First, the project's longevity is significant in itself. Among a select group of Madisonians-those in opinion leading strata-it has established itself as a local deliberative institution. According to Still, Iverson, and Denton, when a topic comes up in conversation and someone thinks it should be treated by WTP it is often invoked as a verb: "Why don't you 'we-the-people' this project?" It is an achievement for three media partners (later joined by two others) to have established and maintained a working collaboration over four years time.

Second, longevity lends institutional weight to the process of deliberation itself among those who are aware of the project. Each new venture is taken more seriously. The most recent WTP in summer 1995, "The Search for Common Ground" on land use, which was jointly televised on Wisconsin Public Television and WISC resulted in an extraordinary 12 rating and 31 share in Dane County, easily winning its time period. According to an aide to Dane County Executive, Rick Phelps, interest and awareness in this important issue that had been restricted to a small number of interested parties climbed substantially in the period following the project. [9]

Third, there is some evidence that those who are aware of the project are engaged, at least episodically, in key election or policy issues. A survey by Thorson and Denton (1995) taken in Fall 1994 right after the November election found general project recognition of 51 percent. However probes of the sample found that only 20 percent could correctly identify the source of the project. Similarly, a survey taken by the Mass Communications Research Center at the University of Wisconsin earlier in Fall 1995 found recognition levels of 43 percent. Of those who had heard of the project 35 percent reported that they were likely to attend a town hall meeting on juvenile crime. However follow-up depth interviews with 24 of those participating in the survey found that of the twelve who had been selected from the group reporting awareness of We the People, recognition was very weak.

Random sample telephone surveys of Madison residents demonstrate that We the People viewers and readers tend to be more well educated than those who have not heard of WTP. The surveys were conducted in autumn of 1994 and 1995, and yielded samples of 158 and 261 Madisonians respectively. In 1994, WTP viewers and readers were more likely to be women than men, but in 1995, gender was not a significant correlate of WTP exposure. In 1995, Madisonians exposed to WTP also tended to be older and earn higher incomes than residents not familiar with the project.

More interestingly, the forms of participation that WTP viewers and readers report have expanded over time: in 1994, Madisonians exposed to WTP were more likely to have attended a community meeting and were more likely to have voted in a recent election than those unfamiliar with WTP. The following year, WTP viewers and readers also tended to attend community meetings and to vote more than their counterparts; in addition, they were more likely to have contacted a public official about a community issue or problem than those unexposed to the project. In 1995, survey respondents were asked about their willingness to attend a community issue forum in the future. WTP viewers and readers were more likely to express a willingness to engage in community-level meetings than those not familiar with the project. In fact, the likelihood of attending a future community meeting was the strongest participation correlate to WTP exposure.

There may be a link between this increased willingness to participate and our fourth point . Starting in 1995, there has been a movement in Madison to formalize citizen deliberation that may be linked to We the People. Groups have been formed to continue community dialogue linked both to Study Circles and National Issues Forums. Both national organizations help set up local ongoing deliberative forums, with Study Circles stressing the process of dialogue, and NIF stressing action oriented towards public problem-solving. In Madison, the Study Circles leadership group is fairly distinct from WTP, although aware of the project, while the NIF involves some informal overlap (Still is involved).

We can say, then, that a certain plateau of institutional public deliberation has been reached in Madison, aided and stimulated in no small way by the success of We the People. This conclusion must be somewhat qualified, however, by two limitations involving 1) the problem of continuity in the choice of deliberative topics; and 2) the effect of the project on moving readers and viewers toward community problem-solving activity at some level.

First, there has been a tendency to treat issues episodically with relatively little continuity. Table One shows a wide range of topics, but relatively little overlap or repetition. There have been some continuities among topics, for example property tax relief, the people's state budget, and gubernatorial debates that focused on these issues; or between We the Young People, and youth voices in the gubernatorial and senate debates. But these thematic links, and in some cases, carryovers among participating citizens, are separated by a wide gulf of time, and perhaps more important, a large flow of other information that is only episodically related back to We the People. None of the major partners regularly follow-up issues raised in WTP projects, even though they do refer back to the projects occasionally in stories and editorials. So despite the underlying message during a given project that "we are now deliberating seriously about important issues that take time," there is a second, countervailing message, "now we are done with this issue and can move on to the next one." Both media sponsors and viewer/readers know this is not true, but nonetheless there has not been a strong sense of "we are tackling a difficult issue that will require strong, clear, continuous deliberation, and we will keep coming back to it until we have seen some progress emerging toward a consensus on a framework of how we as a state or community might move forward."

