Davis "Buzz" Merritt, retired editor of the Wichita Eagle and a leader in the civic journalism movement, tells this true story:
There was a big fight over a proposal to dam a river in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Ranchers wanted the dam so they could have water for their cattle. Environmentalists opposed it because of the threat to a certain variety of fish found in the stream.
"I sent a reporter out to talk to the people about it," Merritt recalled the other day, "and he came back initially with our usual approach to these things: the three points the ranchers insisted on and the three points the environmentalists insisted on, and so forth. But neither of us liked doing it that way, so we sent him back to talk to more people.
"And that's when he came across a rancher who was also an environmentalist -- and the story we told through this man's ambivalence was fairer, more helpful and far more insightful than anything we might have done following the old approach."
