Public Journalism 2.0

The Promise and Reality of a Citizen Engaged Press

Jack Rosenberry, Burton St John

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135966089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Periodismo

Where does journalism fit in the media landscape of blogs, tweets, Facebook postings, YouTube videos, and literally billions of Web pages?

Public Journalism 2.0 examines the ways that civic or public journalism is evolving, especially as audience-created content—sometimes referred to as citizen journalism or participatory journalism—becomes increasingly prominent in contemporary media. As the contributors to this edited volume demonstrate, the mere use of digital technologies is not the fundamental challenge of a new citizen-engaged journalism; rather, a depper understanding of how civic/public journalism can inform citizen-propelled initiatives is required.

Through a mix of original research, essays, interviews, and case studies, this collection establishes how public journalism principles and practices offer journalists, scholars, and citizens insights into how digital technology and other contemporary practices can increase civic engagement and improve public life. Each chapter concludes with pedagogical features including:

* Theoretical Implications highlighting the main theoretical lessons from each chapter,

* Practical Implications applying the chapter's theoretical findings to the practice of citizen-engaged jouranlis,

*Reflection Questions prompting the reader to consider how to extend the theory and application of the chapter.

blogging and other participatory journalism practices enabled by digital technology are not always in line with the original vision of public journalism, which strives to report news in such a way as to promote civic engagement by its audience. Public Journalism 2.0 seeks to reinvent public journalism for the 21st century and to offer visions of how digital technology can be enlisted to promote civic involvement in the news.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Public Journalism Values in an Age of Media Fragmentation

Jack Rosenberry and Burton St. John III

Modern communication is defined by its fragmented nature. Blogs, tweets, Facebook postings, YouTube videos and literally billions of Web pages cover the media landscape. Content created and distributed by “the people formerly known as the audience” (to use Jay Rosen’s particularly apt term) dwarfs information available from the one-time giants of mass communication such as daily newspapers, weekly magazines and network television. A.J. Liebling’s sardonic quip that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” has been turned on its head as anyone with an Internet connection and some easy-to-use software can publish to the world.

But where does journalism fit in a landscape where people can – and frequently do – publish anything, all the way down to Twitter reports on the contents of their breakfast? What does such an environment mean for journalism’s most important functions of supporting democracy and improving public life?

As Kovach and Rosenstiel put it, “Civilization has produced one idea more powerful than any other – the notion that people can govern themselves. And it has created a largely unarticulated theory of information to sustain that idea, called journalism” (2001, p. 193). The traditional view of this process held that journalists would report, citizens would read the reports, and some form of public opinion would develop that helped to connect the will of the people with public action. Election coverage helps citizens decide who should represent them, from City Hall to the floors of Congress and the county courthouse to the corridors of the White House. News reports about government activities or proposals, from local public works projects to national programs and policies, can translate into public support or opposition that affects policy outcomes. Reporting on scandal, abuse and incompetence can lead to reforms as journalists provide a crucial “watchdog” function. Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation about preferring newspapers over government was rooted in these ideas of journalism as supporting democracy.

This approach reached its apotheosis in the early twentieth century, as the Progressive Movement sought to institutionalize journalism as the fourth estate, or even the “fourth branch of government.” Here journalists served as the intermediaries between the public and the technocrats managing the state. But as the twentieth century ended, a more common view was the one expressed by journalist and press critic James Fallows that the news media were no longer contributing to a functional democratic system but undermining it. “Far from making it easier to cope with public challenges,” he wrote, “the media often make it harder” (Fallows, 1996, p. 7).

A complete critique of problems with the late-twentieth-century political communication system is beyond the scope of this volume, but suffice to say that many observers in government, the media and academia saw it as dysfunctional and offered various ideas for improvements or repairs. One of those potential answers was public journalism, sometimes referred to as civic journalism, which attempted to encourage a more citizen-engaged press that would, in turn, facilitate improved citizen involvement with issues of public concern. In so doing, it drew on the ideas of educator and press critic John Dewey, who in the 1920s said newspapers needed to move beyond purely reporting events to become vehicles for public education, debate and structured discussion of public issues.

