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Public Journalism Movement

Chapter · January 2016

DOI: 10.1002/9781118541555.wbiepc203

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Public Journalism Movement
THEODORE L. GLASSER
Stanford University, USA

Public journalism, sometimes called civic journalism, emerged in the early 1990s as a
loosely organized reform movement aimed at reinvigorating the press’s commitment
to the democratic ideals of citizen participation and public dialogue. As an idea and as
a set of practices, public journalism embraced the simple but apparently controversial
proposition that the purpose of the press is to promote and indeed improve, and not
merely report on and complain about, the quality of public or civic life (Glasser, 1999;
Haas, 2007).
Unlike other 20th century efforts to reform the US press—in the 1940s, the privately
funded Commission on Freedom of the Press, a blue-ribbon panel of mostly elite aca-
demics; in the 1960s, the federally financed National Advisory Commission on Civil
Disorders, a panel of elected officials and civic leaders—public journalism developed
within US newsrooms as a grassroots effort to reimagine the relationship between the
press and the public. Although it had its leaders, the decentralized movement operated
without a formal hierarchy and without a clear blueprint for the future of journalism.
Public journalism came to be defined as much by the varied projects that flew its banner
as by any shared vision of the role of the press in a democratic society.

The genesis of public journalism

The public journalism movement began in response to two unfortunate features of

mainstream US journalism: the prevalence of “bad” news in the daily press, which
engendered a sense of disillusionment and despair; and the treatment of politics as
a game, which cast citizens in the role of spectator rather than player (Glasser &
Craft, 1998, pp. 204–205). From public journalism’s perspective, both contributed
to, and illustrated, what was widely regarded as the disreputable state of public
discourse.
In response to the phenomenon of bad news, a chronic characteristic of coverage
of urban neighborhoods (Glasser & Lee, 2002, pp. 207–209), public journalism called
on the press to heighten the public’s awareness of solutions, not just problems, a
mode of coverage intended to frame issues in terms of what could be done about
them. Not a ploy to evade responsibility for reporting on a community’s problems, as
critics of public journalism often interpreted the plea for more “good” news, accen-
tuating the positive meant taking seriously the likelihood, or at least the possibility,
of good results. It was public journalism’s contention that no matter how bleak or
dire a situation might be, every community needed a press that took into account

The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication, First Edition. Edited by Gianpietro Mazzoleni.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118541555.wbiepc203
2 PU B L I C JO U R N A L I S M MO V E M E N T

a community’s assets as well as its liabilities, a press that reported not only on a
community’s problems but also on its capacity to confront them. In short, every
community deserved a press that considered, and covered, the prospects for a better
tomorrow.
But perhaps nothing galvanized the public journalism movement more than the 1988
US presidential race, fairly described by James Carey (1995, p. 375), a Columbia Uni-
versity journalism professor whose essays on journalism and democracy provided a
framework for many of public journalism’s putative goals and aspirations, as a “mon-
umentally smarmy campaign, reduced to a few slogans and brutal advertisements that
produced yet another record low in voter turnout.” For Carey, an early and ardent sup-
porter of the idea of the public journalism (see his chapter in Glasser, 1999), and others
(e.g., Rosen, 1999), the campaign highlighted the failure of the press to engage the public
in a meaningful debate about who would make the best president. Advocates of reform
lamented the portrayal of elections and their campaigns as contests, a kind of extended
sporting event in which the political elite compete while voters cheer and jeer, with jour-
nalists, safe on the sidelines, providing color and commentary. As an alternative to news
that devolved into chatter about game plans and playing conditions, a motif fueled by
constant reference to winners and losers in the latest public opinion poll, public journal-
ism invited journalists to treat campaigns as a political process in which the public could
and should participate, an approach to election coverage arguably less likely to leave cit-
izens feeling disengaged and disenfranchised. Thus, public journalism wanted a press
that appreciated and facilitated, rather than ignored or discounted, the conditions for,
as Hannah Arendt (1953) once put it, the “interminable dialogue” that self-governance
demands.

