It feels like an age of plenty, but more children live in poverty now than twenty years ago; 17 percent of them live below the line, up from about 16 percent in 1979. Welfare reform has ushered more people into the work force, but low wages make it hard for many of them to cope with the cost of living. And 42 million people, most of them working but still poor, do not have health insurance. For newspapers trying to fulfill their public service mission, stories about these still-stranded Americans are challenging to present to a largely prosperous, middle class audience. How do you engage readers suffering from "compassion fatigue"? How do you cover those without enough money in what feels like a new Gilded Age? Modern poverty is almost entirely an enterprise topic. It's a quiet story. Poor people do not send out press releases. Cathy Trost, who last March stepped down as director of the Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families, is a close observer of the coverage of poverty. She says that while some series stand out, "no one paper covers poverty in a seamless, energetic way." It's not something, she says, "that newsrooms demand." Yet some are trying. James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, has observed about journalism that the "highest achievement of the trade is to make people care about and understand events or subjects they had not previously been interested in." Here is a look at how three newspapers are attempting to do just that with the issue of poverty.
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
At first, Laura Saari, and some of her fellow reporters at The Orange County Register, could not believe that extensive poverty existed in Orange County. It clashed with the image of Ferraris and swimming pools. But the staff did some digging and found that 19 percent of children in the county lived in poverty -- just about the national average. How could the paper paint a face on the numbers?
Saari found a family she wanted to profile, but the story stalled when the photographer assigned to the project had trouble establishing rapport, mostly because he didn't speak Spanish. She would try three photographers, in fact, before she got the right one -- Daniel Anderson -- to work with her. Together they produced "Motel Children," an August 1998 special section that chronicled the day-to-day existence of poor children living in the Golden Forest Inn, a shabby motel across the street from Disneyland, and in one called The Fire Station, in the town of Garden Grove.
Saari and Anderson camped out at the motels and gained the trust of the children and their parents. The hours were long and the job frustrating at times. People moved in and out. Good subjects disappeared. "This was going at it from the grass roots. It was getting to them without a lot of interference," Saari says. "We weren't going through welfare to find them."
"Motel Children" has the feel of early twentieth century muckraking journalism. It tells of the lives of Angelica, Jeffrey, Kristina, Sunny, Regina, Stephanie, Rick, Lovon, and their friends, using their own voices to communicate the wretched conditions that poverty had brought to them. Some of their parents were working at minimum-wage jobs that did not pay enough for a better home, and the motel was the last stop before a homeless shelter or the street.
Their dialogue described days and nights living in rotting motel rooms infested with roaches and lice; their inability to stay in school because their families moved so much; and their struggles to create private space out of the chaos around them. It told of kids scouring garbage bins for toys abandoned by a family that had moved on, and it showed kids who were hungry. "'My mom doesn't exactly make enough money to be spending it on breakfast,' Kristina says. 'I'm hungry,' Bobby says. 'When does the bread people come?' 'I need a taco,' Xavier screams. He punches his mother's arm. 'I'm mad at you. You don't buy me a taco. I need a taco. I need a taco. I need a taco.'"
The idea to use the children's voices grew out of a brainstorming session at the paper. "We did not want yet another trend story that no one would pay attention to," says Robin Doussard, the paper's deputy editor. "Motel Children" quoted few bureaucrats, social workers, or housing officials. It didn't allow government officials to proclaim they would do a better job. It didn't engage in handwringing over the lack of affordable housing -- the real reason the kids lived in the motels.
And it was powered with Anderson's photographs, which telegraphed both helplessness and hopelessness. (He went on to win the Robert F. Kennedy photojournalism award for this work.)
The series captured the attention of the community. More than 1,000 people responded with letters and phone calls. Says Saari, "It threatened nobody. It gave them sadness and surprise, rather than fear." The paper opened its auditorium for a meeting, after a nurse who often visited the children, and who was mentioned in the series, got more phone calls from readers than she could handle on her own. Community residents donated some $200,000, 8,000 toys, and fifty tons of food. The Orange County Board of Supervisors ordered an audit of services for children living in the motels. A private organization launched a $5 million capital campaign to build transitional housing.
Saari says there hasn't been as much follow-up to the series as she'd like. But "Motel Children," she says, "restored my faith in what we can do as journalists to have an impact."
THE ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS
The Pioneer Press turned to the techniques of public journalism when it published "Poverty Among Us" in 1998. One Sunday a month for seven months, the paper published special reports about poverty in Minnesota, all part of a larger project to stimulate a community discussion. The idea, says editor Walker Lundy, was to focus on the idea that the poor are not far off somewhere, but right in the midst of readers' lives.
The series described the daily existence of several people who were working but barely making it -- a woman who worked eleven hours a day at Kentucky Fried Chicken; a woman working part-time as a school bus driver who couldn't work more hours because of a back injury; a single father trying to make it on $920 a month from his job as a home health aide.
The paper tried to drive home the notion of the "working poor," a term that Lundy thinks the public does not readily comprehend. In the 1960s, Lundy says, people were poor because jobs were scarce; today there are plenty of jobs, he says, but "those jobs aren't intended for people to raise families on."
The series offered more than just stories. It tried to reach into the community psyche to stimulate a public conversation about poverty. Stories on each topic, such as the working poor, poverty in the schools, divorce and lack of child support, were accompanied by a set of questions for adults, teens, and children, that were designed to stimulate discussion about the lives of people with low incomes. For example, the paper posed to children: Does every kid have the same chance to get good grades? For teens: Does personal appearance affect a student's education?
