Public Journalism Without the Public: Problematizing the Public Sphere and Press Credibility in Academic Journals,1991

Abstract

A review of public journalism journal articles from 1991 through 2018 revealed significant gaps in (a) conceptualizing the public sphere, and (b) ascertaining the credibility of public journalism efforts. These gaps have implications for a press that is becoming increasingly challenged in an era of self-curated news selection and polarization. This work offers conclusions regarding how journalistic engagement efforts can better consider audience perspectives and thereby examine more sustainable footings for a citizen-engaged press.

Keywords

public sphere public journalism press credibility participatory journalism

One of the largest attempts at reform of journalistic practices that gained momentum by the mid-1990s in the United States was the public journalism movement, an initiative by both academics and news workers to move journalism toward more citizen-engaged practices.

Scholars widely concur that the arrival of public journalism first appeared within a spring 1988 project sponsored by the Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer called “Columbus: Beyond 2000” (Coleman, 1997; Rosen, 1991, 1999). The paper’s project offered, across an eight-part series, reporting on the difficulties that Columbus faced—severely challenged schools, stagnant wages, elite dominance of local politics—and then asked community members to meet and discuss concerns (Rosen, 1999). The Columbus experiment with public journalism set the ground for the roll-out of hundreds of public journalism projects in the 1990s (Rosen, 1999).

In understanding the appearance of public journalism, there are at least two fundamental aspects to consider: (1) the contextual societal impetus for its arrival, and (2) the conceptual momentum that sought to substantiate public journalism’s constructive potential. Proponents pointed to two major contextual factors for the ascendancy of public journalism in the early 1990s: (1) newspapers were increasingly losing readership—in 1967, 73 percent of Americans read a newspaper, by 1988 it was only 51 percent (Batten, 1989, p. 2), and, (2) mainstream journalism had become, by the 1988 presidential election, too focused on the horse race aspect and failed to delve sufficiently into citizens’ concerns (Carey, 1995; Eksterowicz, 2000; Rosen, 1999). Public journalism proponents also pointed to a conceptual impetus: that problems apparent in low paper readership and the 1988 election coverage revealed a press that alienated the public by too strong a focus on maintaining a series of routines (e.g., balance and detachment) that were designed to convey authoritative objectivity rather than on reporting potential solutions. These objections were fueled, in great part, by communitarian-leaning conceptual frameworks that stressed the importance of community cohesiveness as the most effective and just way for citizens to address mutual concerns (Barney, 1996; Hodges, 1996). Journalism should help the community strengthen its “capacity to understand itself, converse well, and make choices,” said Rosen (1994, p. 381). In turn, that conversation would then be placed within news accounts, further propelling a forum for local deliberation regarding pressing issues (Glasser & Craft, 1996; Lambeth & Craig, 1995; Rosen, 1991, 1994). Across the 1990s and into the new decade, 600 public journalism projects appeared in communities across the nation (Friedland & Nichols, 2002), and academics offered numerous research projects and related commentary.

Both the societal context and the conceptual impetus traced here point to an overarching challenge identified by public journalism advocates: American society was increasingly risking the failure of its democracy, largely because citizens did not have accurate, information-rich venues through which they could engage in dialogue that could then enhance their ability to affect official policies and actions. With this argument, public journalism advocates highlighted how this emerging form of journalism could work to correct a tragic denigration of the public sphere.

However, by the mid-2000s, the movement appeared to lose momentum. This work examines, from within the peer-reviewed journal scholarship on public journalism, how gaps in conceptualizing the public sphere and ascertaining the credibility of public journalism may have contributed to the movement’s apparent loss of, at a minimum, scholarly impetus.¹ Examining these gaps in public journalism scholarship are important for at least two reasons. First, the scholarship reviewed applied the public sphere thinking of both Jurgen Habermas and John Dewey, claiming that journalism could help invigorate the public sphere by, in large part, helping community members articulate connections among themselves as they work toward solutions to address common concerns (e.g., Coleman, 1997; Glasser & Craft, 1996; Haas & Steiner, 2006; Heikkilä & Kunelius, 1996). Habermas and Dewey, however, while allowing that journalism could surely inform the public, both emphasized that intra-community communication was the crucial element as it allowed for individuals co-creating meanings that could then potentially guide their actions. The public journalism scholarship reviewed, however, tended to focus on how the press could contribute directly to this intra-community communication, while eliding how both Dewey and Habermas emphasized the essentiality of face-to-face communication instead of a primacy for journalism. Second, this scholarship—which focuses in large part on journalism building community capacity for democratic deliberation—inherently suggests that citizens factor into their intra-community discussions information, knowledge, and perspectives that were informed by public journalism projects that were seen as credible by these community members. However, the journal articles reviewed offered no attempts to ascertain community members’ perceptions of public journalism’s credibility. Accordingly, this omission only further complicates assertions that the commercial press, through a modality like public journalism, could activate a public sphere of private citizens to better engage in a deliberative, intra-community conversation.