Public journalism in practice

Practice trumped theory as public journalism spread from newsroom to newsroom,

initially in the United States but then in countries in Africa, Europe, South America,
and the Asia/Pacific Rim (Haas, 2007, pp. 117–135). Public journalism captured the
imagination of journalists not as it represented a series of principles and propositions
about what the press ought to be and what journalists ought to do but as it encour-
aged journalists to experiment on their own with initiatives and projects designed to
“convene the community,” to use a phrase popular in the public journalism literature.
Empowered to jettison conventional thinking about being, under the guise of profes-
sionalism, detached and disinterested, journalists devised ways of doing journalism that
exhibited, rather than masked, their interest in making their community, especially its
civic culture, more vibrant and robust, more democratic, and therefore more successful.
But if public journalism repositioned the newsroom as an ally of activism, it was
activism untainted by partisan politics. Public journalism’s “golden rule,” articulated in
the first textbook devoted to the practice of public journalism (Charity, 1995), under-
scored the difference between supporting democratic means and embracing democratic
ends: “Journalism should advocate democracy without advocating particular solutions”
(p. 146).
 PU B L I C JO U R N A L I S M MO V E M E N T 3

Advocating democracy, then, implied a general and intentionally vague shift from
a “journalism of information” to a “journalism of conversation,” to use a metaphor
popularized by Carey (1987) and adopted by proponents of public journalism to vivify
the importance of forms of journalism that engaged readers, viewers, and listeners in
debate and discussion. Public journalism understood the press as an agency not only of
but also for communication; a medium through which citizens could keep themselves
informed, of course, but also through which they could discover their shared interests
and common values (Glasser & Craft, 1998, p. 207).
Eager to appeal to a broad range of newsrooms—large and small, print and broad-
cast, cosmopolitan and provincial—and reluctant to present itself in ways that might
limit or otherwise inhibit what rank-and-file journalists wanted to do in its name, public
journalism succeeded as a movement that eschewed orthodoxy and welcomed imagi-
nation, discovery, and experimentation. To the satisfaction of some and to the conster-
nation of others, the early literature on public journalism served more as a compass
that pointed journalists in a particular direction than a map that told them what path
to follow (Glasser & Craft, 1998, p. 205); or, to shift metaphors, it sought to “raise con-
sciousness rather than spell out a faith” (Charity, 1995, p. 14). To be sure, when Jay
Rosen and Davis Merritt, two of public journalism’s chief architects, joined forces in
the early 1990s (Rosen & Merritt, 1994) to promote the fledgling movement, and to
give it its name, they made it a point to define public journalism as a work in progress;
they disclaimed any canonical conception of public journalism, preferring instead to
empower journalists by letting each newsroom decide for itself and by itself about how
public journalism would be best put into practice. Because “we’re still inventing it,”
Rosen liked to say, “we don’t really know what ‘it’ is” (quoted in Glasser & Craft, 1998,
p. 206). Merritt (1995, p. 124) expressed a similar sentiment when he insisted that any
attempt to “codify a set of public journalism rules” would be an “arrogant exercise, a lim-
iting one”; journalists who accept the challenge of public journalism need to “develop
their own rules over time and through experience.”

The idea of public journalism

However, with “no fixed goals, no directing agency, no clear formula for success”
(Rosen, quoted in Glasser & Lee, 2002, p. 206), public journalism left itself open to
divergent and even irreconcilable interpretations. That is, by embracing what Charity
(1995, p. 14) approvingly described as a “panoramic view” of public journalism,
one in which “[j]ournalism’s proper role in support of democracy is a case-by-case
question, defined by circumstances,” journalists forfeited any opportunity to work
together to advance a comprehensive, authoritative, and analytically rigorous account
of journalism’s public purpose. Notwithstanding the warm reception it received among
legions of journalists, public journalism stood in disarray as a normative theory
of the press (Glasser, 1999); its many claims, buttressed mostly by examples rather
than explanations, failed to coalesce in the form of a logically developed, historically
informed, and internally coherent philosophy of journalism (Glasser & Lee, 2002,
pp. 205–206).
4 PU B L I C JO U R N A L I S M MO V E M E N T

