Likely, by now you’ve heard a little something about “public journalism.”
It’s a means of delivering information, sometimes liberally punctuated with opinion, that the American Journalism Review has termed “the hottest secular religion in the news business.”
Other words for the same approach are “civic journalism,” “community-minded reporting” and “community-spirited journalism,” and prominent among its many buzzwords is the term “community connectedness.”
It is such a hot topic in the news industry that a session on public journalism was included in a recent seminar on ethics that drew approximately 30 editors, reporters, teachers, etc. to The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. I was lucky enough to be among them.
Dr. Roy Peter Clark, Poynter’s dean of faculty and someone who appears enthusiastic about this debatably “new” concept, laid out the issues facing today’s journalists, the theses behind public journalism and the structural things that, at the extreme, really would divorce it from modern mainstream news delivery.
I’ll share some of what Clark said, as well as the opinions of dissenters and my own thoughts, this week and next.
The motivation: The public journalism movement grew out of the frustration that followed the 1988 presidential campaign, in which journalists as a lot ever-so-frequently abandoned the issues to dabble in trivia. In short, the campaign was a prime example of the media allowing the candidates to set the agenda and tone.
It was not a proud time for us, and the public said so, loudly.
In the wake, some observers coupled the dissatisfaction over journalists’ performance with the facts that public participation in public life had sagged — e.g., voting was down dramatically — and newspaper readership also was dropping.
Clark describes their initial conclusion this way:
“We have to begin with the presumption that (the journalists’ traditional) role as detached observers has gotten us into a kind of problem that has encouraged people not only to hate us and retreat from us,” but also and as a result, to retreat from the “basic kinds of activities of citizenship and participation in public life” needed for a vital nation.
At Poynter, Clark continued that there is a “correlation between people’s identity as citizens, their sense of membership in communities, their participation in public conversations about the problems and the way they embrace journalism, expressions of journalism, the press.”
Traditionally, he explained, American journalists have functioned as observers and reporters. The most stringent models for their behavior have discouraged them from voting and kept them from joining anything but trade organizations. Opinions have been held to columns and the editorial pages.
At the first level of public journalism, reporters and editors would become intimately involved in their communities and function on the job as bridge builders and conveners, as well as observers. The outlets for which they work would sponsor things like community forums and expend increased effort on special sections and projects about public issues they consider important.
At the second level, you’d find the editor, for example, chairing a task force on an issue his newspaper covers and reporters marching door to door to register voters – not really as part of their personal commitment to the electoral process, but in their role as members of the press corps. The newspaper would become an advocate; news stories on public issues openly would reflect editorial positions.
Shifting power: Said Clark, traditionally American journalists have focused their efforts on exposing the wrongs of government for the benefit of the people.
Public journalism would, instead, see the people provoking change and keeping track of the government, with journalists as the middlemen. Thus, said Clark, it represents a new way of looking at the First Amendment that would rest power with the people themselves and not with a business. It would rekindle civic discourse and participation, he said. The idea is that “journalism is valuable if public life remains viable,” said Clark. “Public life belongs to citizens” and “it is helpful and good to turn residents into citizens who have a stake in the community.”
There is no need for journalists to be objective about what is right and good, he said.
Remember, the key is advocacy. Next Sunday, I’ll tell you what the movement’s opponents say about that.
