Public Journalism:

The US journalistic reform movement known as public (or civic) journalism has
during the past decade inspired like-minded initiatives in other parts of the world,
including Africa (Malawi, Senegal, Swaziland), the Asia-Pacific Rim (Australia, Japan,
New Zealand), Europe (Finland, Spain, Sweden), and South America (Argentina,
Columbia, Mexico). Since 1988, when the first public journalism project was launched
by the Ledger-Enquirer, a local newspaper in Columbus, the vast majority of projects
have been conducted by newspapers, many television and radio stations, both private and
public, have experimented with public journalism.
Categories of Public Journalism Projects:
The public journalism projects conducted to date fall within two broad categories:
election initiatives and special projects.
Election Initiatives
During national and local elections, news organizations committed to public journalism
have made efforts to focus their reporting on topics of concern to citizens rather than on
the campaign agendas of candidates for office. This has been accomplished by identifying
citizen concerns through large-scale telephone surveys, focus group discussions, and
indepth interviews, soliciting questions to candidates from citizens and relaying their
answers in the news pages, facilitating actual interaction between citizens and candidates
in the form of town-hall style meetings, and reporting back on the outcomes of such
citizen-candidate encounters.
Special Projects
Similarly, news organizations committed to public journalism have engaged in special
projects aimed at focusing attention on political problems of particular concern to
citizens, such as race-relations, educational inequalities, and poverty, among others. This
has been accomplished by reporting on those problems from the perspectives of citizens
rather than politicians, experts, and other elite actors, offering citizens opportunities to
express and debate their opinions in the news pages, elaborating on what citizens can do
to address given problems in practice, organizing sites for citizen deliberation and action
such as roundtables, community forums, and local civic groups, and following up on
citizen initiatives through on-going and sustained coverage.
Public Journalism in News Organizations:
Aside from such project-based initiatives, many news organizations have taken steps to
make public journalism an integral part of their routine information-gathering, reporting,
and evaluation practices, including by restructuring their newsrooms from conventional
beat systems revolving around institutional sources of information to include multiple
teams focusing on particular topics of concern to citizens, reporting on those topics from
the perspectives of citizens rather than various elite actors, and offering citizens
opportunities to evaluate news coverage on a regular basis.
Citizen Journalism:
The ability of the ordinary person on the street to create and distribute their own content
has increased exponentially over the last decade. Factors for this include technological
developments that have reduced the price and increased the availability of user-friendly
content capture devices, such as Flip cameras and mobile phones, alongside the

absorption into popular consciousness of free distribution sites such as Youtube and
Facebook.
The result of this production is certainly a lot of footage of sneezing animals and
laughing babies but there is also more depth and heart to the application of these social
media tools, and this is the ground held by citizen journalists.
Citizen Journalism is defined in We Media as, public citizens playing an active role
in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and
information."
Popular examples of citizen journalism breaching the mainstream media on an
international and national field include the Arab spring uprising, the Occupy movement
or the commentary in the blogosphere that tracked the summer riots in the UK. The
influence can also be felt at a local level, where there are numerous examples of
community blogging sites reporting on causes and campaigns, a role formerly
championed by a local press now heavily in decline.
From both the formal and informal interpretations of Citizen Journalism, one message
seems to come through more clearly than others: the relationship to news. The term
seems to relate to ordinary people creating, reporting from or commenting on key
newsworthy events. It is this close relationship to traditional journalism that has led to
some professional journalists criticizing, the unregulated nature of citizen journalism
for being too subjective, amateurish, and haphazard in quality and coverage.
By sharing the term journalism, there seems to be an in-built expectation from the
mainstream that citizen journalists should be maintaining the standards and mimicking
the guidelines by which professional trained journalists tell their news. In reality
though, individual citizen journalists can enjoy the freedoms of telling their stories in
their own ways using social media to do so and the results can therefore be wideranging in efficacy, effect and form.
Community Journalism:
And how does all of this relate to our definition of Community Reporting or Journalism?
Well, the principal starting point for Community Reporting as we define it is story. And
why story rather than news? Well, as Owen Flanagan puts it, Evidence strongly suggests
that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form.
We are inveterate storytellers.
Story can be the means by which we work out our thoughts and ideas about who we are
and how we connect to those around us. It can be an exploration, a search for meaning or
an offering up to others. From a community development point of view, story is an
extremely useful tool for helping people to locate themselves in their own lives and their
communities.
We all have something to say and stories to tell about our lives and this is our starting
point for Community Reporting. From here, we support people through a process of
refining communication, developing new skills, thinking more about the audience for
their stories and the impact they want those stories to have. Some of the stories that
Community Reporters tell might be considered newsworthy, but the heart of
Community Reporting is in individuals telling stories about their own lives rather than
reporting on news, an approach that serves to benefit both the individual and the
community.

