The fifth session of the day examined what values the advocacy journalist, the columnist, the alternative journalist share with the establishment journalist.

Patty Calhoun, the editor of Westword, found an overwhelming degree of common ground between mainstream journalism and the alternative press, and it had nothing to do with objectivity.

"It's not easy to explain what an alternative newspaper is. We couldn't decide then, and frankly, we still can't decide now. The members of the Association of Alternative News Weeklies, 18 back in 1978 when the group was founded and 111 today -- we can't describe ourselves."

"The real reason the alternatives work is because we've learned something -- something that a lot of journalists have forgotten. That is that people still like to read. They don't like to read everything, and not everyone likes to read. But a significant enough number of the people out there like to read that we can make a living and sometimes a good living, giving them something to read. Giving them -- and we're free, after all--something challenging; something that will make them think; something that might make them happy; something that might make them furious; but certainly something longer than the eight inches that Gannett strives for. Something that jumps not once, but sometimes a dozen times..."

"People still like to read, and more importantly, they like to read about their own hometown. . . To this end I can offer one useful piece of advice which is go to bars. What is the matter with journalists today? Especially people just coming out of journalism school. No one goes to bars. And I'm not talking about journalism bars, I'm talking about seedy, disgusting, gross bars -- the kinds I go to."

"It is the kind of stories you get by going out and talking to the people in the town you live in rather than reading the Internet and talking with other journalists and going home to the suburbs where you live with other journalists. You have to get out where your readers are and where the people who care about what you put in your paper are. And those aren't the advertisers."

"Our writers have just one rule when they sit down to write a story -- they have to find their subject far more fascinating than they find themselves."

"You can't have a point of view until you've explored all points of view. Writing a screed without a story behind it is not advocacy journalism, and putting yourself in the first paragraph of a story is not voice."

"In exploding the myth of objectivity and neutrality, and instead adopting the more accurate, I think, mantle of fairness, what they've done is they've created confusion. We all have."

"All too often people can no longer distinguish what journalism is."

"You see talk radio, which we've talked about here, which puts out rumors and now thinks they're doing investigative reporting which is novel, but unfortunately, their listeners can't tell any better than the radio DJs that they're not. You get the Web stories going out there that are kind of taking off, thinking they're doing alternative journalism, but they're really putting out yet another posting about TWA Flight 800 and how it was shot down."

"But there's a more important problem with the Web that I think maybe we can address. The problem is because the Web is out there, people are not starting alternative newspapers anymore. No, that's wrong... The dailies are starting alternative newspapers. But that's a real loss to journalism, that rowdy, rambunctious voice of the alternative press, and I hope we can change that, or that the Web pages stay around."

Mary Mitchell: "When I think of alternative press I think of the difference between say a woman who wears a girdle and a woman who does not. One is very constrained, and one is kind of very loose. That looseness gives you room to be different. When you're constrained, you can't afford to be different. The standards, the agendas, the mission of the mainstream paper make it very difficult for you to be different, for you to try new things, we call it push the envelope, and that's something that I love to do, to just see just how far I can go in print. So that value that the alternative press brings is just very important."

"When I think of alternative press, of course, I think of black press, I think of the Chicago Defender. I think about the reason why the black press was founded, and the famous line that we want to 'plead our own cause'. People who start alternative papers look around and say, "I don't see me. I don't see my story. I don't see the things that are important to my life. I cannot relate to this."

"I think too often we're strong writers, and we write good stories, but people want to know what you think. We don't know who to trust anymore in our writing...You went out and you interviewed ten different people. So? Who are these people? Why should we trust these people? What makes them an expert? But then they develop a relationship with a writer in the paper, and they begin to trust that writer and to trust that writer's point of view, and trust that writer's credibility. Then they can see themselves in the press."

Audience Question: "What common values does the alternative or personal journalist share with Carol Marin's definition such as commitment to accuracy, balance, or objectivity?"

Patty Calhoun: "If we take out the objectivity and replace it with fairness, I would hope alternative journalists do agree with all of those tenets."

"It's interesting, I will periodically get calls from people and say don't you people have to include the facts in your stories? The fact is yes, of course, we do the reporting and then we add it one more level."

Bill Kovach: "Can I push you just a little bit on that? On the question of objectivity, which goes back to what you were talking about earlier, why should journalists give up, even alternative journalists, give up on the concept of a pursuit of an objective approach to information?"

"Everybody knows there's no such thing as objectivity. Scientists know there's no such thing as objectivity, but they don't give up the pursuit of an objective experiment to try and understand what they're examining. Why should journalists give up the notion of a pursuit? Not the attainment of, but the pursuit of objectivity in their work?"

Patty Calhoun: "I think it's more important that we pursue the truth, and I think that's what we're doing. By saying objectivity isn't out there, what we're saying is you cannot, bottom line, be objective because you're going to go in with certain biases. You're going to go in and say I'm a white woman without a girdle who's writing a story. I'm writing it differently than a white woman in a girdle on a daily newspaper might be. Those biases are there and that's going to rule out objectivity, but you can certainly pursue accuracy and fairness and the truth, and that pursuit continues."

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