Exploring Public Service Journalism

Abstract

Although the public journalism movement met its demise in U.S. newsrooms around the turn of the 21st century, new market models and technological tools now make it far easier for journalists to accomplish the goals of the now-dead movement. Through in-depth interviews with 19 journalists at digitally native news nonprofits (DNNNs), this study seeks to examine whether this relatively new market model practices a new form of public journalism, one prior research dubbed public service journalism. The results show that, indeed, this market model does practice public service journalism. These results are interpreted through the framework of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere.