Doug Oplinger: Journalism for the People

Oplinger’s life as a journalist started unintentionally. A baby boomer raised in a church-going Protestant family, as a teenager he watched the often violent struggle for civil rights and revelations of government lies surrounding the Vietnam War play out on the television in his living room.

What he saw on the news compelled him to ask for divine intervention one evening: “I said this prayer: ‘God, you got to fix this.’ And I had this strange feeling that said to me, no, you need to fix it.”

In high school, he studied history and politics and got involved in the student government, anticipating a career in politics that would take him to Washington and maybe the White House. The Kent State shootings occurred just miles from his house weeks before his graduation, and pushed him further toward politics. By the time he started at the University of Akron that fall, he was attending local school board meetings and asking the kinds of questions that attracted the attention of Bill Hershey, a reporter for the Beacon Journal. Hershey offered – and Oplinger accepted – a job attending school board meetings and reporting to Hershey what happened.

On his first assignment, the school board fired the school superintendent, who after 17 years in the position was beloved by the community. This was news, which Oplinger dutifully passed on to Hershey. The next day, he saw Hershey’s article – with his name included in the byline.

Exciting, but not life changing.

It wasn’t until he attended his next school board meeting that Oplinger understood what he’d done. When he arrived, a sign directed him down the hall from the usual meeting room to the school gym, where hundreds of people were prepared to confront the board about their decision to fire the superintendent.

“I sat down between the people and the school board and watched this and realized how vital journalism is for energizing people to play a role in local democracy,” Oplinger remembers. “And I was just like, oh, my goodness, this is amazing.”

So began Oplinger’s life as a journalist. Connecting people with the information they needed to engage in the decision-making affecting their communities became his mission. As a reporter and editor at the paper over five decades, he came to understand how hard that can be to do regularly and with the same kind of gym-filling impact. And sometimes, the stakes were more far-reaching, as when he contributed to reporting that garnered the Beacon Journal’s two most recent Pulitzers.

In 1986, Oplinger, then the business editor, led coverage exposing an attempted hostile takeover of Goodyear Tire and Rubber, the engine of the local economy. His team produced a series of articles making clear that jobs and the city’s way of life were at stake. Inspired to act, the community supported the company against the buyout.

After the takeover attempt was defeated, Goodyear’s CEO, Robert E. Mercer, said it was the Beacon Journal that saved the company. The newspaper’s coverage won a Pulitzer the following year.

“A Question of Color”, the Beacon Journal’s yearlong examination of race relations in and around Akron, published in 1993, won the second Pulitzer. The reporting began after the beating of Rodney King, a Black man in California, and the 1993 acquittal of the White police officers seen on videotape delivering the beating. Oplinger was among three editors to lead an exploration of the impact of racial differences in five areas affecting the Akron community: daily life, school, jobs, crime and punishment, and hope for a better future.

Oplinger teamed with Alice Rodgers to organize 15 focus groups representing the local population to discuss those five topics. He credits Rodgers, an expert in the use of dialogue and deliberation for business improvement, with mentoring him in the design and facilitation of citizen convenings. Their work on the race project, Oplinger says, “caused me to examine everything I had done in journalism and my thinking about diversity.”

At the end of the project, the paper conducted one last focus group, turning its lens from the community to its own newsroom. Oplinger thinks it was this “willingness to expose our own raw nerves on race” that clinched the award.

The series produced several tangible outcomes. In the newsroom, editors required reporters to diversify their source lists to better represent women and minorities, and two of the paper’s columnists became bolder in their coverage of race.

The newspaper also challenged its readers to commit to doing something to improve race relations in Akron. Close to 22,000 people made the commitment and had their names published in the paper as a public declaration of their readiness for change. This effort at catalyzing the community resulted in creation of a foundation-funded nonprofit, the Coming Together Project, to carry on the work of improving race relations.

Inspired by this project, in 1997 President Bill Clinton launched a national series of town halls on race relations in Akron during which he urged people to focus on what unites us rather than what separates us.

In an essay about community-centered journalism included in Reinventing Journalism to Strengthen Democracy, Oplinger quoted John S. Knight, his friend, mentor, and publisher of the Beacon Journal and the Knight Newspapers: “We seek to bestir the people into an awareness of their own condition, provide inspiration for their thoughts and rouse them to pursue their true interests.”

Oplinger lived by Knight’s description of journalism’s purpose, relying on two essential tools for holding power to account for the public interest: data analysis and citizen input. Reliable data, for Oplinger, often provided the insight needed to unravel the narratives being spun by elected officials.