The Pioneer Press also prepared a "community action pack" that offered, among other things, resources and contacts and a guide for starting volunteer groups. It hired people to lead formal discussions, making them available to community groups that wanted to explore poverty issues. The paper also organized chat rooms on a special Web site meant to encourage discussion of the issues surrounding poverty.
The editorial page, meanwhile, in a partnership with the St. Paul Public Library, created a book club to examine the literature on poverty. By the time the series ended, some 2,500 people had attended either a formal discussion group or a book club meeting, and a number of others held informal talks in their homes and schools.
Finally, the paper invited representatives of thirty community organizations to come up with some common community goals. Explicit in those goals was the notion that people cannot generally pull themselves out of poverty without the support of others, without good programs, livable wages, child care, health care, and help with transportation.
The result of all this talk and thought is hard to quantify. "I'm not sure I know how to gauge the success," Lundy says. "We created a lot of community conversation. Beyond that, I don't know." Chuck Johnson, director of the Families with Children division in the Minnesota Department of Human Services, says that the series was "good, high quality, and very informative," but he questions the long-term impact. As for the public discussions, Johnson thought they were "well structured" but the two he attended were not "terribly well attended."
In some ways, Lundy says, the newspaper itself may have been the beneficiary. "It changed the minds of people in the newsroom," he says. "Our staff learned a lot about stereotypes." The project, he says, changed "how we approach" the subject. Still, Lynda McDonnell, one of the lead writers and now the paper's political editor, concedes it is hard to figure out what the paper should do next about poverty.
That job now falls largely to Maja Beckstrom, who works three days a week covering both poverty and religion. "We've been trying to figure out how to carry on that momentum" from the series, she says. Lundy says the Pioneer Press has been wary of making poverty a full-time beat. "You fall into the trap of covering the bureaucracy of poverty," he says. "Nothing is more boring."
THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution does not have a "poverty beat," but poverty coverage cuts across most of its beats, from economic development to immigration to children. "Poverty has been on our mind for decades," says managing editor John Walter, "and Georgia has all kinds -- urban, rural, suburban, and immigrant." The paper looks at the topic broadly, and that approach has resulted in some impressive reporting.
"If I were assigned to the poverty beat, I would be overwhelmed," says veteran reporter Jane Hansen. "Where would I start? With health care, nursing homes, crime, the schools?" But as a member of the special projects team, she zeroed in on children, and the kids she wrote about often were poor.
In 1997, the Journal-Constitution asked the state Division of Family and Children Services for records of neglected and abused children who had died after coming to the attention of the state, using a 1990 law that requires open records. When the state refused, the paper petitioned the Fulton County juvenile court, and won. Hansen spent the better part of 1999 investigating the human and paper trails of 844 children who had died between 1993 and 1998. Most of these children came from families far down the socioeconomic ladder.
Nineteen stories (including sidebars) over six months revealed a horrifying tableau of the children's battered lives and exposed the state's indifference to its mandate to protect them.
Every step of the way Hansen and her editors defined and redefined their goals and thrashed out details of presentation. "We wanted tears in readers' eyes, but we didn't want them to stop short and say 'that is not for me,' and turn the page," Walter says.
Along the way, the paper conceived of a graphic -- 844 pairs of children's shoes, piled high to represent each of the dead children. "Why wouldn't you want to find out about them?" Walter says.
He believes in a multi-level approach that includes stories about government agencies failing to do their job (as in Hansen's series), stories about individuals and their daily struggles, and stories that take a more sweeping look at the system and the root causes of poverty. The nitty-gritty of people's lives leads to reader interest in the larger picture, he says.
For example, in the summer of 1999 the paper published a vividly written story of Bridgett Stewart, a fifteen-year-old living in a crumbling pine shack without flushing toilets or hot water in rural Georgia. Despite her poverty, she managed to earn straight A's, and she aimed to go to college.
The story told the reader something about the context of poverty and the systemic problems that nourish it. In a particularly revealing passage, the story pointed out that "in 1972 when the Dow Jones reached a historic mark of 1000 points, Bridgett's grandmother shucked peanuts for $2 a day. Twenty-five years later, when the Dow hit 8000, Bertha Mae Brown picked peas. Still for $2 a day."
A special report in early 1999 called "Poverty in the Promised Land," illustrated with a series of compelling photographs, examined what it called the "growing underclass" in Gwinnett County, an affluent, developing area northeast of Atlanta. It examined why in the midst of plenty were there so many people who were poor. The section profiled the lives of ten families living in poverty. It concluded with a story examining the high cost of poverty to county residents in terms of taxes and overburdened social services.
As part of the paper's multi-beat approach, Mark Bixler reports on the point where poverty and immigration intersect. "I look at places where new arrivals bump against the system," he says. Bixler has reported on unscrupulous people taking advantage of new immigrants, and some of his reporting has the flavor of old-fashioned consumer stories. One exposed a scheme by people posing as advocates in the Hispanic community to obtain green cards for new immigrants. Another told about the sale of phony drivers' licenses. Bixler finds his beat invigorating, "It's not like the police or council beat. It's a thematic beat," he says. "It's what you make of it. It's the furthest thing from boring."
Trudy Lieberman, a contributing editor to CJR, is director of the Center for Consumer Health Choices at Consumers Union.