Materials and Methods

In light of these problematic elements, two early public journalism works helped guide this study’s examination. First, Rosen (1994), building on some preliminary observations from his 1991 piece “Making Journalism More Public,” posited that the public journalism movement was greatly rooted in theoretical foundations about the community and the public sphere offered by John Dewey and Jurgen Habermas. Their work on the public sphere informed Rosen’s advocating for a more relevant journalism that reconnects “with citizens and their true concerns” (p. 376). Second, Lambeth and Craig (1995) pointed out that the matter of how credibly the public journalism movement engages citizens was crucial. “No aspect of the civic journalism debate has generated more heat than the issue of whether its practitioners are destroying media credibility” by their abandoning traditional practices like objectivity, they noted (Lambeth & Craig, 1995, p. 156). Accordingly, Lambeth and Craig (1995) asserted that there needed to be a framework for measuring how the public perceived the credibility of public journalism. This study explored the trajectory of these items regarding public journalism—the linking of public sphere theory to the movement and the need for credibility studies—across a total of 143 peer-reviewed journal articles from 1991–2018. As such, we pursued a qualitative meta-analysis, tracking where these two items (the public sphere and credibility) appeared in articles that addressed public journalism and then distilling key assertions made in these articles into meaningful frames (Keyton, 2015). In contrast to quantitative meta-analysis, which tracks and analyzes data from multiple data sets in an effort to determine statistical significance, this study’s qualitative analysis offers interpretative findings based on the textual content of the articles reviewed. We focused exclusively on peer-reviewed journal articles because they are normally foundational for knowledge building in fields, revealing where scholars have synthesized knowledge and extended on it (Murray, 2013) and generally have a wider reach within many fields as they are more readily accessible via databases than monographs and edited volumes. We used the Communications and Mass Media Complete EBSCO database to select journals, a comprehensive communication journal database that provides access to more than 650 journals (EBSCO, n.d.).

Central search keywords were “public journalism” and “civic journalism,” but we also used “participatory journalism,” and “citizen journalism” as scholars sometimes included these terms in their studies of public journalism. See Table 1 for how these terms have been defined in journalism scholarship. Using advanced term searching, we coupled the terms in Table 1 with references to Habermas and Dewey, and we also searched for the term “credibility” as it was mentioned in reference to public journalism, participative journalism, and citizen journalism. We then compared notes about prevailing conceptual explications about the links between public sphere theory, Habermas, Dewey, and public journalism and identified how these links were articulated. We also tracked how credibility was conceptualized and applied regarding public journalism. Our focus was on discussions of public journalism within the U.S. since, in the journals reviewed, the vast majority of scholarship was on U.S. journalistic outlets and practices. We found 41 journal articles that either asserted substantively links between public journalism and the public sphere or addressed some aspect of credibility as pertained to public journalism.

Table 1.

Key Term Definitions.

Key term	Definition(s)
Public (or civic) Journalism	“The undeveloped art of attachment to the community in which journalists work…” (Rosen, 1994, p. 381). Its premise is that “the purpose of the press is to promote and improve, and not merely report on or complain about, the quality of public or civic life” (Glasser & Craft, 1996, p. 153). A press that is “by and of the people” (Wahl-Jorgensen, 1999, p. 28).
Citizen Journalism	“The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information” ( Bowman and Willis, 2003 , p. 9).
Participatory Journalism	“…news users generating content, more or less independently of the professionals, whereas the professionals generate some other content, and also produce, publish and market the whole news product. User contribution is solicited within a frame designed by the professionals” (Nip, 2006, p. 217).

Results

Disconnects Between Public Journalism Scholarship and the Public Sphere

The justification for public journalism, from a theoretical perspective, rested significantly on articulations about the public sphere. That is, the public sphere, as conceived by John Dewey and Jurgen Habermas, consists of individuals coming together and surfacing their concerns (which customarily fall along a spectrum of the more private to the more public) within a space that is not orchestrated by powerful, vested interests like commercial interests, wealthy individuals, and the state. Rosen’s (1991) seminal journal article on public journalism highlighted links between this new journalistic practice and John Dewey’s and Jurgen Habermas’ writings on intra-community conversations that took place within a community’s public sphere. Across the journal articles reviewed for this study, theoretical conceptualizations of public journalism repeatedly turned to Dewey’s early-20th century and Habermas’ late-20^th century explications of communicative engagement within a community. A closer examination of Dewey’s and Habermas’s conceptions, however, reveal that both have nuanced views pertaining to an institutional actor such as the press and its role regarding intra-community communication. However, the articles reviewed elided the following key considerations while attempting to theorize public journalism as relates to the public sphere: a) the need to sufficiently acknowledge the primacy that Dewey put on intra-community interchange as the core of communicative action, and b) the need to significantly acknowledge the anti-privileged interest focus of Habermas’s conceptions of the public sphere.