There are a number of reasons for this gap. The most important one is the operation of news routine. A We the People project requires mobilizing a great deal of organizational energy among all of the partners, often using key editing, producing, and reporting personal that have to be drawn out of the daily reporting pool. There is a legitimate and understandable tendency to breath a collective sigh of relief when the project is over, and return back to "daily life" in the newsroom until the next project. A second important reason is the philosophy of weak deliberation purposively chosen by at least some of the major partners. The notion that it is the function of WTP to "hold the door open," no more and no less, tends to reinforce a sense that what the community does with the framework offered by each individual project is primarily the business of the community, and not the media partners. If a project strikes a public chord, fine, then the public will proceed to deliberate further. If not, that is unfortunate, but it is not the job of WTP to advance the agenda, even if the agenda is militantly non-partisan and is restricted to further, deeper deliberation on an agreed topic of public importance.

The second limitation is the reluctance of We the People partners to link the deliberative process to ongoing problem-solving. This is in no small part explained by the project's statewide scope. Because sites change for each individual project, the only constant location is Madison. As we have noted the process of organizing each program is episodic. Wood Communications personnel identify key sites and actors at chosen locations, and then town hall meetings leading up to the televised events are organized. There may be an informal residue in specific communities, as participants continue to discuss the issues among themselves, but to date there has been no formal continuation of the deliberative process. As WTP moves on to the next topic, the informal connections among participants are all that remain.

The quality and reach of deliberation created by We the People can be summed up as a clear institutional success with wide recognition by an opinion leading stratum of Madison. The deliberative process is limited, however, by a number of factors. Recognition among the general public is wide, but remains weak. The project itself has purposely adopted a strategy of weak deliberation, in which the episodic airing of a topic is considered the deliberative limit. [10] Each organization has embraced WTP as central to its mission, but the investment in deliberation has been episodic and remains unintegrated into its daily or weekly news coverage.

Finally, a deliberative strategy, whether weak or strong, contains inherent limits discussed in section one above. Without linking deliberation to ongoing citizen problem-solving efforts, media-sponsored and induced deliberative efforts are more likely to fail, both in institutionalizing a wider discussion in the community, and in helping forge the links that lead from deliberation to civic problem-solving. This is of course, a choice that can be made consciously, as in the case of We the People. But we believe that it ultimately poses limits to the deepening of deliberation proper.

The study of community can be very broadly divided into three types. First, studies have looked at communities from the standpoint of integration, the notion that communities consist of groups in relation to each other which are bound together into a more integrated whole. Second, studies have focused on conflicts among groups based on power and interest, often focused on the relation between local power structures and subordinate, linked groupings. Third, in the last twenty-five years, studies have emerge that look at communities from the standpoint of networks, or more properly networks of networks.

There are numerous differences as well as overlaps among these three broad divisions. Among the most important are those between theories that hearken back to the core sociological distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. In the tradition of gemeinschaft, the community is conceived of as a large, relatively bounded entity, with the groups within it being linked in some form of hierarchical unity, as subordinate parts to the whole. In the tradition of gesellschaft groups are no longer bound to each other, other than through contractual ties. Both views tend to conclude that community is in "decline" if not "lost" altogether. This loss can be seen as irretrievable, superseded by capitalist or bureaucratic development, or recoverable through a range of strategies for reinvigorating community life. In contemporary political discourse the latter position is represented by some forms of communitarianism on the one hand (Etzioni 1993), and more conservative neo-Tocquevillian visions associated with the revival of civic virtue and the transfer of government power back to newly reinvigorated neighborhood and community-based associations (see for example the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship).

The vision of community as rent by power has a long and complex tradition, dividing primarily between those who proceed from C. Wright Mills to see the power structure of community as primary in determining the local distribution of power and resources (Hunter 1953; Molotch 1976; Hunter 1980; Mollenkopf 1983; Logan and Molotch 1987), and the pluralist tradition represented by Dahl, which sees interest group competition resulting in long term balance between in-groups and out--groups (Dahl 1961).

