In short, Smith has spent the better part of the past 20 years making a name for himself as a firebrand and an outside-the-box thinker in a generally status-quo business where change is usually incremental and painstaking.
“I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian,” he says with a serious hint of understatement.
Others put it more bluntly.
“In this profession, if you’re not in the club, whew!”, says Jan Schaffer, executive director of the University of Maryland’s J-Lab: the Institute for Interactive Journalism. “For him to find a comfort level on the periphery of the club to me connotes a certain amount of bravery.… He’s far more independent.”
“I have known Steve Smith for about 15 years,” adds Jay Rosen, an New York University journalism professor and the author of the well-known PressThink blog. “The great thing about him is that he simply doesn’t care what conventional opinion among his fellow editors is, and doesn’t think as they do. He’s always willing to defy newsroom culture too. (And that’s a mean beast at times.)”
Smith still calls himself a “civic journalist.” But that cause — to which he so feverishly attached himself — turned out be a noble marketing failure. Its adherents saw civic journalism largely as an extension of basic “shoe leather” reporting, one that got reporters closer to grassroots-community concerns rather than having them depend on professional spokesmen and officialdom for story ideas and sources. But for many editors and journalists, the intensity of the adherents’ reform-minded fervor and the emphasis on solutions and problem-solving was off-putting, leaving former New York Times executive editor Max Frankel to famously complain that “the ardent civic journalists … want to tell it and fix it all at once.”
And as Smith himself admits, some of his ideas — like the new webcast — are not exactly embraced by everyone. Surely there are plenty of ways to connect the public to the newspaper without employing a gimmicky webcast tactic that would seem certain to have an impact — and not necessarily a good one — on what is said and done at those meetings. While it’s great to throw open a window in the sausage factory, not everything in a newsroom should be available to public scrutiny.
But even if we can argue about tactics, Smith is absolutely right about the need for open lines of communication between news outlets and their audiences. For too long the news media have been paternalistic and arrogant, going about their business without feeling the need to explain their motives, practices, and even glaring mistakes to the paying customers. Frankly, that’s one reason why the public continues to give the profession low grades when it comes to issues such as fairness, accuracy, independence, and even motives.
In recent years, thanks largely to such attention-grabbing scandals as the Jayson Blair and Jack Kelly fabrication fiascos at the New York Times and USA Today, respectively, that mindset has begun to change. After the Blair case, which led to the resignation of executive editor Howell Raines, even the mighty Times underwent a period of searing self-examination that led to the hiring of an ombudsman to examine the paper’s performance and act as a liaison with its readers.