One of the bricks in the foundation of public journalism was laid by Washington Post columnist David Broder in the wake of the 1988 presidential campaign between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. The campaign was seen (then) as an all-time low point in American politics, with its most memorable images centered on superficialities – Dukakis looking silly riding in a tank and the “Willie Horton furlough” and “Pledge of Allegiance” themes from Bush’s campaign. In the run-up to midterm elections two years later, Broder (1990) offered that journalists were largely to blame for the degrading level of campaign discourse because they did not demand better from the candidates on behalf of the public. His comments were echoed by scholars. James Carey remarked that the 1988 election revealed the extent to which journalists and elites concentrated on manipulating each other, relegating the public to the role of alienated spectators (1995, pp. 391–393). New York University professor Jay Rosen wrote that “A critique of press performance was brought forward by the depressing events of 1988. It saw the press as a player, caught up in a system that was making a mockery of politics” (Rosen, 1999, p. 54).

Correspondingly, the late 1980s brought the beginnings of the public journalism movement; newspapers began experiments in citizen-engaged coverage in places such as Columbus, GA; Charlotte, NC; Spokane, WA; and Wichita, KS. Several of the papers involved in these projects were from the Knight-Ridder group, and comments by Knight-Ridder CEO James Batten became a kind of manifesto for public journalism. In remarks in California in 1989, he called for “a fresh journalistic mindset rooted in the best of our past but shrewdly and tough-mindedly in touch with the realities awaiting us in the 1990s.” A little later in the talk he continued:

We can be more inventive than ever in making issues crackle in our news and editorial columns. We must drop our bland assumption that we have done our obligatory bit to stimulate debate by merely printing dull op-ed pieces that few bother to read. We can identify key issues and boldly assert them as never before in lively, readable formats.

(Batten, 1989)

He followed up on those thoughts at a college address in early 1990 with a call for newspapers to re-connect with their readers in new and innovative ways, focusing on building communities and helping revitalize journalism at the same time. (That talk is reprinted as Chapter 2 of this volume and the publication of this book, in fact, coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the address.)

Citing declining voting participation over the previous quarter-century and particularly dismal levels in the 1988 presidential election, Batten observed that “These patterns, without question, are symptomatic of the sluggish state of civic health in many communities in the early 1990s.” He then referred to several examples of newspapers’ efforts to help rebuild the connections between the papers and their communities, emphasizing that

Newspapers that immerse themselves in the lives of their communities, large or small, have the best prospects for success in the years ahead. And they have the best chance of drawing people in from the apathetic periphery to the vibrant center of community life.

(Batten, 1990)

These statements struck a chord with many journalists who felt that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Moreover, noted one scholar, more journalists and academics avowed that “if media are part of the problem, perhaps they can be redirected toward being part of the solution” (Meyer, 1998, p. 256). Early experiments in the field and philosophies such as those expressed by both industry representatives (such as Batten) and academics (such as Carey and Rosen) coalesced into a set of practices. These efforts centered on including citizen participation in news selection and encouraging dialogue about issues. Journalism’s purpose, in this view, should be “addressing people in their capacity as citizens in the hope of strengthening that capacity. It [journalism] should try to make public life go well, in the sense of making good on democracy’s promise” (Rosen, 1999, p. 50). The idea of “making public life go well” became perhaps the real theme of the public journalism movement, and over the next few years the experimentation expanded, by one tally reaching at least 600 discrete projects (Friedland and Nichols, 2002).

That’s not to say what came to be called public journalism faced easy or universal acceptance; it drew criticism and opposition from many quarters inside and outside the industry. Consequently, within a few years much of the early energy, innovation and support from sources such as foundations and academics that gave the movement its momentum gradually declined. Additionally, several journalists brought forth alarms about public journalism: it drained newsroom resources, it was a marketing ploy, it was self-absorbed and self-righteous and even bordered on propaganda, they claimed (St. John, 2007). In 2004, Friedland noted that “public journalism is at a crossroads” (p. 36) because its bases of support “are not sufficient for a vital, continuing and innovative public journalism practice” and “do not counter the inertia of the journalism industries” (Friedland, 2004, p. 39).

