Civic journalism

Overview

Civic journalism is the process of integrating journalism into decision-making processes. The idea is that well-informed and engaged citizens are better able to participate in deliberative decision making and democratic practices. Some civic journalism projects are supported by citizen journalists, whereby citizens produce news about, by, and for their communities. These reports seek to engage the local community, prompt debates, and encourage readers to believe that they can participate in decision making and change. Other civic journalism projects work by encouraging mass media and corporate news producers to include local news and/or multiple viewpoints into their reports. While people predominantly think of civic journalism occurring online, civic journalism has existed for a long time through print media.

The emergence of digital media has prompted new questions and reinvigorated old debates regarding the role of civic journalism. Traditional debates focused on what citizens should do with the news that they received, and the ways that journalists should produce their reports to best engage citizens and encourage them to participate in democratic decision making. The availability of multiple news platforms, including blogs, web pages, social media, and access to international media, have required traditional news corporations to find news ways to compete with one another and engage their readers. For example, Hedman (2015) has examined the ways that journalists are using Twitter to encourage new types of reporting, and in doing so, prompt new questions regarding journalists' ethics. Focusing on Sweden, Hedman found that Twitter has been normalized by journalists, but they are still debating on how their tweets can be used as a form of civic journalism. These changes to journalists' practice have also required a new type of citizen and reader education to be able to evaluate multiple types of media and determine which reports are most trustworthy, reliable and unbiased. Hackett (2017) has analyzed the ways that these changes affect environmental communication and information provided through civic journalism. They argue that journalists need to address the public's general lack of interest in environmental topics. The issue, for Hackett, is that there is already enough reporting and information available to the public, but that the public is not responding to the information they are provided.

The need to encourage readers to act has promoted new debates and attempts to expand the practice of journalism. New media offers many opportunities for journalists to reach their readers, but it is not yet clear how effective their attempts are. The original goal of civic journalism, to educate citizens and encourage them to participate in decision-making, has not changed. However the method of engagement and the ways to evaluate if an impact has been made have changed quite a bit. Simmons et al. (2016) are studying the ways that journalists measure the impact of their work, prompting the question of whether new methods are needed to measure the impact of journalism distributed through new media.

Further Insights

Some scholars have debated the merits of civic journalism in contemporary society where new media allows readers to access a diverse array of information in a short period of time. One line of inquiry investigates whether citizens are well enough educated and informed to write and evaluate news about their own communities. They also explored whether citizens could be trusted with all of the details about a situation, that is, whether civic journalism might result in opinionated citizens who were misinformed. This misinformation could come from readers who would not know the difference between professional journalists and civic journalists or readers who did not have the critical thinking skills to evaluate multiple and at times opposing viewpoints. Many scholars, such as Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) have studied the ways that "fake news" affected the US 2016 presidential elections. These scholars question whether the American public was able to differentiate between real events and fabricated news stories. They also ask what responsibility social media platforms and news providers bear to regulate news stories and ensure that they are adhering to journalistic ethics. These debates are in many ways similar to debates that occurred more than a century ago regarding the role of journalists in democracies.

One early example of these debates are the discussions between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann in the 1920s. John Dewey argued that citizens made good journalists because they were engaged in public issues, they cared about the outcome of discussions, and their participation in journalism was proof of a well-functioning democracy. He admitted that journalists had opinions but believed that when they acted well and ethically, both professional and civic journalists could ethically contribute to a discussion. These opinionated pieces would then educate the reader, preparing him or her to be able to participate in public discussion and deliberation about political and community topics. Walter Lippmann, on the other hand, believed that journalists were only recording what was said in public meetings, debates, and discussions. As such, it didn't really matter who recorded the event, because journalists were not expressing an opinion, they were merely reporting. This debate again gained attention when new media prompted scholars to ask when and how the public should participate in journalism. Hellmueller, Mellado, Blumell, and Huemmer (2016) argued at this time that civic journalism had to work to repair the damage that had been done by past journalists that sought to dictate public opinion rather than encourage the public to make up their own minds on topics of public deliberation.

Contemporary centers for civic journalism, such as the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, are designed to study the ways that the international press is used to engage citizens. For example, a study conduced by the Pew Center in 2004 analyzed the ways that the Brazilian media informed Brazilian citizens. This report highlighted the potential of civic journalism as a way to return journalists to their historic role of informing citizens, as opposed to expressing political viewpoints or advancing corporate ideas. In this study, we see a return to Walter Lippmann's conception of civic journalism, that reporting should state only the facts. However, the Pew Center also supported building better stories, and connecting with readers, which does require a level of human interest and engagement in stories. Throughout the report the Pew Center warned that journalists must maintain a strong division between their own reporting and commentary. This division needs to be apparent for both journalists and their readers who must be able to tell what kind of report they are reading. This Pew Center report highlights the difficulty of news organizations, which want to engage citizens and journalists through civic journalism, but also want to encourage citizens to make up their own minds.

While some news organizations seek only to shine a spotlight on critical issues affecting the community, others are determined to become watchdogs that ensure that journalists are not engaging in unethical activities. Oftentimes, watchdog journalists have decided to maintain a focus on a specific topic, office, or government official. Their targeted attention might shine a light on a specific scandal, or they might work to call attention to a under-reported event in order to prevent a scandal or problem from occurring. Sometimes this form of civic journalism is risky for the reporter who is asking questions about topics powerful politicians and corporations would prefer stayed a secret. Other times, journalists risk violating their own ethics by using overly aggressive methods to gather data for their reports. Hollings, Hanitzsch, and Balasubramanian (2017) have studied the reasons why journalists are willing to take these risks. They find that journalists are more willing to take risks when they feel that their reports will have an effect on changing behavior or might stop a problematic event from occurring.

