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Joining the Fight: A Newspaper’s Odyssey
By: Dana Robbins

I would like to give you some sense of the odyssey – and I use that word quite deliberately – on which my newspaper embarked when we embraced poverty as the public policy issue that would define and inform our newspaper.

One Saturday, The Hamilton Spectator published a front page unlike any that the newspaper had previously published over its 160-year history. To the best of my knowledge, no other newspaper anywhere has ever published a front page quite like that one.

The page was blank.

On our largest readership day of the week, on the real estate reserved for our most important stories and our premium advertisers, the folks who pay our bills, there was only white space…save for a short message to our readers.

The message read:

The stories have been removed from this page to remind us that nearly 100,000 children, women and men live in poverty in Hamilton, people whose stories rarely make the front page. We’re going to change that.

This journalistic decision left the Spec, and myself as its then editor-in-chief, open to sometimes pointed criticism within the Canadian media community, where the page was characterized by some as a dereliction of The Spectator’s journalistic impartiality and objectivity, an unfortunate lapse into advocacy.

Our critics were correct, of course, except for their characterization of our decision as ‘unfortunate’. With our blank front page The Spectator did not lapse into advocacy, we leapt into it. In the most public manner possible, we said:

• That our newspaper found the prevalence of poverty in our community to be both offensive and unacceptable;
  
  
• Further, that poverty, in our estimation, was the single, largest issue confronting Hamilton, and the one upon which all other challenges hinged;
  
  
• And, finally, that as a media organization, and as a corporate citizen, we were committed to helping reduce poverty.

As a news organization we had become increasingly conscious that poverty was a recurring – albeit often unspoken - theme in much of the news coverage appearing in our own pages every day.

In the years since, first as an editor and later a publisher, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about poverty, and its impact on my community. I don’t claim to have gained any great wisdom, but I’ve become convinced of a couple things about the challenge of poverty reduction through the prism of a lifetime working in mass communication.

My first thought is that we are undermined in our efforts to generate the needed societal will to tackle poverty in contemporary Canadian society by a surprising dichotomy.

We’re buffeted by two significant, and seemingly contrary, headwinds:

• The first is the dearth of Canadians who have experienced poverty firsthand;
  
  
• The second is the abundance of Canadians who have experienced poverty firsthand;

In the case of the former, the majority of Canadians of the generations that have followed mine have known only affluence. And, increasingly, that is transforming us into a society that is not rooted in a personal knowledge of poverty or even want. They are smart, thoughtful young people – compassionate and easily moved, motivated by sound values. But poverty is as foreign a landscape to them as the lunar surface.

In the case of the latter, the experience of people in middle-age, people of my generation, who have known poverty – even tangentially - in their own lives, distorts their perception and understanding of poverty in contemporary Canadian society.

 In many cases, it gives people of my generation a misplaced confidence that they understand contemporary poverty. But the truth is that to experience poverty in contemporary Canadian society is to experience a poverty that is particularly corrosive and marginalizing.

If we’re going to make real inroads in poverty reduction, we need empathy, not sympathy. Empathy is what prompts action and change. After a lifetime in media, I can assure you that the stories that most resonate with readers are those with which readers can make a personal connection, ones in which they can see some part of their own life reflected. An ‘empathetic’ community is a powerful tool in poverty reduction, and an obvious point of engagement for media.

I think The Spectator has made significant contributions on both those scores. Beginning with the appointment of a full-time ‘Poverty Reporter’ through 2006, and, most recently, with the publication of Code Red, a unique journalistic exploration of the relationship between poverty and health in Hamilton. I also see the transformation occurring within my own organization.

Poverty has become so embedded into our journalistic consciousness, it’s part of the newsroom’s DNA – so much so that poverty naturally percolates to the top of our story file on a routine basis. Witness Code Red.

Equally interesting to me, though, is the number of staff who have come forward to say, “What can I do?” Not what can I do with the journalism, but what can I, personally, do to help reduce poverty in my community.

Remarkable things have flowed from that moment in 2005 and continue forward even today.

Related Links:

• Read Dana Robbins full speech for the May 2010 Strategic Dialogue on Place-Based Poverty Reduction
• View the story Dana Robbins wrote in 2005 to launch the Hamilton Spectator Poverty Project
• Learn more about the Strategic Dialogue on Place-Based Poverty Reduction

Banner Photos Courtesy of Carl Hiebert.