Disconnects Between Public Journalism Scholarship and Dewey

Dewey and Intra-Community Communication

Dewey’s (1927) book The Public and Its Problems has served as what Kunelius (2001) has called “the theoretical bible of most public journalism thinkers and practitioners” (p. 32). The book was an important referent for several public journalism academics (Coleman, 2000; Heikkilä & Kunelius, 1996; Parisi, 1997; Rosen, 1991, 1994) as it makes a case for understanding the unique challenge of arriving at a more community-driven deliberative framework in a modern society. Dewey noted that community discourse was becoming increasingly dominated by agenda-driven, often vested-interest associations that could either shut down or distort community conversation. While Dewey wanted to see more associations between and among individual community actors, he was alarmed that niche groupings and organizational structures had inserted themselves too strongly within the equation:

Life has been impoverished, not by a predominance of society in general over individuality, but by a domination of one form of association, the family, clan, church, economic institutions, over other actual and possible forms (1927/1954, p. 194, emphasis added).

Dewey (1927/1954) maintained that it was important to counteract this rise of institutional forces by improving “the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion” and encouraged face-to-face, intra-community communication (p. 208). Dewey said that “… Print is a precondition of the creation of a true public,” and “…the public which results is partially informed and formed until the meanings it purveys pass from mouth to mouth” (pp. 218–219).

Public Journalism’s Attempted Links to Dewey’s Work

Rosen linked Dewey’s articulation of a crystallizing community to the press’s responsibilities. He said that journalists could help realize the Deweyian notion of community by reconnecting “journalism to its natural constituency, an active citizenry” (Rosen, 1994, p. 73). In doing so, the press would help in “recovering public life and supporting a living democracy” (Rosen, 1994, p. 373). He asserted that Dewey’s views on the importance of community conversation meant that journalism had an essential role: to help the public come “into fuller existence” (Rosen, 1999, p. 21). Other scholars followed suit. Table 2 displays how, from 1991-2000, journal articles attempted to expressly theorize links between Dewey’s framework and public journalism. This was the time period that saw the most appearances of attempts to theorize links between Dewey’s work and public journalism, with no other substantive references to Dewey after 2000. Scholars saw Dewey’s premise of intra-community communication as foundational for public journalism scholarship. They claimed Dewey’s concepts signaled that journalists could a) help actualize the public within a community by pointing them to problems they need to engage with (Heikkilä & Kunelius, 1996; Rosen, 1991), b) become moderators of an event and not simply recorders (Parisi, 1997), and c) spur people to participate “in the public life of a community” (Coleman, 1997, p. 64), signaling that the press had an active role in forming a “more involved citizenry” (Coleman, 2000, p. 44).

Table 2.

Articles That Theorize Links Between Dewey’s Intra-Community Framework and Public Journalism, 1991–2000.

Source	Dewey’s intra-community communication framework and public journalism
Rosen (1991)	“Dewey’s perspective allows us to approach the problem of the public incrementally…We can try to find ways to engage more citizens in public life while we make public life more engaging” (p. 269).
Rosen (1994)	Journalists should be willing to experiment, allowing their efforts to “reconnect journalism to its natural constituency, an active citizenry.” Such efforts would allow for “recovering public life and supporting a living democracy” (p. 373).
Heikkilä & Kunelius (1996)	Public journalism “attempts to do what exactly what Dewey saw missing: engage people in their own problems” (p. 85).
Coleman (1997)	“Dewey saw communication as the problem of getting people to participate in the public life of a community, which parallels one of the stated goals of today’s public journalism” (p. 64).
Parisi (1997)	Journalists take on the role of a “social narrator/moderator” who helps the community come to a wider range of views (p. 681).
Coleman (2000)	“The notion of an active role for the press in a democracy was first proposed by John Dewey in the early twentieth century…” (p. 41). He advocated a “more involved citizenry via a more active role for the press” (p. 44).

However, it is important to clarify that Dewey’s (1927) book did not specifically articulate that the press should serve such a facilitative role. Although it is true that Dewey (1927/1954) saw as significant journalism’s “gathering and sale of subject matter having a public import” (p. 182), he clearly articulated that the publication of news was only an initial step. The essential factor for the formation of public opinion, he maintained, was face-to-face communication. He emphasized the primacy of lived experience within a community over the influence of other power centers like the state or business interests such as the press. He explicitly stated that “special forces outside the series of observable connected phenomena” within the community should not be given undue consideration (Dewey, 1927/1954, p. 36).

