In my years of teaching journalism in different countries, I’ve seen promising students – who could make a critical difference to the profession – continue to pursue careers in lifestyle infotainment media. Which is a disconcerting trend.

Not that lifestyle magazines are less respectable. It’s just that when in fact more than half the world’s children go to bed hungry every night, writing eye-candy advertorials about fad diets, fashion and ‘how to look beautiful’ seems so …

tanni haas Whither the spirit of social conscience journalism of the early 70s that carried university journalism programs and inspired students with attainable journalistic ideals? Some answers may be found in a readable book sent to me for review, The Pursuit of Public Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism (2007).

I interviewed its author Tanni Haas ( left ), media academic at City University of New York, on how he sees ‘public journalism’ steering us from the low road of infotainment to one where journalists may act as effective public surrogates rather than as conduits for dross and goss.

How did your book come about?

After having written many scholarly journal articles and book chapters on the topic, it occurred to me that it would be useful to reconfigure those works into a unified statement on the theory and practice of public journalism.

The book is primarily intended for journalism scholars, practising journalists and students. The book also has considerable appeal to ordinary citizens concerned about journalism's role and responsibility in a democracy.

What reactions have you received from practising journalists?

The book has been well-received. Indeed, many of the reviews so far have been by journalists - both those sympathetic to public journalism and those committed to more conventional journalistic norms and practices.

Among the latter group, the main point of contention has been my appeal to journalists to foreground the concerns of underprivileged social groups. Not surprisingly, this appeal has been seen as a threat to the conventional journalistic norm of neutrality.

Is ‘public journalism’ any more coherent and concrete today in its philosophy and practice?

Unfortunately no. That is why I felt compelled to include a chapter titled "A Public Philosophy For Public Journalism" in my book. While a number of scholars have discussed various theoretical aspects of public journalism, none have put those individual pieces together into a coherent whole.

Partly as a result of this lack of a coherent public philosophy (or theory) of public journalism, the actual practice of public journalism has been and continues to be rather fragmented.

How is your book different from many others written about ‘public journalism’ since the 90s?

It articulates a coherent public philosophy (or theory) for public journalism, it summarises all the empirical research on public journalism and offers suggestions for future research, it describes the practice of public journalism around the world, and compares the practice of public journalism to that of the more recent, citizen-based media projects (weblogs, hyper-local community web sites, OhmyNews, and Indymedia). It is much more comprehensive.

What are the working assumptions in your book’s title ‘The Pursuit of Public Journalism?’

It assumes, first, that public journalism is indeed worth ‘pursuing’. To my mind, public journalism continues to be our best hope for a democratically relevant and progressive form of journalism.

If democracy is government by the people, then journalism would need to represent the hopes and aspirations of the people, and especially those with the least power to do so themselves. It assumes, second, that public journalism continues to be ‘pursued’ in practice. I deal with that question throughout the book, but most especially in chapters 7 and 8.

Journalists are losing touch with their public - thus, the many catchwords such as ‘citizen journalism’, ‘participatory journalism’ and so forth. Your book alludes to these catchwords. However, journalists at the coalface say - with conviction - that there’s only ‘good’ or ‘bad’ journalism. Is this observation reasonable?

It depends on what one understands by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ journalism. To my mind, there are many kinds of ‘bad’ journalism: journalism which reduces all issues to two opposing viewpoints, journalism which relies solely on elite sources of information and journalism which is more concerned with political actors’ personalities than with their views on issues.

Similarly, there are many kinds of ‘good’ journalism: journalism, which represents the hopes and aspirations of ordinary people and journalism which acknowledges and reports on salient social inequalities.

Your book offers a ‘consensus conference model’ as one way to engage citizens and governments with the media as (impartial) facilitators. Herein lies the foundation for ‘public journalism’. You also note that "journalists should actively endorse those politicians, candidates for office, and special interest groups whose agendas would best serve the overarching goal of reducing social inequality". Is this not compromising the traditional role of journalists being ‘disinterested’ distant observers?

