Public Journalism

Public journalism is a movement within journalism that aims to reconnect news institutions to public and civic life and local community. Also known as “civic journalism,” it began with a series of experiments in local newspapers in the late 1980s and eventually spread to more than a fifth of all U.S. newspapers (as well as some public and commercial television and radio stations) before beginning to fade as a self-conscious movement around 2002. The public journalism movement generated an impressive array of innovative practices in newsrooms and communities and an extensive network of practitioners, educators, and organizations committed to reshaping professional and institutional norms. Further, public journalism laid some of the foundations for the current practice of citizen journalism.