Public Journalism
Public Journalism (also known as Civic Journalism ) is a journalism movement that was founded in the 1990s.
history
Decisive for the development of this journalism movement was, on the one hand, the low level of public interest in politics and the objective reporting of the media, which limits election campaigns to competing elites and reduces people to their role as viewers.
David Buzz Merritt, editor-in-chief of The Wichita Eagle magazine, sparked the spirit of this journalism movement ahead of the 1990 Kansas gubernatorial election . Together with a hundred citizens, he developed topics and compiled the main problems of the political situation, which journalists then integrated into their reporting in various ways (reports, discussion forums, etc.). The project soon proved successful and was quickly spread and developed in the United States. The focus is on the problems and needs of the people - which journalism should take up and thus bring up for public discussion. While traditional journalism concepts emphasized objectivity , “public journalism” is based on an attempt to connect journalists with people. This concept has its origins in the United States of America - where Professor K. Perry of the University of Alabama describes this bourgeois journalism movement as an attempt to use journalism to integrate citizens and people into political and social processes.
definition
The fundamental idea behind this model is that journalism is not only based on the transmission and dissemination of information, but that it also fulfills its obligations towards the public and focuses on their concerns and interests. A definition by the German Foundation for Participation reads: "The idea behind this is to use forms of activating journalism to encourage and enable citizens to actively influence political events in their community." Eksterowicz and Roberts describe public journalism as follows: "Public Journalism is concerned with developing productive relationships with the communities that journalists observe. Journalists are not mere observers but rather are participants and facilitators in such relationships. "
Principles
Proponents of public journalism criticize traditional journalists for the fact that they put the needs of the readers in the background through their objectivity to the facts and thus create a distance to the recipient . The "public journalist", on the other hand, orients himself to:
- Community-oriented reporting
- Journalistic independence
- Use of innovative forms of representation for all topics
- Promotion of knowledge and understanding
- Continuous control of the relationship with the citizen
- Inclusion of the opinion of the citizens in the reporting ( opinion polls , group events, internet forums, panel discussions, etc.)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Charity, Arthur: Doing Public Journalism. 1st edition. New York: Guilford Publications. 1995. p. 1.
- ↑ Foundation for Cooperation, available under Archived Copy ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Accessed February 22, 2011
- ↑ Eksterowicz, Anthony J. / Roberts, Robert N .: Public Journalism and Political Knowledge. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2000. p. 3.
