Civic Journalism 2002 Abstracts
Civic Journalism Interest Group
Students as Citizens: Experiential Approaches to Teaching Civic Journalism • Chike Anyaegbunam and Buck Ryan, Kentucky • As newsrooms gingerly embrace various civic journalism principles and practices, journalism schools have also started to experiment with innovative curricula and instructional models for teaching the “new journalism.” This paper presents a description and evaluation results for one of such emerging instructional models. The study departs from other descriptions of instructional models for civic journalism education because a classroom experimental design was used to evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of the project.
Source Prominence and the Unaffiliated: Testing a Primary Tenet of Civic Journalism • David D. Kurpius, Louisiana State University • Research studies consistently demonstrate a disproportionate use of elites as sources. Previous research demonstrated that civic journalism used much higher percentages of unaffiliated sources compared to traditional journalism. Civic journalism is a decade-old, foundation-driven effort to encourage journalism organizations to alter their coverage routines to better reflect communities and the public dialogue on issues. Civic journalism encourages greater depth of knowledge of communities, alternative framing for stories and developing sources within layers of civic life (from officials to private individuals).
Tale of Two Cities: Connections Between Community, Corporate Culture and Public Journalism • David O. Loomis, North Carolina at Chapel Hill • A decade after public journalism was coined to identify a reformist set of press practices, little evidence of its goals has been found and confirmed, although audience awareness of public journalism’s populist intent has been found. Research by Meyer and Potter theorized that something in the organizational culture of the newspapers they studied may contribute to this audience awareness. This quantitative and qualitative study of two nominally public-journalism newspapers confirms the Meyer-Potter prior-cause theory.
Crime and Violence in Charlotte, NC: The Impact of a Civic Journalism Project on Knowledge, Mental Elaboration, and Civic Behaviors • Esther Thorson, Jae Shim and Doyle Yoon, Missouri-Columbia • Few studies have attempted to evaluate the impact of civic journalism on readers and viewers of these projects. This study examines the impact of exposure to a crime-focused civic journalism project in Charlotte, NC on knowledge about the content of the project, people’s mental elaborations about the crime situation in Charlotte and what might be done about it, and behaviors including belonging to an organization involved in issues related to high-crime neighborhoods, talking to others about high crime neighborhoods, and seeking further information about how to deal with crime in urban neighborhoods.
Clinging to Tradition, Welcoming Civic Solutions: A Survey of College Students Attitudes Toward Public Journalism • Kim Trager, Jennifer Rauch, and Eunseong Kim, Indiana • Based on a survey of 405 journalism students from six colleges, this study shows support for “modest” and “bolder” practices associated with civic journalism but found resistance to more “radical” or activist forms. This suggests that while journalism students are loyal to traditional news values such as objectivity, they are open to new communitarian approaches to journalism. It appears that students most removed from traditional news environments are most receptive to civic journalism.
How Public Sphere Theorists Have Influenced Civic Journalism, Communication Department • Sherrie L. Wilson, Nebraska at Omaha • Civic journalism has grown out of a number of philosophical and theoretical traditions, including the writings of 20th-century theorists of the public sphere, particularly John Dewey, James Carey, and Jurgen Habermas. This paper begins by outlining the views of these three concerning the role of journalism in relation to the public and democracy. It then discusses how these views have influenced civic journalism as expressed primarily by its leading academic proponent, Jay Rosen.
Print friendly
