During his life, Robert C. Maynard earned a reputation as one of the deepest thinkers in journalism. Long before he helped found what is now the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and before he became the first black owner of a major daily newspaper in the United States, he had commanded respect among colleagues and won the admiration of the many young journalists he helped train.
Maynard, a former Washington Post ombudsman, became editor of the Oakland Tribune in 1979 and bought it in 1983 with his wife, Nancy Hicks Maynard, in the first management-leveraged buyout in U.S. newspaper history.
Partly out of his experience living in the earthquake-prone San Francisco Bay Area and partly out of having lived through the many social tremors of the time, he formulated a theory that great fissures also explained many of the differences that shape opinion and human experience.
He saw the primary "fault lines" as race, gender, class, generation and geography. Maynard argued that they were the most enduring forces shaping our social tensions and that understanding them held the greatest potential for reconciling them.
As an African-American, he was no doubt concerned about the informational needs of and portrayal of people of color, but as a publisher/businessman he was also concerned about reaching and maintaining readers. As a journalist, he was always concerned about balance and accuracy. As a human being, he was also eternally concerned with the future of our society and convinced journalists had a role to play in assuring its continuance.
"The most important part is keeping our eyes on the master metaphor of the Fault Line," Maynard wrote. "The society is split along five faults, and we try in vain to paper them over, fill them in or pretend they aren't there. Underlying forces, like those in the center of the earth, will thwart us until we come to see our differences as deep, but completely natural, things, as natural as geologic fault lines. We don't have to resolve our differences. We can agree to disagree."
Before his death in 1993, he asked his daughter, Dori J. Maynard, a journalist and former Nieman Fellow, to continue shaping that intellectual idea into a meaningful process that would help journalists understand, re-examine and recast how they cover news to meet the needs of all readers. She now directs the Fault Lines program for the Maynard Institute.
"Honest discourse across Fault Lines with the goal of reaching an understanding, irrespective of agreement, is a first step," she said. "For once we give up the notion that we are all alike, we can give up the idea that if we all talk long enough and loudly enough, we will win others to our side. And once we let go of the need to be right, the need to win, then perhaps we can begin to truly listen to each other. It is also our belief that we in journalism have a special responsibility. For together we can create foundations for those structures of integrity by making sure the picture our fellow citizens receive from the media is a picture that accurately reflects and defines the world."
The Fault Lines framework provides the foundation of The Maynard Institute's Reality Checks workshop. Reality Checks is a module of Maynard's Total Community Coverage program. The workshop consists of a series of exercises and learning experiences designed to teach news employees how to use the Fault Lines framework to analyze and improve news coverage and to identify news business opportunities. Reality checks include an assessment of community demographics, content-analysis training and a case study on how to identify and create strategies to reach underrepresented audiences.
The goal of the content analysis is to quantify who or what is in the news and who is not. More important, Reality Checks has helped individual journalists and news organizations all over the country use fault lines to try to understand and to cover news in a broader, more comprehensive way. This is what the Maynard Institute calls "total community coverage."
Trainers have taken the program to the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, San Antonio Express-News, Philadelphia Inquirer and others. Through the American Society of Newspaper Editors' National Time-Out for Diversity, other newspapers and many individual editors also have used the Reality Checks content-audit tools to assess their coverage. MIJE also has trained presenters from the industry, and as one of them, I was able to bring the Fault Lines concept to the SPJ convention in Columbus, Ohio. More than 40 people signed in at workshops I conducted there.
The purpose of these two one-hour workshops was to give participants an overview of the Reality Checks workshops and Content Analysis Training. Usually the training stretches over a few days.
In these sessions, I emphasize that one of the attractions of applying the Fault Lines framework to news is that there is no right and no wrong implied in them. Everybody has fault lines. We cannot change each other's fault lines, or even our own - nor should we - but we can begin to understand them. We have to be aware of them, so we know our own blind spots and the interests of our potential customer. One analogy that Don Maynard borrows from a friend is that of hopscotch. Depending on the issue, our feet may land on our race square, our gender square and so forth.
SPJ participants wrote down what their fault lines were and then shared some of them aloud. "White, working-class, male, Gen X, suburban Texas" was a typical response in one workshop. One woman from my own home state of West Virginia and my alma mater there, Marshall University, actually gave "hillbilly" as her geography.