This realization—that Dewey saw the public cohering around identified issues and problems without the active presence of an institutional force—is not theorized adequately across the public journalism journal articles reviewed. Instead, as Table 2 shows, these articles follow the path of Rosen’s (1991) journal article on the possibility of a more-public press. In that piece, Rosen claims that Dewey’s (1927) book argues that “face-to-face talk is just as vital as information through the mass media,” making both factors roughly equivalent (1991, p. 270, emphasis added). As visible in Table 2, what followed were attempts to align Dewey’s concepts of intra-community dialogue with the claim that journalism could act as an agora for such discussions. These attempts, however, do not comport with Dewey’s (1927/1954) assertion that community intelligence “is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium” (p. 219; emphasis added). His words emphasize that institutional forces associated with a community have, at best, a secondary and somewhat distant role to the face-to-face dialogic interchange within the community. As such, the journal articles reviewed largely fail to adequately acknowledge that the Deweyian view of local communicative action prioritizes the community itself as the focal point of interchange over the involvement of an institutional force such as for-profit journalism.

Disconnects Between Public Journalism Scholarship and Habermas

Habermas and Intra-Community Communication

By the 1990s, academic Jurgen Habermas’s conceptions of the public sphere were used by scholars to further articulate claims to a theoretical root for the public journalism movement (Coleman, 1997; Glasser & Craft, 1996; Rosen, 1994; Wahl-Jorgensen, 1999). Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (originally written in 1962 and translated into English in 1989) conceptualized the public as a group of private citizens who come together to enter into discourse about public matters. He offers an ideal of the “public of private people” (Habermas, 1962/1989, p. 51) who gather to use their reason to criticize and, to some extent, mobilize public interests against power centers that rest within apparatuses wielded by the state and private interests. This picture of citizens coming together to pursue rational discussion was informed by Habermas’s understanding of the citizen discourse within salons in early 19th century Europe. In a subsequent piece, Habermas described such assemblies of private individuals transforming into “a public body, which almost immediately laid claim to the officially regulated ‘intellectual newspapers’ for use against the public authority itself” (Habermas, 1964/1974, p. 52, emphasis added). He points out the importance of private interests in shaping how news is offered. The newspaper, prior to the 1830s, had been a literary journalism greatly supported by political parties; it was a “journalism of conviction” that amplified the private, intra-community interests of a few (Habermas, 1964/1974, p. 53). Then, after the 1830s, the intra-community focus began a slow erosion. The massification of the press, he said, made for a “transition from the literary journalism of private individuals to the public services of the mass media,” resulting in an “influx of private interests” that were not necessarily a part of the intra-community conversation (Habermas, 1964/1974, p. 53). This has contributed to undermining local interests’ ability to use intra-community communication to structure “their relations with the state and each other,” he said (Habermas, 1964/1974, p. 55).

Public Journalism’s Attempted Links to Habermas

Responding to Habermas’s concerns about the decline of an intra-community conversation free from outside private interests, Rosen said public journalism would allow for a new “brand of journalism that takes as its subject the deterioration of the public sphere” that journalism had actually contributed to (Rosen, 1991, p. 278). This can be done, Rosen said, by situating journalism so that it is “more attuned to the requirements of public discussion” within a community (Rosen, 1991, p. 281). Wahl-Jorgensen (1999) went further and claimed that Habermas’s observations provided a useful normative ideal (if not framework) for public journalism: a press that is “by and of the people, rather than merely for the people” (p. 28, emphasis added). That is, said Wahl-Jorgensen, the Habermasian view can allow for a press that facilitates the “intersubjective creation of meaning” within a community (p. 28).

Table 3 displays how, from 1994–2001, journal articles attempted to expressly theorize links between Habermas’s public sphere framework and public journalism. This was the period of time that showed the most consistent appearances of attempts to link Habermas’s work to public journalism. Moreover The articles reviewed across 1991–2018 stress that Habermas’s concept of the public sphere offers a foundation for profit-oriented journalism to act as a springboard for: (a) community connectedness and public discourse (Glasser & Craft, 1996; Kennamer & South, 2002; Lewis, 2012; Singer & Gonzalez-Velez, 2003), (b) public consensus (Compton, 2000; Page, 2007, Wahl-Jorgensen, 1999), (c) enhanced awareness of multiple publics within the community (Haas, 2004; Haas & Steiner, 2001), (d) better prioritizing of community goods over individual prerogatives (Schroll, 1999), and (e) the effective pursuit of rational solutions to shared problems (Haas & Steiner 2006; Kunelius, 2001; Min, 2016; Singer & Gonzalez-Velez, 2003).

Table 3.

Articles That Theorize Links between Habermas’s Public Sphere Framework and Public Journalism, 1991–2001.

