Beyond discussing distinctions, it appears citizen journalism and public journalism share an approach: they both intend to place the citizen closer to defining and relaying news. In light of this commonality, but understanding that public journalism dates back about 20 years, how do you see the principles and practices of public journalism informing citizen journalism?
I don’t think “citizen journalists” have much, if any, knowledge of civic journalism or its principles and practices. It is not of their world. Again, they care about community, not journalism per se. They care about information that can build capacity for members of a community to elect wise leaders or solve community problems or become knowledgeable about community issues. If it’s in the form of a news story, that’s fine. If it’s just information, that’s fine, too. They care about journalism only in the sense that it is largely absent in their communities or their available media is unsatisfactory. And they now have some digital tools so they can do something about that.
Far more apparent is how the principles, practices and language of civic journalism are met with such an intuitive understanding and a comfort level among new-media practitioners in mainstream newsrooms, those who are charged with constructing participatory and interactive forms of journalism. Just on a lark I searched in mid-March 2009 for mentions of civic and public journalism in the blogosphere. There were 28 for civic and 26 for public journalism tracked by Technorati just in the previous five months. And they included things like an Online Journalism Review article that mentioned the thinking behind London School of Economics professor and former broadcast journalist Charlie Beckett’s idea of “networked journalism.”
“The idea is to take the best parts of the civic journalism and public journalism movements and sync these up with the possibilities of the Web,” wrote the author, Nikki Usher. “Through networked journalism, Beckett urges legacy journalists to think of themselves as participating in somewhat of a pro-am kind of relationship, where mainstream journalists share the process of production with everyday citizens.”
Also of note, and largely unheralded, is how the innovators from the heyday of civic journalism have continued as leading innovators and thinkers of today’s journalism. Take Kate Marymont, managing editor and one of the key drivers behind the Springfield News-Leader’s “The Good Community” initiative in 1995. She went on to make major strides in dispatching mojos or mobile journalists in Fort Myers, Fla., then broke a major municipal story there using crowdsourcing. Now she’s replacing retiring Phil Currie as vice president for Gannett’s U.S. Community Publishing Division. Or take Wendy Warren and Ellen Foley, both drivers behind the “Rethinking Philadelphia” initiative in the late ‘90s at the Philadelphia Daily News. Foley went on to become editor of the Wisconsin State Journal and open up her front pages to reader suggestions for stories. Warren is now vice president and editor of Philly.com and the leader of one of the most recent quintessentially civic journalism projects: TheNextMayor.com, which involved citizens in the 2007 mayor elections. The project used a textbook civic journalism template and it’s unfortunate that it was not archived online. Or Steve Smith, one of Buzz Merritt’s protégés at the Wichita Eagle, who went on to webcast the Spokane Spokesman-Review’s daily news meetings and engage citizens in the paper’s journalism with a raft of transparency initiatives and editor blogs. Or Mark Briggs, a Batten Award winner for the Everett Herald’s Waterfront Renaissance clickable map that engaged 2,500 residents in redevelopment. He went on to write the best-selling Journalism 2.0 (which J-Lab commissioned and published). Or Chris Satullo, renowned in Philadelphia for bringing “Citizen Voices” and other initiatives to the editorial page, who just moved to WHYY-TV to launch a new initiative. Or Lew Friedland, who has not only authored books about civic journalism but launched one of the first citizen driving community news initiatives in 2005, MadisonCommons.org. Just to name a few.
Yesterday’s civic journalists are today’s new media innovators.
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