Some Papers Seek Readers’ Guidance in Shaping Coverage : Innovation: Instead of relying on official representatives or political spin doctors, a few news executives are asking the public to select key issues.

Three years ago, as the Kansas gubernatorial campaign drew near, Davis (Buzz) Merritt Jr. decided “we weren’t going to let the bastards push us around anymore.”

Merritt is executive editor of the Wichita Eagle and he says he had gotten fed up watching politicians set the campaign agenda and ignore the issues that voters were most interested in.

To counter that, the Eagle created “Your Vote Counts.” The paper polled readers on what they thought the major issues in the campaign were and used the answers to shape their campaign coverage.

Public response was so enthusiastic that the Eagle took a similar approach in local elections the next year and in the 1992 presidential election.

The Charlotte Observer also used voters’ views to guide its coverage of the 1992 campaign.

Troubled by increasing voter disenchantment with the news media and the political process alike, Observer Editor Rich Oppel wanted the Observer to try to “disengage from the . . . the political professional--the campaign manager, the advertising person, the spin doctor, the candidate himself or herself--and re-engage with the citizens, the voters, who feel increasingly removed and alienated from the process.”

In December, 1991, and January, 1992, the Observer conducted a public opinion poll to determine which issues most concerned the voters in its area. Editors and reporters used the responses to that survey to forge an election coverage plan--and to “cast aside a lot of stuff from the candidates once the campaign began . . . (because) we decided it was irrelevant and we knew our readers agreed.”

Before President George Bush came to Charlotte in July, the Observer asked its readers what questions they wanted the President to answer; then they gave those questions to their reporters and printed the President’s answers in the paper.

Although some candidates resented this approach--especially when the Observer left a blank space alongside the name of a U.S. senator who declined to respond to its questions on health care reform--the public liked the coverage a great deal, Oppel says.

Declining newspaper readership and television viewership, combined with public opinion polls that show a steadily growing skepticism and hostility toward the news media, have prompted news executives like Oppel and Davis to experiment with various ways to cover the news--and to try to rebuild relations with their readers:

* NBC News broadcast “Voice of the People” last year, a series of a dozen reports from around the country in which average, individual voters--not candidates, not pundits, not consultants--talked about the major issues in the election.

* The Los Angeles Times has added a two-page, weekly “Voices” section to bring the views of people in the community into the news pages on a regular basis.

* The Orange County Register has made a major effort to publish stories that “focus on how people live their lives” and to provide “information that will help them live their lives better,” says N. Christian Anderson, the associate publisher. Anderson says he and other top executives at the Register also try to be very accessible to readers, in part by “answering our own phones as often as possible,” instead of having secretaries answer them. Like a number of other papers, the Register also sends a questionnaire to at least one person a day who was written about in the paper, asking, among other things, if he or she found the story fair and accurate.

A few newspapers, especially those in small and medium-size towns, have taken a more active, participatory role in community affairs:

* The Columbus, Ga., Ledger-Enquirer followed up its six-part series on challenges facing the community by organizing a town meeting and a series of more casual get-togethers to discuss the problems.

* Editors at the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass., sought the advice of city planners on how best to get the word out about a new, comprehensive development plan in order to maximize citizen participation.

* The Charlotte Observer has sponsored a series of public forums on education, transportation and other local issues.

Direct participation in community affairs can be risky for a news organization; it can backfire, undermining credibility rather than rebuilding reader relations, if it appears that news coverage is slanted to favor projects that the newspaper supports.

In fact, 67% of the respondents in a Times poll last month said they thought that journalists taking “an activist role in organizations trying to change society . . . (would) compromise their ability to cover the news fairly and accurately.”

But news media executives realize they must do something to reverse the decline in readers’ and viewers’ confidence, and some seem willing to experiment with a whole range of approaches.

The Wichita Eagle has been one of the most innovative.

One of the reasons people don’t like the news media is that media are “mostly writing about problems and not solutions,” Eagle editor Merritt says.

“Generically, we do a 15-part series on hunger and maybe in the last half of the last part, we talk about maybe some people have some ideas about some solutions. People get tired of being bombarded by that. We call it ‘agenda-setting reporting’--and we reinforce this kind of journalism by giving prizes for it, even if it doesn’t go beyond cataloguing problems; but readers call these stories ‘negative news.’ ”

Encouraged by public response to the Eagle’s “Your Vote Counts,” Merritt decided to apply that approach to other areas of the paper. Thus was born “The People Project: Solving It Ourselves.”

Last June, in conjunction with a local TV station and a local radio station, the Eagle began a 10-week series of stories examining education, crime, political gridlock and stresses on local individuals and families. The stories discussed the problems, proposed solutions, listed local organizations and agencies working toward solutions, provided information on special community events where the problems would be discussed, and invited readers to participate in an ongoing dialogue by telephone, fax or in person and by writing for the paper.

In November, the Eagle published a similar, three-week series on health care.

On each topic, Merritt says, the paper was careful not to publish just another “catalogue of problems.”

“We’re talking about possible solutions and where personal responsibility lies,” he says. “You don’t just dump bad news on the reader; you talk about why it’s there . . . and what can be done about it. . . . It’s an attempt to engage people in deciding about their own future--and for newspapers to be seen as a vehicle that empowers them to do something, that facilitates doing something. “

Readers have responded positively to “The People Project,” Merritt says, but it is too early to judge its effectiveness in rebuilding reader confidence. Still, Van Gordon Sauter, president of Fox News and former president of CBS News, says that what papers like the Eagle, the Charlotte Observer and a few others are doing is “a step in the right direction.”

Most news media executives, Sauter says, seem more concerned with “a marketplace problem than with a credibility problem,” more worried about gaining readers and viewers than about regaining credibility.

Maxwell King, executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, says news media executives who think that way and who then do “panicky things” to increase readership are making a big mistake.

“Newspaper editors (are) groping for ways to be more relevant to readers,” he says, and “all sorts of dumbing down of newspapers is taking place, all kinds of silly gimmicks are being employed. . . . I think it’s real simple. . . . If you want to be relevant to readers, you’ve got to write about what really matters to them.”

As an example of the media’s failure to do that, King cites coverage of changes in the economy and the tax structure in the 1980s--”a time in which, I don’t think it’s unfair to say . . . the middle class was exploited, in new and venal ways and, by and large, newspapers missed that.”

Most newspaper readers and TV viewers are middle class. If newspapers and television news programs want to attract them, King says, they must cover the news in a way that is meaningful to them, not just to their colleagues and their news sources.