From an online-news mailing list, journalists and media professionals put up a discussion on identifying the key issues that the interactive publishing industry is likely to face in 1997. Leah Gentry, assistant managing editor for Excite, and Howard I. Finberg, director of information technology for Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., agreed that newspapers need to make content the top priority in the coming year.

Gentry said content should be crafted with the medium in mind, and content should be user-friendly, customizable where appropriate, compelling in all instances. Finberg highlighted that a bigger issue facing the industry is concerning about the consumers. Newspapers have to focus on what kind of services they will offer to meet consumer needs.

Civic Journalism

During 1980s, the profits and market value of newspapers and television news divisions began a significant decline (Harwood, the Washington Post, Jan. 17, 1995). Their audience shares were shrinking along with their shares of advertising revenue. Harwood wrote the lose of readership underlies and motivates the "civic journalism" movement.

The premise of "civic journalism" is that newspapers are aloof from their readers. Richard Harwood, a consultant to the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, argued that the remoteness of newspapers from their communities contributes to the alienation and detachment of people from public affairs. It also contributes to their alienation from the press and their loss of interest in newspaper reading.

The new theory is that newspapers create connections with the readers by their publications. Newspapers create a dialogue with and among their readers by actively soliciting their views, by using news columns and the opinion pages to promote civic virtue and involvement.

Mike Hoyt, senior editor of Columbia Journalism Review, wrote the movement was strengthened in October 1994 when local newspapers invited Korean community leaders to meet with local politicians to discuss the issue about a pair of cops strode into a Korean Presbyterian church. In the news article covering the meeting, the religion reporter shared a byline with the editor who had facilitated the meeting, and the article had a brighter point of view. It is in the interest of a newspaper to portray its public journalism efforts as helpful, perhaps even when they are not. With a few twists of the semantic dials, public journalism can become public posturing.

Philip Meyer listed a number of defining elements of civic journalism, which are considered to be consistent with the historical role of journalism as a society's watchdog. The objective is to focus on the light of public attention on any problem long enough to spark discourse leading to a solution. Six elements presented in the Investigative Reporters and Editors' 1995 conference are :

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"In a word, public journalists want public life to work. In order to make it work they are willing to declare an end to their neutrality on certain questions -- for example: whether people participate, whether a genuine debate takes place when needed, whether a community comes to grips with its problems," writes Jay Rosen, one of the leading exponents of civic journalism.

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Notes