The notion of community as a networked entity has emerged since the 70s. Led by the work of Wellman (Wellman 1979; Wellman and Leighton 1979; Wellman 1982; Wellman 1988; Wellman, Carrington et al. 1988) and Fischer (Fischer, Jackson et al. 1977; Fischer 1982), social network theory stresses the multiplicity of network connections among individuals and groups, making a primary distinction between local, or proximate, networks and more distant networks. Both Wellman and Fischer have found that individuals' network ties are more complex, multiplex in form and substance, and less proximate than implied by a more locally rooted view of community integration. In short, individuals have many sets of relations with local family, extended kin, in the workplace, and now via phone and email that make generalizations about "community" more difficult.

Network research on community power structures by Laumann, Galakiewicz, and Marsden in the seventies and early eighties(Laumann 1973; Laumann and Pappi 1976; Galaskiewicz 1979; Galaskiewicz 1985; Marsden 1987; Galaskiewicz 1989) found the persistence of core networks of community leaders that were linked to each other through complex interlocking networks of information, communication, and resource exchange. Laumann et al did not posit an apriori structure of community power. Rather they investigated the empirical variation of these networks in multiple dimensions of power and opinion formation. Galaskiewicz (1979) found three dominant structures, the money network, the information network, and the support network, each dominated by different sets of elites and each using different media for establishing and maintaining influence (p. 155). While conflict was central to each case study, so were efforts to work together to solve common problems.

These findings led us to ask about the role of public journalism media in social networks. The question of media influence in social networks was, of course, first articulated in Lazarsfeld and Katz's Personal Influence (1955) In the most systematic review of the literature flowing from the opinion leadership tradition, Weimann observes that while the concept of opinion leadership was widely applied in the domains of health, marketing, and diffusion of innovations, that it has only recently been resurrected in the study of politics (Weimann 1994, p. 159). He attributes this renewed interest in part to the interest in social network analysis as a method for bridging micro- and macro- levels of politics. The most comprehensive recent study uniting politics and social networks concentrates on the relation of social networks to formal politics.(Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995). We believe that understanding the local structures of both deliberation and social capital formation requires more complete mapping of local network structures, including problem-solving capacities or "community assets" (discussed below).

We can only suggest the relevance of this argument for research on public journalism here. The notion of the "two-step flow" presupposes a group of "opinion leaders" who pass information through to others in their circle of influence. But what has been somewhat obscured in the legacy of Personal Influence is the actual structure of opinion leadership posited. Beginning with The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson et al. 1944, 1968), Lazarsfeld et al. had found a "molecular" level of opinion leadership, "persons who were influential in their immediate environments but not necessarily prominent within the total community" (Personal Influence, p. 3). Further, in contrast to a belief that opinion filtered down from elite to mass, they found that each social stratum generated its own opinion leadership, and that molecular leaders were likely to be attuned to media characteristics of their own groups, forming a horizontal structure of opinion leadership. The types of leader in which we are interested in this study--the ones we call opinion leaders--serve informal rather than formal groups, face-to-face rather than more extensive groups. They guide opinion and its changes rather than lead directly in action.

What we call opinion leadership, if we may call it leadership at all, is leadership at its simplest: it is casually exercised, sometimes unwitting and unbeknown, within the smallest grouping of friends, family members, and neighbors...it is the almost invisible, certainly inconspicuous, form of leadership at the person-to-person level of ordinary, intimate, informal, everyday contact. (p. 138)

It is this "lower" level horizontal structure that interests us most in the investigation of the effects of deliberation and social problem-solving within communities. Lazarsfeld and Katz based their research on early sociometric models of opinion diffusion and were concerned with the chain of information passed from small group to small group. In contrast, the later network community studies of Laumann et al.. allow us to develop more comprehensive descriptions of community structure, in effect to begin to reunite the vertical and horizontal levels of influence in a single community, or viewed from the standpoint of the media of influence, to trace the circulation of power and information.