Although it lacked clarity and precision, it did become apparent over time what the
idea of public journalism did not mean: empowering the public vis-a-vis the press. If
public journalism repositioned the press with regard to the public, it did not reposition
the public with regard to the press. Nothing in public journalism’s panoply of projects
sought to pierce the irony of an institution that preached democracy but operated as
an autocracy; nothing amounted to an alternative to a professional ethos, typically tied
to free press claims, that considered public accountability a threat to press autonomy;
nothing posed a serious challenge to the prevailing economic order, which had for well
over a century equated a free press with free enterprise. As Rosen acknowledged a
decade after the movement began, “Public journalism is not an insurrection, or even
a minor revolt against structural forces at work. It did not pose and cannot sustain a
challenge to the commercial regime in which the American press operates. Precisely
because it is a mainstream movement, it is the wrong place to look for a new political
economy of mass media” (quoted in Glasser & Lee, 2002, p. 218).
The public journalism movement lost momentum in the late 1990s as the rapid com-
puterization of communication, especially the rise of what was known then as the World
Wide Web, shifted attention away from traditional forms of journalism and toward
new and different ways of conceiving the production and consumption of news. The
interests and concerns associated with public journalism did not disappear as much
as they dissolved into a new set of adjectives—citizen journalism, networked journal-
ism, participatory journalism—that better captured the imagination of practitioners
and academics alike as they struggled to make sense of news and journalism in the
early years of the new millennium.

SEE ALSO: Civic Engagement; Democracy; Journalism, Political; Media Performance;

News Values; Normative Theories

References

Arendt, H. (1953). Understanding and politics. Partisan Review, 20(4), 377–392.

Carey, J. W. (1987). The press and public discourse. Center Magazine, March-April, 4–16.
Carey, J. W. (1995). The press, public opinion, and public discourse. In T. L. Glasser
& C. T. Salmon (Eds.), Public opinion and the communication of consent (pp. 373–402).
New York, NY: Guilford.
Charity, A. (1995). Doing public journalism. New York, NY: Guilford.
Glasser, T. L. (Ed.). (1999). The idea of public journalism. New York, NY: Guilford.
Glasser, T. L., & Craft, S. (1998). Public journalism and the search for democratic ideals. In T.
Liebes & J. Curran (Eds.), Media, ritual, and identity (pp. 203–218). London, UK: Routledge.
Glasser, T. L., & Lee, F. L. F. (2002). Repositioning the newsroom: The American experience with
“public journalism.” In R. Kuhn & E. Neveu (Eds.), Political journalism: New challenges, New
practices (pp. 203–224). London, UK: Routledge.
Haas, T. (2007). The pursuit of public journalism: Theory, practice, and criticism. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Merritt, D. (1995). Public journalism and public life: Why telling the news is not enough. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Rosen, J. (1999). What are journalists for? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
 PU B L I C JO U R N A L I S M MO V E M E N T 5

Rosen, J., & Merritt, D. (1994). Public journalism: Theory and practice. Dayton, OH: Kettering
Foundation.

Further reading

Ettema, J. S., & Peer, L. (1996). Good news from a bad neighborhood: Toward an alternative to
the discourse of urban pathology. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 73, 835–856.
Fallows, J. (1996). Breaking the news: How the media undermine American democracy. New York,
NY: Vintage Books.
Friedland, L A. (2003). Public journalism: Past and future. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation.
Haas, T., & Steiner, L. (2006). Public journalism: A reply to critics. Journalism: Theory, Practice
& Criticism, 7, 238–254.
Parisi, Peter. (1997). Toward a philosophy of framing: News narratives for public journalism.
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 74, 673–686.
Rosen, Jay. (1996). Getting the connections right: Public journalism and the troubles of the press.
New York, NY: Twentieth Century Foundation.

Theodore L. Glasser is a professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford

University. He was president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication and a vice president and chair of the Mass Communication Division
of the International Communication Association. His research focuses on the norms of
practice in journalism, particularly questions of press responsibility and accountability.
His books include Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue,
written with James Ettema, and Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Demo-
cratic Societies, written with Clifford Christians, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng,
and Robert White.

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