Source	Habermas’s public sphere framework and public journalism
Rosen (1991)	“We should note…the potential public value in a brand of journalism that takes as its subject the deterioration of the public sphere at the hands of journalists” (p. 278).
Rosen (1994)	What does the public mean for “someone who professes journalism?” “…One thing we rarely debate is the proper sphere for our own efforts to understand what the public is or could be” (p. 363).
Glasser & Craft (1996)	Newspapers in the public journalism movement want to emphasize connections but it is “curious that public journalism promotes conversation and deliberation on virtually every topic but journalism itself. Bringing about a public sphere for journalism…will work in the long run only to the extent that the press can sustain a public sphere about journalism (p. 157, emphasis in original).
Coleman (1997)	“What is the fundamental way in which public journalism conceives of its audience? The assumption that journalists must become activists to create a public sphere presupposes that the public has become passive” (p. 72).
Wahl-Jorgensen (1999)	“…By viewing the public sphere in … tangible terms---as a physical site for democratic debate—we also endow the media with a profound responsibility for guiding the public sphere” (p. 28, emphasis in original).
Schroll (1999)	“The good citizen, then, uses print news as impetus for adding to the lives of others and for fostering the well-being of those living in her or his democratic community. This occurs through a person’s participation in … voting and debating public policy…” (p. 322).
Compton (2000)	Public journalism proponents stress dialogue aiming toward consensus and “…believe that commercial media can help foster a public realm that is predicated on open non-coercive discussion…At root, public journalism asserts that the problems of public communication are rhetorical, not structural” (p. 462).
Kunelius (2001)	“Conversational journalism needs the skills of how to make values part of the mundane, everyday business of journalism, a legitimate part of journalism’s and the people’s public vocabulary” (p. 48).
Haas & Steiner (2001)	Public journalism should nurture “a public sphere composed of multiple discursive domains…” (p. 132).

It is important to realize, however that Habermas asserts that the fuller exercising of democracy features in-community conversation that is designed to speak back to power centers. He points out that the insertion of private institutions’ prerogatives into intra-community conversation undermines this dynamic. Thus, the penetration of messages into communities from “the influx of private interests” (Habermas, 1964/1974, p. 53) is antithetical to his conception of a well-functioning intra-community communication exchange. However, the literature reviewed falls short of addressing the fundamental private interest of the commercial press being inherently at odds with the Habermasian public sphere concept of community-driven dialogue. Moreover, the articles reviewed do not successfully grapple with a core claim of Habermas’s public sphere framework: privileged interest communications, like those from a for-profit media outlet, tend to disintegrate a true public sphere of private individuals engaging in their community-based discussion.

Disconnects Between Public Journalism and Press Credibility

Credibility is one of the key components of journalism. Newhagen and Nass (1989) define mass media news credibility as “…the perception of news messages as a plausible reflection of the events they depict” (p. 278). The journalistic field has long maintained that its practice of certain routines in news reporting—including objectivity, neutrality, and balance—can enhance news consumers’ perceptions of a news outlets’ credibility (Schiller, 1979, 1981).

Perceived credibility has been studied a number of times over the years and has been measured using a number of different constructs including bias, telling the whole story, accuracy, and whether the source can be trusted (Rimmer & Weaver, 1987), believability and community affiliation (Meyer, 1988), believability, accuracy, fairness, and depth of information (Johnson & Kaye, 1998), and competence, trustworthiness, and goodwill (McCroskey & Teven, 1999).

For the purposes of this study, press credibility includes more than the perception of news messages as plausible and involves, as mentioned above, such aspects as perceived community affiliation, goodwill, and trustworthiness. For example, since public journalism asserted reporters could function as participative actors within the community, the movement presumed that reporters—and their press outlets—would be seen as trustworthy community members who would provide reliable accounts of the community’s lived experience.

Public Journalism’s Attempted Links to Credibility

Table 4 displays how public journalism-focused articles approached the matter of public journalism and perceived credibility from 1995–2005. This study found that this period of time featured the most consistent appearances of any mentions of credibility and public journalism. However, these mentions were accompanied with little theorizing about public journalism’s credibility and no studies were offered on how communities may have perceived the credibility of public journalism efforts. Lambeth and Craig (1995, p. 156) pointed out that central to the public journalism movement’s potential was the need to move beyond concerns that public journalism’s “practitioners are destroying media credibility” and pursue social science research that could assess public journalism’s performance. The articles in this study, however, did not embrace their call. For example, some scholarly pieces (Ettema & Peer, 1996; Holbert & Zubric, 2000) reported that public journalism’s credibility would be based not on workplace routines (e.g., detachment, reliance on experts), but on fostering community connections and dialogue. These works, however, offered no credibility studies to substantiate that claim.

Table 4.

Public Journalism and Credibility: 1995–2005.