Lets consider an example. An asylum seeker fighting for their right to stay in a country,
challenging a court decision or arguing injustice, is a news story. There is human interest
and a clear trajectory of beginning, middle and end; they arrived, there was a ruling, there
will be a final outcome. The news story will end when they are either deported or gain
leave to remain. Community Reporting however is more interested in all the other stories
that make up the person at the centre of the newsand to give them the tools and the
platform to share those stories. So we might learn about the foods that remind them of
home, or their bemusement at how we shop in large supermarkets, or even better, they
might just want to tell a story about the sports day at their childrens local school. This is
true integration and true empowerment and our hope is that it can contribute to the vision
of sustainable communities for all.
Concept of Community Journalism:
The concept of community journalism can be understood by considering such questions,
Does this concept called community journalism, developed largely by studying small
news media outlets (mostly in the U.S., Canada, and Australia) explain something similar
in all countries and cultures?
When we make generalizations about community journalism, do we risk diluting the
very aspect of community journalism that makes it distinctits cultural relativism?
Furthermore, how do differences in cultural settings affect the journalism-community
relationship?
The first step toward answering those questions is, once again, developing consistent
definitions for the concepts in play, particularly the term community media. Almost
instinctively, U.S. scholars see community media as meaning newspapers, magazines,
radio/television stations, and websites serving specific geographic regions or niche
audiences. However, in a global context, the term does not have universal application. In
their discussion of community journalism, for example, Moore and Gillis (2005)
contrasted community media with community journalism, arguing that the latter defines a
process of doing journalism that is similar to the advocacy style of journalism espoused
by scholars of civic or public journalism such as Jay Rosen.
Community Media
Things get more complicated when the term community media is brought in. Jankowski,
one of the most cited scholars in electronically mediated community journalism, used
community media as an all-encompassing term to refer to a diverse range of mediated
forms of communication: print media such as newspapers and magazines, electronic
media such as radio and television, and electronic network initiatives that embrace
characteristics of both traditional print and electronic media
The International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) explain that
community media originates, circulates and resonates from the sphere of civil society. This is the
field of media communication that exists outside of the state and the market (often nongovernment and non-profit), yet which may interact with both

Fullers (2007) definition of community media did not seem as inclusive; she used
community media to define electronic media that is operated by citizens, has roots in
social justice movements of the 1960s in North America, and has begun to take hold in
developing nations through the support of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). By
community media, it refers to grass roots or locally oriented media access initiatives predicted on
a profound sense of dissatisfaction with mainstream media form and content, dedicated to the

principles of free expression and participatory democracy, and committed to enhancing

community relations and promoting community solidarity.

If those distinctions between the concepts of community journalism and community

media meant only differences in the type of media channel, it would be one thing, but
those differences may also speak to differences in the roles those media play in their
communities differences based on those medias organizational structures, community
relationships, and what they consider to be news values.
Characteristics of community media:
Jankowski defined the characteristics of community media as
Objectives: to provide news and information relevant to the needs of the community members, to
engage these members in public communication via the community
Medium; to empower the politically disenfranchised;
Ownership and control: often shared by community residents, local government, and
community based organizations;
Content: locally oriented and produces;
Media production: via the ether, cable television infrastructure or other electronic network;
Audience: predominantly located within a relatively small, clearly defined geographic region,
although some community networks attract large and physically dispersed audience;
Financing: essentially non-commercial, although the overall budget may involve corporate
sponsorship, advertising, and government subsides.
Major Functions performed by Community Media
To provide information transfer fro giving community members access to
knowledge
To watch the community environment
To mobilize to direct peoples actions
To establish networks for community members
To establish community identity
To create new value and culture
To transform members experiences/problems into a communitys common
experiences/problems