One session of the workshop happened to have an all-white audience, but the fault lines they recited showed intriguing differences in geography, age and class - and an almost even gender split - not at all the homogeneous group it might have appeared to be. That's the beauty of the fault lines approach. It probes deeper. We discussed how those differences could be used to advantage in a newsroom or editorial board.
Next, we explored how the fault lines concept can be applied in a business context that makes retaining readers and going after new audiences more urgent than ever.
These factors include:
* Loss of circulation over all and in certain markets.
* Changing demographics of race, gender and age, particularly the loss of female and young news customers.
* Broad social and political changes resulting from the shifting racial makeup and immigration in the nation, as well as from changing gender roles and family structures.
* Public distrust of the news media.
The workshop also examined how applying these concepts can help in assigning and developing big stories - making sure a multiplicity of fault line perspectives are at least considered and represented in the final package. Examples were:
Elian Gonzalez, the "Wilding" in Central Park, the videotaped police chase in Philadelphia, the Republican convention, the O.J. Simpson verdicts, the USS Cole, the Subway series and the Presidential election.
The deaths of such famous figures as Selena, Tito Puente, Frank Sinatra or Biggie Smalls - and determining their news value - often come up as cases where the natural schisms, particularly of age and race, become self-evident in a newsroom.
In longer workshops, five groups are usually designated to meet and come back with an idea for an article intended to address a specific fault line assigned to each. On the Elian story, for instance, The "race" groups have explored why U.S. policy handles white Cubans and black Haitians differently. "Gender" groups explore whether the public might see the custody issue differently if the mother had survived and the father had perished. "Geography" might interview people on whether Cubans outside Miami cared as much as its residents.
The other two groups -- "Class" and "Generation" -- always come back with equally readable stories. The exercise allows us to "try on" the fault lines of the readers/viewers and target stories that might address their concerns.
Our SPJ workshop focused briefly on using the materials available for the content-analysis part of the program. The Maynard Institute's basic method involves identifying each news source in a story or image and making a notation of certain fault line data, if it can be determined. The journalists code each notation, and the software experts feed the codes into a database. With sufficient amounts of data, the journalists can help track general trends about how often and how well people are portrayed and under what circumstances. For example, whether women never show up as sources in business stories, but always show up in the society pages, or whether Asians might appear in national stories but never in the local pages -- though they make up a large segment of the population of the city studied and are projected to be its majority in five years. Some of these factors explain why they might not buy the paper or just feel alienated from it.
When MIJE does the program at a newspaper or other site, it generally brings several presenters, the software to analyze results, and an expert to calculate and crunch numbers. A demographics expert from the host newspaper is also usually on hand to present actual readership and population data. Local staff members learn the method in the workshops and then code their own paper to compile data for a period of a week or more. This way, findings are not imposed by an outside consultant but are experienced by the staff as it goes along. Groups include writers, editors, graphics specialists, photographers and others the paper chooses. MIJE later provides reports to the paper to help them look at the challenges and possible gaps in coverage, and to develop strategies to change.
Angela Dodson is a free-lance journalist and consultant. She has been a Fault Lines presenter for The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
What does it have to do with journalism?
How are Fault Lines reflected in news coverage? Some are more subtle and "hidden" than others, but Fault Lines are reflected through news sources and photo subjects, story dimensions and story ideas.
Sourcing: In analyzing sourcing, ask: What fault lines do my news sources and photo subjects reflect? How do their fault lines affect their comments, interests, decisions or actions? What fault perspectives are missing? Are they needed to help readers better understand the relevance of the news to their lives and communities? If so, can they be added within the constraints of deadlines, news holes and other available resources?
Dimensions: In analyzing individual stories, ask: What fault lines are reflected in the story? What's missing? If there are missing elements, would adding them help readers better understand the relevance of the news to their lives and communities? If so, can they be added within the constraints of deadlines, news holes and other available resources?
Source: The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
The Five Fault Lines:
Race: Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Native American, mixed race, White
Class: Rich, upper middle class, wealthy/middle class, poor
Gender: Male, female, gay/lesbian
Generation: Age and generational experiences, such as growing up during the Depression, World War II, the Vietnam era, the Nixon impeachment, the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s and whether you define yourself as part of the post-war Baby Boom, as Generation X or by some other generation.
Geography: Urban, suburban, rural, region
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