Studies have also found that journalists engage in different types of research and reporting depending on the type of newspaper and the section of the newspaper for which they are writing. For example, in an analysis of 1,421 stories from major American newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, Hellmueller, Mellado, Blumell, and Huemmer (2016) found that front page news often engaged in civic journalism, while stories contained further back in a newspaper did not. Additionally, this study found that some topics, such as housing and human rights were most likely to be covered by civic models of journalism. This may be because topics such as housing are areas in which individual readers have the largest ability to act, or it may be because of the ways that journalists are educated and trained to think about their profession.

Debates about the roles of journalists in modern society are not occurring only in the United States. In Russia, similar debates are occurring over the difference between mass media and smaller media organizations. These debates question to what extent citizens should be encouraged to participate in decision-making processes. While civic journalism is not as widely studied in Russia as it is in Western democracies, it has been promoted by international aid agencies, which have attempted to inspire participatory journalism since the fall of the Soviet Union, as a way to engage citizens in local decision-making processes. This change is seen in examples such as the Youth of Tartarstan newspaper, which spotlights local and important issues in ways that national media would not do, either because the local issues would not be interesting to the larger nation or because it would cost a large news organization too much money to report on local issues (Garifullin & Zakirov, 2016).

In Chile, the change has been different; as the nation has become more democratic, standards and laws regarding journalism have changed. This means that while it would have once been impossible for civic journalism to occur in Chile, journalists are now looking for ways to inform and engage local decision makers. These changes include advancing the concept of freedom of the press as well as changes which occurred in news offices such as lightening editorial control of stories, which gives individual journalists more autonomy as they decide which stories to cover and the angles to take. Yet, while many changes happened as soon as Chile transitioned to a democracy, later studies of the nation's journalism found that civic journalism stayed static, meaning that it did not expand any further after the immediate changes from the democratic transition (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2017). Because of the changes, and at times lack of changes, occurring in the field of journalism around the world, scholars continue studying civic journalism.

Issues

Contemporary scholars of civic journalism are concerned with questions of ethics, methodology, and basic questions such as how the field of civic journalism is defined. At times civic journalism is defined as occurring only online, with reports spread through social media or web pages designed explicitly to promote community voices. At other times civic journalism is defined as being an alternative source of news, or a form of reporting that can only affect certain topics. Scholars are concerned with the definition of civic journalism because it affects the ways that they organize their studies and reports, as well as the ways that journalist students are trained for their field (Tully, Harmsen, Singer & Ekdale, 2016). The rapid changes created by new media have resulted in some students who engaged in civic journalism before entering a journalist education program. These new students may have radically different perceptions about the role of their work than traditionally trained journalists or those who have only worked in academic institutions.

The resulting clash is fascinating for intellectuals but can cause confusion for practicing journalists, who need to clearly explain to their editors and readers how and why they are producing specific reports. Scholars such as Goode (2009) have called for new research that addresses these definitional problems. By changing the ways that research is undertaken to understand civic journalism, it will be possible to find more examples and produce more accurate analysis of the ways that citizens are participating in the production of news and reports about their own communities.

Bibliography

Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211–36.

Garifullin, V. Z., & Zakirov, L. R. (2016). Functioning of civic/citizen journalism in the media space of the Republic of Tatarstan. The Turkish Online Journal of Design, Art and Communication. TOJDAC November, 2322–2326.

Goode, L. (2009). Social news, citizen journalism and democracy. New media & society, 11(8), 1287–1305.

Hackett, R. A. (2017). From frames to paradigms: Civic journalism, peace journalism and alternative media. In R. A. Hackett, S. Forde, S. Gunster & K. Foxwell-Norton (Eds.), Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives (pp. 94–119). New York: Routledge.

Hedman, U. (2015). J-Tweeters: Pointing towards a new set of professional practices and norms in journalism. Digital Journalism, 3(2), 279–297.

Hellmueller, L., Mellado, C., Blumell, L., & Huemmer, J. (2016). The contextualization of the watchdog and civic journalistic roles: Reevaluating journalistic role performance in US newspapers. Palabra Clave, 19(4), 1072–1100. doi:10.5294/pacla.2016.19.4.6

Hirst, M. (2018). Navigating Social Journalism: A Handbook for Media Literacy and Citizen Journalism, New York: Routledge.

Hollings, J., Hanitzsch, T., & Balasubramanian, R. (2017). Risky choices? Modelling journalists' perceptions of aggressive newsgathering practices. Journalism Studies, 1–18.

Mellado, C., & Van Dalen, A. (2017). Changing times, changing journalism: A content analysis of journalistic role performances in a transitional democracy. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 22(2), 244–263.

Simons, M., Tiffen, R., Hendrie, D., Carson, A., Sullivan, H., Muller, D., & McNair, B. (2017). Understanding the civic impact of journalism: A realistic evaluation perspective. Journalism Studies, 18(11), 1400–1414.

Togtarbay, Beibit, et al. (2023, Nov. 28). The role of citizen journalism in society: An analysis based on foreign theory and the Kazakhstani experience. Newspaper Research Journal,45(1), doi.org/10.1177/07395329231213036

Tully, M., Harmsen, S., Singer, J., & Ekdale, B. (2016). Civic journalism values and newsroom norms in the digital era. Newspaper Research Journal, 1–19.