Source	Public journalism and credibility
Lambeth & Craig (1995)	“No aspect of the civic journalism debate has generated more heat than the issue of whether its practitioners are destroying media credibility” by their abandoning traditional practices like objectivity (p. 156).
Ettema & Peer (1996)	Public journalism offers a new type of credibility that embraces “community connection over objective detachment as well as substantive dialogue over official pronouncement” (p. 837).
Parisi (1997)	Public journalism loses its credibility when it turns to supporting local activism.
Coleman (1997)	Critics say that public journalism advocates are “dumbing down the news, sacrificing journalistic independence, losing credibility” (p. 72).
Gade et al. (1998)	“…Civic journalism is embarking on a slippery slope into advocacy journalism, a move [critics] perceive threatens to destroy objectivity, and, in the process, credibility” (p. 12).
Brewin (1999)	Notes concerns about journalists losing credibility while being seen as activists.
Holbert & Zubric (2000)	Public journalists’ credibility comes from the development of “…shared values and interests within their communities” (p. 55).
Heider et al. (2005)	The public and press are “…headed in different directions and unless something is done to better meet the public's expectations, civic participation, newspaper readership, and the credibility of the press may continue to decline” (p. 963).

More often, scholarly discussions often centered on how public journalism appeared to take an advocacy role and, by not adhering to traditional journalistic norms (e.g., objectivity), put journalism’s credibility at risk (Brewin, 1999; Coleman, 1997; Gade et al., 1998: Parisi, 1997). (Hynds and Archibald, 1996) also acknowledged that critics of public journalism feel that journalists’ involvement with citizens in reporting could “…jeopardize the objectivity and detachment that have served newspapers well in the past” (p. 16). Eksterowicz et al. (1998) expressed a similar concern that journalists will lose their objectivity if they move away from simply reporting the news to taking an active role in setting the agenda. Coleman (1997) noted there was a disconnect between what public journalists think they are doing (connecting with community members, listening to them, and reporting on issues the community cares about) and what critics say they are doing (giving up journalistic independence and, therefore, losing credibility). In addition to not adhering to traditional journalistic norms there were concerns that journalists who practice public journalism will turn into activists. Scholars argued that public journalism loses its credibility when it turns to supporting local activism (Parisi, 1997; Woodstock, 2002 ). Still, scholarship about public journalism in these academic journals did not provide either quantitative or qualitative studies to see what impact public journalism efforts may or may not have had on the perceived credibility of the news outlet involved and how that might relate to public perspectives (and even acceptance) of public journalism projects.

By 2005—the last appearance this study found of a reference to public journalism’s perceived credibility—one group of scholars (Heider et al., 2005) noted that public journalism still faced the challenge of its original objectives to help public life go well. They noted that the public and the press are “…headed in different directions and unless something is done to better meet the public's expectations, civic participation, newspaper readership, and the credibility of the press may continue to decline” (Heider et al., 2005, p. 963). Even this assertion, however, was not bolstered by any evidence from a perceived credibility study.

Conclusion

When public journalism gained more interest among scholars and professionals in the mid-90s, it purported to improve “the quality of public or civic life” (Glasser & Craft, 1996, p. 153). However, by 2006, Hass and Steiner observed that, some 15 years into the study of public journalism, a “definitive conceptualization of public journalism” had still not been attained, chiefly because there was no “coherent public philosophy” for the movement (p. 240, emphasis added). This study finds that academic journal research of public journalism from 1991-2018 amplifies Haas and Steiner’s observation. We found that public journalism scholarship exhibited a lack of coherency in two crucial areas.

First, this study found that attempts to theorize Dewey and Habermas as a foundation for public journalism failed to adequately acknowledge that both authors saw intra-community communication as being in tension with an institutional interest such as the commercial press. Dewey prioritizes intra-community interpersonal communication as democracy-building in itself, using the community and its concerns as the primary referent. He voices concern that institutional actors tend to dominate “over individuality”—therefore, he emphasizes face-to-face communication over other forms of making sense of information (Dewey, 1927/1954, p. 194). For Dewey, the press is a platform for receiving information that feeds intra-community conversation. Habermas’s conceptions about intra-community communications go further. He sees such communication as designed to articulate its own interests in the face of “the influx of private interests” (Habermas, 1964/1974, p. 53). He maintains that private interests, which would include the for-profit press, tend to debase the public sphere by inserting their views into the intra-community conversation. Journal scholarship reviewed in this study did not sufficiently engage with Habermasian and Deweyian arguments that the public sphere, which consists of interpersonal dialogic exchanges, is not inherently conducive for citizens taking collaborative approaches with an institutional actor from a for-profit power center such as a commercial journalistic outlet. Therefore, a public sphere theoretical framework for journalist action in collaboration with the community was left fallow across the period studied. This lingering gap is important because commercial journalism continues to pursue, for example, online interactive engagement with news consumers, unguided by how Deweyian and Habermasian concepts of the public sphere point to inherent obstacles in such an approach.