Absolutely. I couldn’t be happier if journalists decided to abandon their presumed stance of disinterested neutrality. I say ‘presumed’ because, in reality, journalists can never be neutral.

Every time journalists choose to report on certain issues, from certain perspectives, using certain sources of information, they either implicitly or explicitly suggest that certain issues are more in need of public attention than others and that certain ways of understanding and addressing those issues are more appropriate than other possible ones.

What are the impediments to ‘public journalism’ being adopted by the commercial media as part of its news culture?

abdullah ahmad badawi election annoucement 130208 media The major impediments are journalism’s conventional reliance on elite sources of information and the costs involved with including citizens more actively in the journalistic process.

To many news media managers, public journalism's reversal of traditional information-gathering procedures is seen as a threat to one of the primary sources of their cultural capital and authority: their access to elite sources of information. Moreover, it is costly to consult ordinary citizens through focus groups, community forums, town hall meetings.

‘Public journalism’ emphasises the need for journalists to serve the public rather than those in power. How can journalism educators teach their students who will be graduating into an industry that’s beholden to commercial imperatives than public service values?

First, educators can remind students why they chose this profession in the first place. Most students choose journalism as a profession because of certain public service ideals, not to make a lot of money and certainly not to service those in power.

Second, educators can engage students in actual public journalism projects, either in collaboration with local news organisations or as stand-alone class projects. This has been done in a number of universities.

What is the most common misperception of 'public journalism' by journalists? How can educators address this misperception from within the industry?

The most common misconception is that public journalism requires journalists to abdicate their power to set the news agenda. As I discuss in my book, this has rarely, if ever, been the case. In virtually all public journalism initiatives to date, the news agenda has been set collaboratively by journalists and citizens.

Journalism educators can help address this misperception by showing practising journalists the multitude of ways in which this collaboration between journalists and citizens has been accomplished in practice.

‘Public journalism’ assumes a ‘reasoning public’ who are motivated to engage in talking about public issues in ‘roundtable discussions’ ‘town-hall meetings’ and so forth. How do you see this ever happening in societies, such as Malaysia and Singapore, where the media are highly regulated?

That’s a tough one. For public journalism to work, you do need a relatively free press and a citizenry that is committed and accustomed to democratic practices such as getting together, without government interference, to deliberate about and try to solve issues of concern to them.

If citizens are not committed and accustomed to such practices, and the press is not able to freely report on their outcomes, there can be no genuine public journalism. That said, it is certainly possible that public journalism could work on anti-establishment sites such as Malaysiakini .

What links do you see between public journalism and ‘development journalism’ (which you alluded when you commented on how Asian media could have taken a more activist role in advocating for marginalised groups) pioneered in India and the Philippines in the 60s?

I see a lot of links between public journalism and development journalism. While I didn’t elaborate on this particular topic in my book, I have written an article on this topic which is scheduled to appear in the International Journal of Communication next year.

In that article, I show that the principles and practices of public journalism can be traced back historically to development journalism and, more specifically, to a number of experiments with farm radio forums that took place in India as well as other developing countries in the 1940s and 1950s.

What ought editors in regulated media environments do to encourage their journalists to report beyond the official press statements?

newspaper coverage sudden balanced view coverage of opposition headline 120308 Editors ought to encourage their journalists to seek out ordinary citizens to identify and report on their particular concerns. One of the most promising methods in this regard is known as ‘civic mapping’.

Civic mapping, an information-gathering and news-reporting tool developed by The Harwood Group in the US, requires journalists to identify the various ‘civic layers’ that make up a given locality, seek out citizens within those civic layers, and subsequently to report on their concerns.

Where do you see ‘public journalism’ heading?

I see public journalism heading in several different directions simultaneously. In many countries, news organisations are beginning to institutionalise public journalism's principles within their routine information-gathering, news-reporting, and performance-evaluation practices.

At the same time, many news organisations are allowing citizens to have their voices heard, such as in the form of news-media-sponsored citizen blogs, or by enhancing journalist-citizen interaction, such as in the form of editorial board blogs.