To extend the crossroads metaphor, a vehicle coming down the intersecting highway was a bus – loaded with citizen journalists. Could they perhaps be the inheritors of the “democratizing” influences promulgated by public journalism and take up where it left off? It seemed a natural progression; what could be more democratic for journalism itself than coverage created by the people, for the people?

But in many respects, though for different reasons, citizen-created news was as flawed as the one-way, newsroom-centered model of traditional journalism. Neither served particularly well to create what Yankelovich (1991) called “public judgment.” Yes, citizen journalism added more voices and perspectives to the mix. The Internet also made communication more fluid and gave news audiences access to a virtually unlimited information bank, literally at their fingertips, indexed and organized with hypertext links. “For utopian visionaries, the promise of nearly unlimited information delivered to your monitor in mere moments is the promise of a better democracy” (Hill and Hughes, 1998, p. 2). But because the network can make a more citizen-engaged press¹ possible does not mean it is inevitable. As a more citizen-initiated journalism unfolded, traditional notions of gatekeeping that for generations had confined the press to a narrow, proscribed model were swept aside. But the citizen-created coverage that emerged in its stead was all too often fragmented, incomplete, and in its own way even narrower, addressing private issues and concerns rather than anything related to building a more robust public sphere. Unalloyed citizen journalism didn’t seem to be an automatic approach to making public life go better either.

Nonetheless, there are common threads between civic and citizen journalism. Public journalism sought to make journalists and citizens partners in driving the news agenda; citizen journalism does this in a direct fashion. The Internet – particularly so-called “Web 2.0” tools such as blogs and interactive websites – does offer a practical and efficient way for interactive communication to occur among citizens of a community grappling with a public issue. In fact, such communication was a central element of many traditional public journalism projects, though the movement generally employed “off-line” settings such as public meetings or discussion forums. Today, “cyber-democracy” holds the potential for greater deliberative efficacy, even if beneficial outcomes are not as automatic as its more utopian advocates believed they would be.

This book takes some of these common threads and weaves them into a tapestry that illustrates ways in which public journalism’s principles and purposes can inform and build an improved citizen-engaged press. In computer lingo, this would be a version 2.0 upgrade; hence the title: Public Journalism 2.0 – a new model built around improved technical capacities. But the need for an upgrade is embedded in the subtitle of the work: The Promise and Reality of a Citizen-Engaged Press. The reality is that citizen media production doesn’t contribute much toward improving public life at present. The promise is that it could, if informed and guided by aspirations of public journalism and bolstered by professional journalists unafraid to engage more closely with their audiences using online tools.

This new fabric is woven through presentation of original research, case studies and essays (based on evidence in the existing literature of the field) that follow a rough pattern of public journalism’s implications for the past, present and future. Part I examines root principles of public journalism and citizen journalism, and ends with an interview with Lew Friedland about the evolution of public journalism. Part II examines how news definitions differ for citizen journalists and their trained counterparts, and presents several case studies showing how these differences play out in print and online. An interview with Tanni Haas exploring the contemporary state of affairs regarding public journalism closes this section. Part III includes suggestions for where citizen and professional journalism might find synergies. It features a review of two different but somewhat overlapping “frameworks” for articulating the pro–am relationship and a final case study of how one citizen site has evolved to incorporate both more interactive tools and a greater sense of public engagement into its operation. Finally, Jan Schaffer – who has been deeply involved with citizen journalism’s expansion as director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism – offers some thoughts about the common ground occupied by civic and citizen journalism.

A number of themes re-occur throughout the book, including how news is (or could be) defined...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments and Special Editor’s Note
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I The Roots of Civic and Citizen Journalism
• Part II Contemporary Civic and Citizen Journalism
• Part III Looking Ahead
• Appendix
• Contributors
• Index