Second, a lack of studies in the area of the perceived credibility of public journalism makes it difficult to assess whether people who consumed public journalism stories found those stories, or the news organizations that produced those stories, to be credible. Some pieces claimed that public journalism would allow for newer understandings of press credibility (Ettema & Peer, 1996; Holbert & Zubric, 2000), but these assertions were not measured. Other articles about public journalism and credibility focused on fears that public journalists were hurting the press’s standing by becoming activists (Brewin, 1999; Coleman, 1997; Gade et al., 1998; Parisi, 1997). Again, no empirical studies were offered for these claims. Various scholars across the period of this study offered other observations that, while not directly about perceived credibility, pointed to a larger deficiency in studies about public journalism—a lack of effects studies. Voakes (1999) observed that some studies revealed a positive association between public journalism and citizens’ enhanced “political participation and community awareness” (p. 761). That summation, however, was based on a third-party conference paper that did not subsequently appear in the journal articles reviewed. Massey’s (1998) study of the effects of civic journalism in one community found that the results seemed “to be too slight to have been readily noticed by civic journalism’s ultimate target: citizens…” (p. 402). A review of 47 studies (Massey & Haas, 2002, p. 571) found no “convincing pattern for attributing public journalism to various audience effects (e.g., increased voter turnout, increased participation in civic groups).” They also found no credibility studies in their review; they stated that “more work is needed on the audience effects of public journalism” (Massey & Haas, 2002, p. 577). Correspondingly, we found that several studies were clear that there was a lack of conclusive evidence related to the effects of public journalism (Eksterowicz et al., 1998; Massey, 1998; Mutz & Soss, 1997). A lack of research in the area of public journalism about the larger matter of effects appears to correlate to the lack of any perceived credibility studies of public journalism. This gap in the literature has crippled our understanding of how audiences perceived public journalism, and therefore, what public journalism was potentially capable of achieving, especially regarding public sphere-based arguments that the movement could help build intra-community communication. As critics of public sphere theory have pointed out, there are multiple publics within a community, and some of these subaltern publics (e.g., women, people of color) receive insufficient attention (Fraser, 1990), especially when it comes to listening to the way these discrete publics, with their particular social identities, articulate what are the pressing matters of their daily lives (Compton, 2000; Haas, 2007). For example, it may be that a lack of trust by the audience in public journalism led to people failing to see the relevance of stories produced by public journalists based upon perceptions that the stories were not believable representations of community concerns or interests. Perhaps had studies been done regarding public journalism’s credibility the information gathered could have been used by public journalists to sharpen any connections the movement was attempting to make between the press’s role and an engaged citizenry.

These omissions, however, are not fatal to the enterprise of journalism exploring how it can, as public journalism originally proposed, help public life go well. Habermas (2006) articulated that journalism (along with other mediatized forms) can aid public sphere deliberation if it acted as a feedback loop between citizens and elite actors and if it realized more independence from other sources of influence (e.g., marketplace imperatives, the interests of political/elite actors, the personal aspirations of media owners). While an extensive discussion of journalism practice and the political economy of journalism is beyond the scope of this study, in the spirit of Habermas’s (2006) observation, there are some ways that journalism can move forward to demonstrate more connection to community feedback and more distance from, for example, marketplace imperatives. First, when it comes to the matter of credibility, it is vital to research community concerns; scientific surveys and intermittent focus groups should be considered as valuable before and after reportage. This recommendation is not about market research but about what Lambeth and Craig (1995) pointed out was a central tenet of the public journalism movement: an emphasis on listening to people within a community so as to identify “problems, reactions, issues and concerns” (p. 151). We emphasize the post-reporting research of the audience because this can allow news organizations to determine news consumers’ perceived credibility of any citizen-engaged reporting efforts. In this way, it can allow a news operation to move beyond assumptions it makes about its own pertinence and, instead, assess its impact regarding intra-community conversation, especially regarding the varied subaltern and often marginalized publics within a larger community. Second, it is important to realize that public sphere theory points to the need to ameliorate (or, at least, better account for) the power of for-profit institutions to inordinately influence intra-community conversation. There are ways that journalism can, in a structural sense, temper market imperatives. For example, commercial press outlets can investigate how reader-funded platforms like those used at the Intercept and ProPublica can also be applied at the more local, community-connected level. Additionally, considering the continuing economic pressures on the commercial press, now appears to be the time for professional journalists in the U.S. to articulate how public-funded models, used with success in some European countries, can be adopted prudently, and at least partially, in the United States. Of course, such a change in the press’s business and economic model must keep in mind Constitutional prohibitions against government interference in the press and journalism’s own perceived concerns about government-curated funding potentially undermining its own sense of integrity. Still, these approaches can allow the commercial news outlet to move out of the restrained space of a for-profit power center which, as Habermas (1964/1974) particularly emphasized, tends to put a journalistic outlet in tension with the community it purports to serve.

