By Hedrick Smith, Correspondent & Executive Producer

Seeking Solutions deliberately cuts against the grain of typical TV journalism.

In the race for ratings, most American television stations and producers are driven by the conviction that violence, scandal, and conflict draw the biggest audience. In this market mindset, the key operating principles are: "If it bleeds, it leads" and "Celebrities are news." And so, enormous resources are devoted to covering conflict and hyping the crossfire of opinions.

What gets lost is balance and realism - one major reason why the media has lost credibility with so many Americans.

When average people watch TV, they don't see their own lives or their own communities. They know from experience that in many towns and cities, people like themselves find ways to resolve the bitter conflicts and inflammatory disputes that catch the news headlines. Yet this important part of the story — the resolution of conflict, the coming together, the forging of solutions — is frequently ignored or under-covered. After all, the slow, quiet work of everyday heroes is harder to find and cover than an explosion of violence.

There's ample evidence that the public is disillusioned with the current marketing mentality of the media. Many viewers hunger for a more balanced, more realistic, and thus, more encouraging view of our society. Contrary to what many network and cable producers assume, we believe that covering stories of reconciliation and problem solving is good, balanced journalism and this makes for good television as well as good news. As many a fiction best seller has proven, drama and interest lie not only in discord but also in how people confront and overcome problems, how they reach beyond obstacles and differences to develop solutions.

We do not believe, as civic journalists do, that it is the job of journalists to create the solutions. But we do believe it is the responsibility of good journalists to report all the news in a balanced and realistic way - the conflicts and the solutions that communities create, the problems and the answers that people develop - and not just the sensational calamity half of the news. This balance and completeness is the credo of an earlier era of journalism that has been lost in the market madness of today's media and needs rejuvenation today.

Our broadcast,Seeking Solutions,embodies this idea. It is an outgrowth of an earlier, national award-winning program created by Hedrick Smith Productions that was set in the core city of Washington, D.C.This program,Across The River, challenged media stereotypes of Washington's inner city wards as unrelieved pockets of crime, violence, drugs, and poverty. Across The River showed many urban heroes at work - former convicts devoted to saving street toughs; real estate firms reviving housing projects devastated by the crack epidemic; schools within schools putting minority kids on track into mainstream America; community development corporations creating new economic opportunities.

We made a one-hour documentary of these stories and then showed it to a gathering of 100 civic and business leaders from downtown Washington and 250 activists and residents of these inner city wards. The purpose was to stimulate a community dialogue - to see whether, without glossing over differences, people who rarely if ever met together would share ideas about building better communities. They did, and we filmed the one-hour dialogue. The resulting two-hour program (one hour of documentary, one hour of public dialogue) generated enormous interest nationwide. It drew many local people to volunteer support for community building and it helped to create networks among active groups across the country.

Seeking Solutions, seeks to build on this example, by providing an entire evening of PBS prime-time nationwide programming devoted to showing examples of effective grassroots civic action across America combined with public dialogues in town halls from coast to coast. People discussing the lessons and inspiration to be drawn from the story segments. Many PBS stations did their own spin-off programs from the basic national broadcast.

The six stories in the broadcast are set in places as diverse as rural South Carolina, inner city Washington, D.C., and suburban Orange County California; as a medium-sized town like Salem, Oregon, or big cities like Chicago and Kansas City. The common thread is that these very different communities all developed homegrown solutions to local crime problems - teen violence and gangs, street crime, random shootings, ethnic violence, and hate crimes. Although the settings are specific, the central issues, problems and approaches are relevant nationwide, faced by cities, towns, neighborhoods and rural communities all across America.

Viewers get to see how ordinary people break out of fear, isolation and despair to take control of their own communities, work with teens, push out drug dealers, join forces with community police and prosecutors to close down troublespots, rehabilitate abandoned houses, and take back their communities again. People have come away from this experience surprised at their own power and also at how many different kinds of people pitch in and help, often people no one would have imagined would be so effective.

In Portland, Oregon, Kansas City, and Columbia, South Carolina, we showed our documentary stories of grassroots action to local people to get their reactions and hear their own suggestions for local initiatives in crime prevention. The idea was to spread the lessons and experiences from one part of the country to other regions, as well. To further facilitate the creative networking that comes out of sharing experiences, we have created a website where users can click onto all these stories and public dialogues. You can download a Community Action Guide that will help you mount efforts in your own hometowns, hear and watch a two-hour symposium among experts and activists, or go to a 50-state resource map that lets everyone get the names of experts, officials, programs and consultants in their home area.

If you want, you can move from view-it-yourself to do-it-yourself. Our goal is to provide the information and insights for you to use. We hope they help you make your own schools, streets, and neighborhoods safer once again.