In 1999, he and his longtime partner, Dennis Willard, published a “groundbreaking investigative report” on the Cleveland Scholarship Program, a school voucher program promoted by Governor George Voinovich (R) and enacted in 1995 by the Republican-controlled state legislature. Much of their reporting was based on a deep dive into budget and accounting data related to the program. Billed by the governor and proponents in the General Assembly as a mechanism for improving the public schools and increasing educational opportunities for economically disadvantaged families, the pair found that the program instead benefited wealthier families and religious, primarily Catholic, schools.

Despite these revelations, a few years later the Supreme Court upheld the program’s constitutionality, and in 2005, another Ohio governor, Bob Taft (R), made it a statewide program.

Citizen input, on the other hand, helped Oplinger understand the disconnect between politicians and their constituents. Between 2007 and 2012, during his first five years as managing editor of the paper, Oplinger convened more than 30 focus groups that helped him and his staff to learn the issues that mattered most to the community often were not the priorities of the elected representatives in the state capitol. To his surprise, a year-long project on civility revealed a disconnect between the news media and the people they served.

In 2012, Oplinger sought input from citizens and community leaders to understand the rising incivility in political discourse. He associated the problem with the then-new Tea Party’s growing presence in Ohio, something the focus groups he convened corroborated. But the group participants also blamed the news media for enabling the politicians’ bad behavior.

This revelation eventually resulted in a three-day meeting for journalists, citizens, and civic leaders from around the state to discuss trust and polarization in their communities. Each group was asked to identify adjectives to describe their relationship with the other groups. He discovered that many of his colleagues had little respect for the people they served, referring to them as “bored”, “apathetic”, and “not paying attention”. For their part, the citizens who participated in the discussion accurately recognized the journalists’ disdain for them.

“That was the beginning of Your Voice Ohio,” Oplinger said.

In collaboration with the Ohio Newspaper Association, Oplinger started what became Your Voice Ohio, which he joined full-time following his retirement from the Beacon Journal. Between 2017 and 2021, he worked with the Center for New Democratic Processes, a pioneering dialogue-and-deliberation organization, and Ohio news outlets to facilitate citizen discussions on a range of projects that identified issues that were not getting sufficient attention from the media, including opioid addiction, lack of job opportunities, gun violence, crumbling infrastructure, and low wages.

The last project completed by the collaborative examined what journalists could do to improve their coverage of conspiracy theories and the lies and disinformation being spread in politics. As a group, Oplinger says, the journalists engaged in the project recognized their audience was getting bad information and it was on them – the journalists – to restructure what they thought about and presented as news.

Their conclusion: “If we’re going to deal with an untruth in a news story, we need to deliver the truth first. Because people remember what’s first.”

Funding for Your Voice Ohio ended when the Center for New Democratic Processes took a more direct route to engaging citizens in community decision-making. Building on the citizen forums run by Oplinger, the Minnesota-based organization promotes the use of Citizen Juries for resolving thorny community issues.

Oplinger has continued to write and speak out about the growth of authoritarianism in Ohio and around the nation while his concerns regarding political intimidation and potential violence have grown commensurately. As he spelled out in last year’s April commentary, Ohio and Ohio residents have been connected with several of the more notorious acts of political violence in the last eight years, including the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, the plan to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and January 6th. And our current president has used lawsuits, rulemaking, and even deployment of the military as warning signals to those who oppose him.

Undaunted, Oplinger presses on and has become more concerned with resisting the march toward authoritarianism.

A former colleague at the Beacon Journal recently showed him an online advertisement from a local chapter of the Republican Party offering training on how to flush out opponents of liberty. Given that Republicans have for decades painted liberals and Democrats as anti-American, and with the president ramping up his attacks on people who don’t bow to him, his colleague was at a loss as to how to stop such an obvious and frightening development.

Oplinger did some research into the training offer and discovered that such programs were being advertised in other states. These groups “create an enemies list of local politicians and learn how to find dirt on them to destroy them.”

He suggested to his friend that he target key individuals in that local chapter for a phone campaign urging the party to end the training. Within days after initiating the campaign, the promotion had come down from the party website.

As Oplinger notes, we are not powerless despite Republican efforts to corrupt our democracy and establish one-party rule. When reflecting on the mostly peaceful protests happening in Los Angeles at the time we spoke, he suggested there should be “peaceful uprisings in incredible masses across the country.”

Then he added, “They have to be the kinds of demonstrations, populated by enough voters, to scare the shit out of members of Congress.”