent nearly two hours Monday with Schaffer, former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Since leaving newspapers in 1994, she has become a leader in the journalism reform movement, first through the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and now through the J-Lab.

Through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the J-Lab administers the pioneering New Voices program, which gives seed money to innovative community news ventures in the United States. Through 2008, New Voices will help fund the start-up of 40 micro-local news projects with $12,000 grants; support them with an educational Web site, and help foster their sustainability through $5,000 second-year matching grants.

Among the projects already funded is one I mentioned in a previous post: The Forum, an incredibly rich Web site that uses citizen-writers to cover community issues and politics.

New Voices recipients for 2006 include:

Western Breeze: Montana's Rural News Network, from the University of Montana School of Journalism in Missoula. The network will recruit and train residents of three rural Montana towns to report on news and information for rural Web sites and plans to locate a computer kiosk in each community to ensure access and the ability to contribute to the news.

Monroe County Radio Project, from West Virginia University in Morgantown. The project will create a news operation at WHFI-FM, a radio station licensed to the Monroe County School Board. Journalism students and faculty will train student and adult volunteer reporters to report and produce local news stories for a 15-minute daily newscast, regular monthly public affairs programming and a Web site with news and streaming audio.

Creating Community Conversations, from Columbia College Chicago. This project plans to recruit and train neighborhood journalists to cover five ZIP codes in central Chicago. Columbia journalism students and citizen journalists will cover the local police district, school council, neighborhood groups, church events and businesses. Content will be edited by staff at a new citizen media start-up, Chi-town Daily News.

(The J-Lab also awards the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations, funded by the Knight Foundation. The S-R was among this year's winners for our Transparent Newsroom initiative.)

Schaffer and I clearly had a lot to talk about, but we narrowed it to three general questions: 1) What is citizen media? 2) Where did it come from? And 3), What do newspapers do about it?

Schaffer has hope for the future of newspapers, but believes a lot of what we do is broken.

"The conventions we use drive me crazy," she says. Incremental pieces of information followed by 'boilerplate' - background information regurgitated over and over again - doesn't begin to capture the murky middle of most issues, she says. "Mostly, the what-it-means part of most stories is missing."

This current wave of citizen-generated content is partly a reaction to mass media's failure to provide meaning, she argues.

Schaffer said this point really hit her during the 2004 presidential election when she "got disgusted" with mainstream news coverage that reduced issues to "bi-polar pieces" - either black or white, liberal or conservative, pro-Bush or anti-Bush. She started reading op/ed pieces, which were a departure from her hard-news sensibilities. But she says she found more voices, more navigational tools, in those op/ed pieces than in traditional stories with limited viewpoints.

"Conventions are meant to safeguard journalism but in some cases they force us into a posture that's not very fair or true and it's not serving readers," she argues. By focusing (in most cases) on only the extremes of an issue, we're missing "the conflicted middle" where most people reside. "Our conventions no longer give room for outrage or rage. We usually think people who are outraged are wacky."

Journalists need to capture that outrage and put it back in to stories. In many respects, that is what some citizen journalists and bloggers are trying to do. In fact, Schaffer wonders if we need to create another type of journalist who "isn't a straight reporter but not a columnist," someone who has the freedom to call people to account within the framework of news reporting.

I asked Schaffer what started this citizen-media movement and she returned to the 2004 presidential election as a tutorial. Political and civic participation escalated with that election, she argues, from the movie industry to flash cartoons to searchable databases to mob blogs to Howard Dean's scream that political activists set to music and e-mailed around the blogosphere. It was as if an "architecture of participation" was being constructed around the country.

The meta trend was an increased demand for citizen participation, but the reason for the trend was that newspapers weren't serving their readers.

Because Schaffer was a leader in the civic journalism movement, I asked her the difference between civic and citizen journalism.

"Civic journalism was meant to engage people in the civic life of their community through forums and discussions. Citizen media engages citizens in media but can lead to community building. It comes out often in the same place."

Through the industry's efforts to engage readers in civic debate (and not all papers were adopters), many newsrooms learned the value of listening. "We know we connected with readers, that people had more positive feelings about media," she says. Those papers that DID adopt the practices of civic journalism (and The Spokesman-Review was one of them through its Interactive Editors program) are in a much better place today to adopt elements of citizen media, she argues.