As regards this study’s limitations, there are factors that likely affected the movement that are beyond the scope of this study. Economic aspects (e.g., constricted news worker staffing), the rise of online and broadcast alternatives, news worker resistance (especially as reinforced through news worker routines), and the increasing polarization within the U.S. may have contributed to some newsrooms’ inability to successfully pursue public journalism principles or practices. Additionally, news consumer factors beyond credibility that may have influenced citizen views of public journalism were beyond the scope of this review (e.g., citizen interest in news, news consumer affiliation to news brands, etc.). At the research design level, this study concentrated on peer-reviewed journal articles; books and edited volumes concerning public journalism may or may not reveal similar gaps that were found in this study. Finally, as regards method, for the purposes of theoretical relevance and parsimony, the authors used database searches that embraced select search terms (e.g., “credibility,” “Habermas,” etc.). The authors attempted to minimize omission of relevant articles by pursuing advanced combinations of searches, but search term selection and database limitations may not have surfaced other relevant articles.

From a theoretical level, public journalism’s attempts to leverage Dewey’s and Habermas’s conceptions of intra-community conversation as a sustaining rationale suffered from a substantive degree of incoherence. As Compton (2000) pointed out, public journalism scholarship tended to delimit the power of marketplace logic over the movement’s own efforts. That is, “the goals of public journalism are presented as if they are compatible with the market” (Compton, 2000, p. 460). This is a striking disjoint to the views offered by both Dewey and Habermas. Both authors articulate a view of intra-community conversation that is not beholden to the instrumental needs of the market (or other institutional forces) but is constitutive of the lived experiences of the actors within a community. Unfortunately, as this study found, public journalism scholarship did not attempt to measure how well the movement did, indeed, offer credible accounts that resonated with such lived experiences.

Schudson (1988) has observed that a useful way to address what Habermas has posited—that the public sphere is constructed so as to speak in opposition to power centers like the commercial press—is to become more adept at focusing on the “changing character of publicness” (p. 241). The current nature of publicness in the U.S. is fraught with polarization, marked by individuals, through the use of technology, increasingly self-curating their news. While this self-curating can lead to citizens being disengaged from a wider range of concerns, there is the potential for such disinterested news consumers to be reached through journalistic accounts that resonate with their lived experiences. Hermans and Drok (2018) point out that journalism is too often missing opportunities to connect with audiences and should re-think its current orientation to the public so that it can avoid “feeding public cynicism or feelings of powerlessness” (p. 683). They point out that journalism can achieve this by highlighting its relevance and credibility; the implications from our study parallel their observation. As such, the gaps found in this study call for further research on how modern journalism can ameliorate some of the disconnectedness associated with for-profit journalism and truly associate with—and inform—intra-community communication.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Burton St. John III

Note

Author Biographies

Burton St. John III is a professor at CU-Boulder and researches public relations and the management of risk and crisis. He is the author of the 2017 book Public Relations and the Corporate Persona: The Rise of the Affinitive Organization (Routledge), a finalist for AEJMC’s 2018 Tankard Book Award. He is also coauthor of the 2017 book Crisis Communication and Crisis Management: An Ethical Approach (Sage). He is lead editor of the 2018 volume Cases in Public Relations Strategy (Sage) and also edited the first-ever release, in 2017, of Ivy Lee’s book-length 1928 manuscript Mr. Lee’s Publicity Book: A Citizen’s Guide to Public Relations (PRMuseum Press).

Kirsten A. Johnson is a professor at Elizabethtown College. Her research interests include citizen journalism, perceived credibility on web sites and user-created content. She has made presentations nationally and internationally on citizen journalism, has authored several papers on citizen journalism and user-created content and has written a book chapter titled "Citizen Journalism in the Community and the Classroom in the book Public Journalism 2.0: The Promise and Reality of a Citizen-Engaged Press. She co-edited the book News with a View: Journalism Beyond Objectivity and co-authored a textbook, titled Shoot, Edit, Share: Video Production for Mass Media, Marketing, Advertising, and Public Relations.

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10.1177/146488490200300101

Public Journalism Without the Public: Problematizing the Public Sphere and Press Credibility in Academic Journals,1991–2018

Abstract

Keywords

Materials and Methods

Results

Disconnects Between Public Journalism Scholarship and the Public Sphere

Disconnects Between Public Journalism Scholarship and Dewey

Dewey and Intra-Community Communication

Public Journalism’s Attempted Links to Dewey’s Work

Disconnects Between Public Journalism Scholarship and Habermas

Habermas and Intra-Community Communication

Public Journalism’s Attempted Links to Habermas

Disconnects Between Public Journalism and Press Credibility

Public Journalism’s Attempted Links to Credibility

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Note

Author Biographies

References