Our study of Madison has led us to rethink this interlocking set of relations. At the highest level of the community we find distinct yet interlocking leadership strata [12] across a range of domains: political, economic, voluntary and "grassroots" (including religious institutions). We believe that actors in this leadership group are most likely to be aware of public journalism projects in all of their dimensions. Indeed, as we shall see, in the case of City of Hope they were "called to the table" by the Wisconsin State Journal precisely because of their leading positions. It is important to emphasize that within each of these groupings there are distinct factions with competing and even antagonistic interests. For example, the Madison/Dane County political spectrum runs from independent left activists and a strong group of pragmatic progressive liberals who hold the offices of Mayor and County Executive (itself factionalized), to center-right conservatives, including the congressional representative, to rural conservatives who are prominent on the Dane County Board of Supervisors. Economic interests are divided among civically oriented businesses, conservative businesses, real estate factions and so on. We cannot detail this structure here, other than to suggest the complexity of this "leading" stratum. In the terms of Personal Influence, this group would function as both local elite and expert stratum, but also as the top rung of "opinion leadership."

At the next level are what we might call opinion leaders in the stricter sense used by Katz and Lazarsfeld. Structurally, these are actors with varied links to the leadership strata, generally multiple links that cut across both functional domains and factions. Prominent examples might be leaders of unions, religious and voluntary organizations and so on. This group functions as both opinion leader in relation to those networks that it influences, and as molecular, in relation to the strata above.

Next are the moleculars who are two steps removed from the top strata. They are connected primarily (although not exclusively) through the second group. This group might include officers of organizations, active members, volunteers, the core of citizen activists found by Verba et al. These moleculars are influential within their circles, but these circles are somewhat more circumscribed.

Finally, we come to the group that Lazarsfeld and Katz call the "influencees" or more simply the influenced. We think that this term is unfortunate because it tends to understate the degree to which the influenced remain reflective citizens and active influencers of others, and grossly understates the possibility for the generation of new ideas and conceptions in a broad range of areas. In short it associates a hierarchy of activity (which may exist) with a hierarchy of capacity. We think of this group in the strict empirical sense of those who self-report as being civically inactive. They may still be influential in a broad array of cross cutting networks in family and work life.

This structure begins to make the activities of deliberation and problem-solving intelligible at a community level. We are not suggesting the revival of the oft-caricatured concept of the two-step flow. Rather, we suggest the need for broader structural map of these multiple and cross cutting networks through which opinion is formed and acted upon. In the case of We the People, we have found in our depth interviews that there a strong and clear awareness of the project among the high leadership and opinion leading strata. Awareness tails off among the third molecular stratum, and is extremely weak within the fourth. These results are supported by the adjusted figures of the Thorson/Denton and the Mass Communications Research Center studies. Thorson/Denton estimate 20 percent awareness controlling for misperception among the 51 percent reporting recognition. Our qualitative follow-up of the MCRC figure of 43 percent is similar, although less precise. The 12 rating for "Common Ground" is consistent with these figures. Verba et al. found a need to reduce their sample to 17 percent of the total to find a broadly defined activist core. We can estimate then, that the activist core, which constitutes levels one through three in our typology, is roughly 15 percent of the population.

This is the core from which the closely attending audience for We the People is drawn. This structure begins to explain both the success and limits of the project as a form of deliberation. At the most basic level, this core has among the highest news readership/viewership of any group. Their percentages as "attenders" certainly extend beyond their raw numbers. Second, this core is by definition the most active in discussing public issues, both within each network, across network boundaries within the interlocking opinion leading networks, and outside. Their active deliberation magnifies the success of the project in reaching beyond the core. Anecdotal reports of success and influence, whether to news managers or politicians are most likely to come from this core.

Denton set out to do a news series on Madison's problems, but did not want to practice what he calls "hand grenade journalism" in which journalists "sit back in our fortress and throw these grenades and go out and count the bodies and then go back and do it again a few years later...I really didn't want that to happen this time. I really wanted something to result from it." Rather than beginning an investigation, Denton invited "community leaders" to come to the WSJ to discuss the range of problems that were surfacing in Madison. The leaders included the mayor, county executive, chancellor of the UW, director of the technical college, head of United Way, the school superintendent, the head of the chamber of commerce, the police chief and others.

