Civic Autonomy in Journalism Education: Applying Expertise to Political Action

Abstract

A contingent of student editors seethed in disdain, unbeknownst to me, as I lectured about the responsibility of the press in a participatory democracy. In retrospect, the public journalism course invited resentment from the first day of class. My intent in this essay is to make something good out of a failed class by describing a largely unrecognized problem of instruction as an influence on professional socialization. The news topic for the course was student retention and programs to alleviate the high dropout rate at our university. The undergraduate students conducted a survey to document faculty views, wrote indepth stories for the campus newspaper, and held a town hall forum to promote discussion. The class included editors and reporters of the newspaper along with mass communication students who were more interested in theory than professional skills. The latter group seemed to accept the goals of the class, but during the ninth week of the semester, two editors approached me after a class to deliver a legalistic document. In terse language, it outlined the independence of the paper as a student-run publication, and the lack of a guarantee that any article from the class would be published. I struggled the rest of the semester to convince the editorial staff that public journalism could be practiced without violating the autonomy of the press, and without jeopardizing the independence of the campus paper. I will argue in this essay that reform advocates have not appreciated adequately the dynamics of professional socialization that predispose college students to resist public journalism. While students in the early stages of anticipatory socialization might support the goals of public (or civic) journalism, the increasing importance of autonomy that comes with professional identification tends to erode this support. Unless instructors can promote an expanded view of autonomy - a conception that accommodates both conventional and reformist views of autonomy - public journalism is likely to fade away as an impetus for curriculum reform. After explicating the process of professional development that engenders a commitment to independence, I propose an instruction strategy based on a model of civic-oriented autonomy. This approach promotes public journalism goals while preserving autonomy - and recasting it as reflective judgment directed at civic activation. Student Resistance Professional autonomy refers to the relative freedom of practitioners to make and implement choices associated with occupational duties.1 Inside the newsroom, journalists value autonomy as the capacity for discretionary judgment despite the constraints of bureaucratic routine. Outside the newsroom, journalists value professional independence as an orientation that provides some insulation against partisan influences and other threats to credibility.2 Public journalism is dismissed by many in the press as an unacceptable threat to professional detachment. Public journalists set out to improve the conditions for discursive democracy so that citizens might participate in discussions that explore options for solving community problems. But independence is compromised, according to critics, when news organizations make connections with local institutions to activate the citizenry. Specific reporting techniques, rather than the lofty goal of civic empowerment, seem to elicit the most antipathy from practitioners.3 My understanding of autonomy as an outcome of professional development is derived from a case study intended to identify factors that predict levels of support for public journalism among undergraduate students.4 The setting for the survey was a large city in the Southwest, where we interviewed 317 students with varying degrees of interest in journalism as a career. Students tended to be critical of conventional reporting, and this disposition helped to account for their approval of public journalism. …