That’s probably a good segue into the first question in the set I sent you and where I did want to start, which is to say that in your article in National Civic Review excerpted from your Kettering Foundation book, you said it was hard to be optimistic about the future of public journalism. But that was several years ago, around 2003-2004. So what’s changed in the landscape since then to either make you more optimistic if you are, or more pessimistic if that’s the way you have gone?
I think one of the hard questions that we have to think about in answering this first question is what public journalism is; the “pivot” of the answer really depends upon how we define it. I don’t necessarily want to go into a long definition at this point but I think I at least need to address it. To me, public journalism was a movement. It was a series of experiments that were largely newspaper based that ran for roughly 10 years, from 1990 or a little earlier, depending on how you’re counting, through about 2002 or 2003. It’s not as if when the Pew Center for Civic Journalism ended that all of a sudden public journalism ended. But what did, I think, change radically around that time was the beginning of the challenge of the Internet to newspapers. The experiments that happened before were for the most part newspaper experiments and, more specifically, they were local newspaper experiments, with some significant exceptions. There were some TV stations, there were some national news organizations – USA Today for example – but for the most part this was a local-newspaper movement.
That means part of the answer to the question for me is intimately bound up with the answer to the question: what is the fate of local newspapers? How much experimentation is there likely to be in local journalism in the next period of, let’s say, 10 years? To me, the answer to that is “precious little.” In fact, what even a few years ago would have seemed to me a somewhat hyperbolic way of framing the question – are there even going to be local newspapers? – now is actually a legitimate way of framing the question. So when I think about whether public journalism will continue and how, whether I’m still pessimistic, the short answer would be: yes, I’m very pessimistic because I’m very pessimistic about the short/medium term fate of local journalism in the United States.
I think Lew is right to be pessimistic about the fate of public journalism as practiced by newspapers. It is true that some public journalism techniques have been adopted as standard practices in these newsrooms, but I know of no large-scale experiment in public journalism underway at a metropolitan newspaper of any size.
ReplyDeleteIf public journalism is defined as a movement propelled by local newspapers, then I agree it is over for all practical purposes. But if public journalism is defined as a vision and aspiration for journalism, then it still has value and could provide a practical framework for online experiments.
ReplyDeleteIt has value to the degree that it stands for an alternative conception of journalism, one that moves from journalism-as-information, to journalism-as-public-engagement.
Both conceptions of journalism are alive and well online. "Public journalism" as a vision provides a way to understand the differences between the traditional model of top-down, authority driven journalism and journalism that works from the point of view of a community.
If the idea of "public journalism 2.0" could be better theorized than the first iteration, if it could be shaped and discussed, it could provide a powerful model for shaping and evaluating the many experiments taking place online.