The pattern that emerged was that the group would discuss one area, for example housing, and WSJ reporters would "cover" the discussion. The ideas were a starting point for an independent investigation of the issues. When the stories were published, the group would be reconvened and asked, in Denton's words, "what are you going to do about it?" They were presented with the options uncovered by reporters with the reporters there covering the leaders' response.

The results were mixed. Part of the series led to a mapping of Dane County social services, with the expectation that there would be some overlap. When there was virtually no overlapping the paper reported on this essentially positive finding. Another series focused on crime discussed one poor, isolated neighborhood on Madison's east side. Despite its high crime rate, a federally funded anti-crime program had not been implemented there. When the mayor was confronted with the reporting he became angry because he felt he had been ambushed. He sat down with the editors and reporters, and his views were reflected in the article. But he later told the New York Times that he was troubled by the methods of the project because the WSJ had been "wearing two hats" by reporting on a project that it had helped to create. He also expressed concern with the "top down" nature of the process in which a group selected by editors rather than voters is making decisions for the community (Glaberson 1995).

Denton doesn't deny that the power of the newspaper was used: "Part of the way that we can use our power is to get them [leaders] to the table. It's hard for them to say 'no' to the dominant newspaper in town." Denton says that his definition of civic journalism means "taking responsibility for journalism beyond the door step" in contrast to Iverson's definition of "holding the door open." This is tied up with Denton's concept of leadership formation, which holds, in ways parallel to Putnam, that there has been a widespread decline in leadership in American society which has led to a vacuum. One of the ways that newspaper power can and should be used is to "take leadership" on community issues, in essence to serve as a catalyst for existing leaders and to stimulate new forms of leadership.

Denton responds that the distinction between deliberation and mobilization is valid but that they are not at opposite ends of the spectrum. He sees a need for convergence in the process, in which journalists "ask the people what they want, go do the journalism that provides the factual basis for a range of options. And then you go to the leaders and say 'This is what the people say. And here are the facts we found out.'" Schools of Hope grew from City of Hope but it reflects some of the lessons learned in the first project. Denton acknowledges that there "wasn't much of a public component" in City of Hope. After City of Hope, he received many requests to do something similar for the schools. Schools of Hope, initiated in late 1995, will have three major components. The first is "traditional journalism," involving investigation. The second is "public involvement" which will integrate We the People-style town meetings and issues polling. The third component is the involvement of a leadership group. The major differences between Schools and City of Hope will be a higher degree of public involvement and mobilization, on the one hand, and greater distance from the policy making and leadership process on the part of the newspaper on the other.

Beyond the question of the degree of involvement of the WSJ in community mobilization lies that of the type of mobilization. The Hope projects have mapped Madison through what McKnight and Kretzmann have called a "needs-driven" approach to the community, which focuses on needs, deficiencies, and problems. They criticize needs-driven approaches to community problem-solving for teaching people "the nature and extent of their problems and the value of services as the answer to their problems" which transforms lower income neighborhoods into "environments of service" (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993, pp. 1-2). Further, the needs map often appears to be "the only neighborhood guide ever used by the members of the mass media" which leads to simplistic and sensational reporting on lower-income neighborhoods that tends to create a wall between these neighborhoods and the rest of society, a wall "built on the desire to help." [13]

McKnight and Kretzmann counterpose an alternative approach that they call "assets based community development" that focuses on developing the capacities, skills, and assets of lower income people. They point to strong evidence that significant community based development takes place only when citizens themselves invest their time and resources in the effort. They propose a method of mapping community assets that focuses on a systematic inventory of the capacities of individuals, citizens' associations, and local institutions, and a strategy of linking them together in a process of mutual deliberation and common problem-solving. [14]

Discussion of community assets planning has been percolating through much of the leadership group convened by the WSJ for several years. Madison Mayor Paul Soglin and Community Development Director Tom Mosgaller have been engaging McKnight in a series of discussions, and the influential Madison Community Foundation has experimented with some community assets based strategies in its giving in the past year. The United Way, which has traditionally represented the needs-driven approach has begun to incorporate an assets-based approach in its annual community mapping. Denton is also familiar with McKnight's work.

