Instruction in News Reporting as Community-Focused Journalism

Abstract

The proposals and ideals promoted by public journalism advocates have been the impetus, in newsrooms and classrooms, for development and testing of alternative methods of defining and reporting the news. The ambiguous and controversial nature of public journalism-a work in progress (Merritt,1997, p. 181)challenges and even provokes journalists and educators to rethink what they do and what they teach. In our professional master's degree program, what would be the traditional Advanced Public Affairs Reporting course is called News Coverage of Public Life. While our approach may not be radical, it does depart from the conventional content of most public affairs courses, which focuses heavily on government institutions and public officials. The Public Life course stresses a multiperspective (Gans, 1979; Anderson, Dardenne, & Killenberg, 1996), community-based journalism (Charity,1995) with special attention to everyday problems and people (Edelman, 1992; Fallows, 1996). Each of these elements has been advocated in the literature of public journalism. The course does not abandon the traditions of public affairs reporting. Rather, it expands traditional boundaries of public life. Some editors insist that public journalism is nothing more than the good, solid journalism they've been practicing for years (Case, 1994). Our idea of public journalism, is, in fact, good, solid journalism. Institutions and the people who run them remain important, but we go into neighborhoods, clubs, organizations, households, playgrounds, parks, and other sites of public activity and conversation. Our students are urged to step outside the normal parameters of public affairs-meetings, hearings, offices, arrests, convictions, public officials, and the more or less standard approaches and forms. They seek unconventional perspectives, experim enting with ethnographic, historical, sociological and literary methods and forms. Besides finding new directions outside public institutions, we emphasize ways of reporting on the lives of ordinary citizens. Although the idea is not novel to journalism, it remains, we believe, an uncommon element of news. Stories most often found in the daily newspaper or on the evening newscast reinforce prevailing mainstream thinking because they frequently come from traditional, official sources, or they use scattered comments from people with whom journalists have spent too little time. Our students, like many practicing journalists, find it difficult to break away from rounding up the usual suspects and getting a quick quote from a bystander. Such conventional journalism is easy and efficient because official sources are accessible, usually comfortable dealing with the press and therefore often quotable, and authoritative and credible, at least to the journalist. We argue (Anderson, Dardenne, & Killenberg, 1996) that for news to become more relevant and useful to the whole community, journalists must communicate with people they ordinarily overlook or ignore. That's why we stress listening and observing as much as we stress writing; we encourage student reporters to discover and explore issues and concerns that are sometimes unspoken, hidden from casual view, or considered routine. As a result, we get articles from the perspective of customers of a predominately black beauty parlor talking about neighborhood crime, or an ethnographic description of three weeks of riding on city buses, or the comments and observations of a group of church women discussing race and race relations. These pieces bring up issues every reporter can find at city hall, including disbursement of city funds for community policing, problems with public transportation, and government efforts to come to grips with racial tensions. But the articles produced in our Public Life and other journalism classes add dimension and context to a traditional article that originated in the mayor's office or the police department. …