Excerpts from Pre-Meeting Interviews

Throughout the room, charts with summaries and quotes from the pre-meeting appreciative  interviews were displayed:

Wishes

  • That journalism can be passionate again.
  • Curious, courageous, and compassionate.
  • Today’s working journalists provide a bridge and pathway to future generations.
  • Play to journalism’s strengths: depth, context, perspective.
  • Journalism becomes more interactive.
  • More diverse voices.
  • Supports the telling of tough stories.
  • Be prouder of itself.
  • Collaboration makes journalism stronger and more fun.
  • Be bolder, willing to try something different.
  • Organizations know they are contributing.
  • Portray people overcoming barriers and understanding each other.
  • Survival; solution-oriented, contextual storytelling.
  • More conversations around sustainability, peace-making, bridge-building.
  • Vehicle for intimate public discourse.
  • Lift up complex interrelatedness of issues – getting to values.
  • Increased grassroots journalism.

Essence of Journalism

  • Desire to challenge power and connect the dots in a complex world.
  • Connection to public life/clarifying stakes and choices.
  • Curiosity.
  • News sense.
  • Pulling back the covers.
  • Depth, context, perspective.
  • Stories that help individuals reflect on the opportunities and challenges in their personal lives, family, community, and the larger world.
  • Information with integrity.
  • Pursuit of the truth, both on part of reporter and audience.
  • Identifying all points of view in the essential data of the story.
  • Being a community storyteller.

  • How might we learn from those who keep and translate story?
  • How might we impact a larger/more accurate rendering of
    • Whole-story news
    • Deeper news?
    • How do stories transform communities?

Fetzer Story Group

What’s the role of media in helping us pay attention?

Cole Campbell

Collaboration is the wave of the future: among journalists, between journalists and audience.

Matt Thompson

Storytelling is part of human DNA and journalists are one of society’s storytellers.

Jane Ellen Stevens

When you use media that get outside old structures, something amazing can change.

Kim Spencer

This entry was posted in Session Notes. Bookmark the permalink.