Despite this relatively lively discussion among key members of the leadership group convened by the WSJ there is little evidence that these insights are being incorporated into the City/Schools of Hope projects. In no small part, this demonstrates the difficulty of moving from institutionally grounded professional strategies to community-driven ones, even when the questioning of professionalism and the recognition for civic revitalization is widespread among a group of ranking leaders. When recognized need for change confronts institutional routines, the routines usually triumph again and again. It takes a long time and concentrated effort for routine to break down in any institution. When community networks coalesce, even in a leadership group dedicated to civic problem-solving and community change, the power of inertia may be even greater.

One piece of evidence demonstrates the difficulty of changing routine, even in the face of the best intentions. The same Mass Communications Research Center Study that measured response to We the People also studied crime coverage in Madison. A content analysis found that both Madison newspapers, the WSJ and the Capital-Times, and all local television stations, including City/Schools partner WISC, cover crime at rates strongly disproportionate to its actual occurrence in Madison. Crime accounted for almost 50 percent of local television stories, and 85 percent of these dealt with violent crime. Crime stories were featured in more than one-third of local newspaper stories, with almost half of these dealing with violent crime. [15] This "imagined community" of Madison was, then, a crime ridden and violent place, and this is how survey respondents perceived it, with more than 51 percent believing that crime was rising when in fact it was falling. At the same time, the WSJ featured prominent articles discussing these falling crime rates. However, respondents tended to underestimate the rate of crime in their own neighborhoods compared with Madison as a whole.

This same structure allows us to generate additional empirical support for the findings of Verba et al that an activist stratum, broadly defined, can be posited around 15-20 percent of the population, and that, further, this stratum is divided among three different levels of civic leadership: high leaders, opinion leaders, and molecular leaders. We stress that these strata are cross-cutting. There is not a clear vertical structure, but a complex "honey-combing" of linkages.

We the People has become institutionalized among this combined leadership stratum. There is evidence that, among these groupings, it is known, respected, and anticipated and that this group looks toward the "we-the-peopling" of a range of community issues. There is no clear evidence that this generalized awareness has reached much beyond this leadership stratum, although there is weak evidence of high recognition levels reported in two separate surveys.

We the People engages in a form of weak deliberation, in which there is no project-level intention to organize deliberation beyond the presentation of individual projects. There is also no systematic follow-up of issues or topics once covered. Still, We the People appears to have stimulated awareness of specific issues among the relatively restricted, but significant leadership group. It has also generated a broader discussion among these strata about the need for more firmly rooted deliberative institutions that has led directly and indirectly to the beginnings of Study Circles and NIF groups. This may, in turn, lead to stronger institutionalized deliberation that can begin to develop citizen-driven rather than media driven deliberative agendas. The City of Hope project employed a strong mobilization strategy beginning from the top of that same leadership group. The initiative for the project has come from the newwspaper, not the leadership group itself. Nonetheless, there is evidence that the process has set some significant community-wide initiatives in place that have had clear effects in galvanizing action on job development. The Schools of Hope project represents a combination of elements of We the People and City of Hope, and attempts to address the criticism that mobilization has been too restricted to the upper leadership stratum.

The City/Schools of Hope process has also paralleled a growing awareness in the same upper stratum of the need for an assets-based model of community problem-solving. Whether and how this will be translated into action, inside or outside the framework of the civic journalism projects remains to be seen.

Civic and public journalism projects do not, in themselves, stimulate deliberation, although by setting a community-wide media agenda on a given issue they can create an environment in which deliberation is likely to be focused and intensified. This intensification, in turn, may lead to other forms of community action, as deliberation ripples through leadership networks. Our evidence suggests that this may be the case in Madison.

Likewise, civic journalism projects do not create social capital. News institutions, are in McKnight's phrase, central community assets. By stimulating leadership networks, creating environments for discussion, and focusing attention on issues, projects can, again, intensify the connections among networks that may lead to new connections and new forms of trust. But we want to stress that the process of building social capital occurs over long periods of time. We would not expect a project operating for four years to yield clear demonstrable results. There is some evidence from Charlotte that 1) a clear, consistent focus over a period of several years coupled with 2) community-assets mobilization strategies (whether called such or not) that involve communities and neighborhoods from the very beginning can perhaps create a kind of "hothouse effect" on social capital redevelopment. But pending further evidence based on comparison of our case and others, we believe that the critical independent variable linking public journalism projects and social capital development is the existing network structure of deliberation and social capital in the community.

Footnotes