The next session was a hypothetical reporting exercise developed by Poynter to bring in the audience and apply the various competencies to a specific case. Deb Potter of the Poynter Institute introduced the scene:

"The town in Colusa, Florida ... a medium sized city on the west coast of the state. It's part of a ten county television market. The population is about two million people.

"There's this major league baseball team, the Tornados. The owners of this team have been watching Colusa, and they've decided that they want to move their AAA baseball franchise to Colusa. Big deal in Colusa. But, first Colusa has to agree to build a state of the art stadium for this baseball team to play in.

"City officials are really hot on this topic, because they've got a dilapidated downtown in Colusa, and they're pretty sure that this baseball team could really revitalize the downtown area. Not everyone agrees with that.

"One argument is over how people would pay for this new stadium. There are lots of different options. ... There's also some dispute over the possible location of this new stadium. One possibility is over by the bay, [but], you'd block the view of the water for many of the residents, and there are possibly some environmental implications.

"Another site is near the center of the city. That would involve the destruction of a large old public housing project and the relocation, obviously, of the people who live there.

"Some people have argued that that's a really bad place to build a stadium because a lot of people remember that in that neighborhood there have been some problems, some racial violence, and nobody is going to want to drive over "there" to watch a ball game."

The reporter on the scene, Scoop Scanlan, quit journalism school to be a newsman and is feeling quite incompetent. He begins his reporting by hearing from the various constituencies, each offering its own perspective. He heard from a baseball enthusiast; a community organizer concerned for those in Palmetto Park; an environmental activist who wants to preserve the land; the downtown developer; the Owner of the team who wants the waterfront site; a tax protester and the police commissioner who wonders what baseball can offer in the way of education and jobs.

During lunch small groups met according to vantage point and discussed what Scoop needed to cover the story accurately and completely:

The News Executives: "The News Executives ended up advising themselves almost as much as they decided to advise you. They answered questions about how well prepared their staffs would be to cover this multilayered, complicated story; what resources they would be willing to devote to it; what existing support staff systems were in place in their newsrooms; and what kind of training might be necessary. But at the end, the news executives came up with a few questions that they thought from the perspective of leaders would be important. And really, it's pretty much the leaders of newsrooms that need to answer questions like: Well, what do we measure now in this newsroom? What do we value? How do we define success? If it has to do with the number of stories versus the quality of stories, that ought to inform us about what our people are picking up. What kind of vocabulary do we use to describe stories or categories of stories or types of sources? What types of processes do we normally kind of fall into as we begin the reporting process on any subject? What existing sources of information do we have? What new ones might we have to develop on an ongoing basis to ensure that we wouldn't be prepared to do this story the wrong way? And finally, how can we as newsroom leaders clarify what's important? Kind of the umbrella under which a lot of these other activities would take place.

"...There was at the beginning of our discussion a fair amount of seeming consensus that if this story were to descend on a number of newsrooms today, the newsroom would not be well prepared to cover it. It would be prepared to cover it in traditional, old fashioned ways that might suffice to get at the power struggle among some of the forces in the community but not, as Valerie said, at the multilayered elements of what is underneath that dispute.

"I think by the end of the conversation there was also a ... recognition that it isn't merely a matter of having resources, but of leading the resources and using them to good effect."

The Students: "What courses could we have taken earlier on in our educational career that would have prepared us for this day, our first day on the job covering this huge story here in Colusa?

'Well, an economics class would have helped. Environmental issues or ecology would have been good as well. What about government? Psychology? Even the history of baseball. There is an endless number of courses that could have been taken, and that's just for one story. In fact if you wanted to, you could have spent decades in school and millions of dollars if you're at one of the more expensive schools, preparing for this two minute package of air time.

"So in our discussions we quickly realized that unless we were going to be gearing for a specialization such as a medical or consumer reporter, the best education we could hope for would be to learn a little bit about everything. [One area] that would be especially helpful in covering today's big story, and that is critical thinking. The process of making decisions."

The Community Group: "Our community group is probably more skeptical and cynical than any of the reporters in any newsroom I've worked in. They have an awful lot of good questions that you'd better ask in getting the story, starting with what are the vested interests of your newspaper in this particular project? What do you do if your editors have already decided this is a good story and one that you'd better write in a very positive way for the community, and how are you going to approach it? Has the paper already worked out a private deal to become the official media sponsor?

"They also wanted a complete assessment of all the players in this particular drama and what their individual financial/economic interests might be...

"They wanted to know how this fit in the long term development and well being of the community. What are the opportunity costs for the city that might be lost, for instance, if you put a park in the bay front site? What else might go there? What else might be done if you look at it on a long term basis that would improve the development of downtown Colusa and might, in fact, have a more positive impact on development of Colusa than would the baseball stadium. What about the relocation impact on the people in Palmetto Park if you took that site?

"And by the way, were there only two possible sites under consideration? What about the other sites? Where are they and what potential might they hold?

"They wanted to know a lot about the team and what their record had been and whether they had any economic impact in the town that they were relocating from to come to Colusa.

What's the record where the team is now? Why is it leaving? Is this a large enough market to support the team? What if it fails? Are the city and taxpayers left holding the bag? ...

"A lot of questions about the history leading up to the relocation history in the community. If minority, lower economic groups have been relocated in this town before for some other so-called community benefit, and what happened? Then generally, what has been the impact of sports in other communities where they came in. Have they really been an economic benefit to the communities?"

The Educators: "Our questions were these: Are your students prepared to deal with a story of this complexity? ... In fact the answer was there would be, in a story of this complexity, the necessity of dividing up the tasks and commissioning students, or indeed providing an instructional path that would build up expertise that, when it was all brought together, would bring the story under control.

"I think the consensus in the group, though, was that as a starting point this was a political story. The phrases that we used and the terms that were mooted included race, social class... With that understanding there was also a kind of presumption that there were some technical forms of knowledge that might be necessary. By technical, you could even take that phrase the "state of the art" baseball stadium. That's a question that could only be elucidated, I think, by a builder of baseball stadiums -- that is to say an architect and an engineer.

"...There was a the question of baseball as a kind of centerpiece of American culture... Perhaps baseball isn't to everyone, and certainly not as much as it is to most men, a thing that captivates the imagination and attracts the kind of attention that this story is giving it...

"There were two additional methodological elements. One member of the group suggested strongly that this is a story that calls for immersion in and a capacity to engage in participant observation rather than just simply conventional interviewing techniques. It was admitted, I think, that it would be necessary to seek out experts and to tap their understanding and to filter that through the critical understanding that would be growing, literally, on the head of this case study...

"We had a brief discussion on the value of specialization in journalism education. That is specialization in a discipline as opposed to specialization in the craft and field of journalism studies... In the context of this case study I think we more or less concluded that the forms of specialization couldn't be too intense because of the breadth of the story."

Reporters and Editors: "[We] suggested that you ought to connect with your colleagues quickly. You ought to figure out who else works in this news organization who can help you, who has some expertise, and get them involved...

"The question really was what resources could you draw on to make yourself smarter quickly? The people in your own newsroom were the first group mentioned.

"...The question was raised about whether journalists as a rule are willing to admit that they're not maybe as smart as they could be, particularly to the people who pay them. And so there was some discussion about whether you might be wiling to go and ask for help...

"To summarize, we really hoped that you wouldn't feel that you were doing this alone, and that you would find ways to enlist others in making you smarter and in making the story better."

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