Public Journalism Challenges to Curriculum and Instruction

Abstract

Advocates of journalism widely agree that this conception of journalism differs markedly from conventional journalism. Not only do the underlying goals of journalism differ from conventional but the way it is practiced contrasts as well. If this is indeed the case, then one would expect journalism scholars be debating, among other issues, the type of formal education and training required for students become competent journalists. Surprisingly, this has not been the case. Only few books and articles have been published. To date, no sustained debate on the important topic of journalism and journalism education has occurred. This is all the more surprising and unfortunate considering that courses in journalism are increasingly being offered at colleges and universities across the United States (Gibbs, 1997; Whitehouse and Clapp, 2000). Theory and practice Widely associated with the theoretical work of New York University Professor Jay Rosen and the writings of former Wichita (Kansas) Eagle Editor Davis Merritt, the emergence of journalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s may perhaps best be explained as reaction perceived flaws in the practice of conventional journalism (Merritt, 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1996, 1998; Rosen & Merritt, 1994; Rosen, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999a, 1999b; Rosen & Merritt, 1998). Central conception of journalism is the argument that the primary political responsibility of journalists is help increase civic commitment to, and citizen participation in, democratic processes. In Rosen's (1993) words, be in their orientation, journalists must active in supporting civic involvement, improving discourse and debate, and creating climate in which the affairs of the community can be aired and deliberated (p. 3). This requires, in turn, that journalists abandon their current preoccupation with government as the actor which [they] need be attentive [and] people as the acted on, who [they] might occasionally ask comment but who otherwise have no role play (Merritt, 1998, p. 77). Journalists should, as Rosen (1994, p. 376) argues, focus on citizens as actors within rather than spectators to democratic processes (Carey, 1987) by helping them articulate what has been referred variously as the citizen's agenda, the public agenda, and the people's agenda. According Rosen's corpus of theory explanations, Lambeth, Meyer, & Thorson's (1998) Assessing Public Journalism anthology (Rosen, 1998, p. 46; 1999a, 1999b), journalism consists of three dimensions simultaneously. Public journalism is: (a) an argument about the proper task of the press, which is topic that has been covered widely in the scholarly literature (Glasser, 1999a; Haas, 1999; Rosen, 1999a), (b) a set of practices - experiments ... that are slowly spreading through American journalism, which are topics that have gained proportionally little discussion and which I seek address in this paper, and (c) a movement of people and institutions, supported by various organizations, notably the American Press Institute, the Kettering Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and the Project on Public Life and the Press. Public journalism can also be defined by example. Since 1988, when the first journalism campaign - as such - was launched by the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer (Rosen, 1991), more than 300 journalism campaigns have been conducted across the United States (Austin, 1997). While these campaigns have included work done across news media -- newspapers, television, radio, and the Internet, either separately or collaboratively (Denton & Thorson, 1998; Thorson & Lambeth, 1995; Thorson, Ognianova, Coyle, & Lambeth, 1998) - the majority of campaigns have been confined small and medium-sized newspapers (Merritt & Rosen, 1998). …