When I asked her my 'what can newspapers do to survive question,' she cautioned that citizen media is not THE answer. It's only a part of the solution.

Her prescription for American newspapers:

1. Rethink our mission. She cited API's NewspaperNext project, which I've cited in previous posts. We need to start thinking of ourselves as service-providers. What 'jobs' do readers need us to perform? By changing the way we think about our content, we can see ourselves the way readers see us. Within that construct is 'relevence."

2. Publish less commodity news because there is no 'value-added' in it. Political news, national and international news - it's on every network or cable station around the clock. There is a sameness to it. We need to distinguish ourselves.

3. Develop more niche products. Not all of them will be ink on paper or even daily publications. They may be monthly or quarterly, but we need to develop content that gives people a reason to spend time with us and content they can't find anywhere else.

4. Update our conventions. We need to "cover the middle of issues and quit scoreboard journalism. We're chronically keeping score. I don't think our readers are keeping score." Readers, Schaffer says, want context.

5. More emotion, more rage, in our stories. We're so worried about being balanced that we've sucked the emotion out of issues-reporting. We can still offer balance and objectivity and still bring more viewpoints into our stories.

6. Develop searchable databases for readers that help them perform a variety of jobs from comparing home prices to voting trends.

7. Create new categories for journalists. She offers two: The "listener," someone who avoids the "kneejerk reaction" of dismissing stories that don't seem important or traditional and who can challenge our assumptions, and the "social relationship entrepreneur," a creative person who doesn't necessarily think in linear ways who can develop niche products that appeal to new readers.

8. And finally, add elements of citizen media. But beware, says Schaffer: there are a lot of players in this arena right now. In addition to all the everyday people who are publishing their own content, you can add disaffected reporters and editors who've left the business, as well as Big Media companies, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

"Citizen media is content, a digital unspooling of life in a community," she says. "It's not journalism. It's more than a neighborhood listserve. It's a bridge media. It's closer to the community than newspapers are. They can frame stories in ways we can't because we've been unwilling to get that close."

I didn't want to end my visit without asking her for practical tips on how to attract underserved, or what she calls "unmediated," citizens to our newspaper. I was hoping for simple suggestions such as 'hold a public forum, ask people what they're interested in, and invite them to write stories and blog on your Web site.'

That is not what I got.

"Do what I do," she says. "Fund projects. I don't have to be the only one to do it. For $100,000, you could fund 10 projects. Help create a citizen radio station, or fund one issues-based project. Give micro-grants of $5,000 to get someone started. You still do Big-J journalism, but we need to create a framework and get out of the way. Some will succeed and some won't, but you'll know it in a year, which is a lot faster than it typically takes newspapers to develop a new product."

She says we should do it for the good of our communities. We should do it because it's good PR for newspapers, because it can lead to new in-paper content, and because it teaches civic leadership.

We need to change our Mass Media way of doing things to a new "hub and spoke" system, she says. Newspapers are the hub, and new content from new voices radiates out from the center.

It's probably not relevant to this blog, but I'll bring it up anyway.

The evolution newspapers are going through is similar to the evolution law enforcement is going through. Both occupations are being forced to deal with changing client expectations. My view is that newspapers have been quicker to identify the underlying forces and recognize the need for drastic and dramatic changes. Law enforcement agencies, which are having extreme difficulty recruiting qualified applicants, cling stubbornly to a model more appropriately used in the 1950's and 60's. Law enforcement agencies believe they can continue to deal with their clientele in the same ways as in yesteryear. Their position is the failed philosophy of the '70's and '80's: Lock 'em up and throw away the key. Never mind that the federal courts are telling the jails to find those keys they threw away and start releasing people to relieve overcrowding. Law enforcement agencies are the first ones called to respond to a disturbing person whose only offense is being mentally ill. And they respond with the hardware of law enforcement, not the subtlety of behavioral sciences.

The Spokesman-Review is trying to adapt to the changing expectations of its clients and a changing business environment. Thankfully, it appears that Spokane County and City have taken the first baby step to achieve the same objective.

I'd urge The Spokesman-Review staff, all of you, please don't give up trying. All of us depend on your being there as a safeguard.