Last Updated: October 01, 1996
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Public journalism, said Jennie Buckner, are the "dreaded two words" of newspaper editors today and said the phrase "might be getting in our way." m m m mShe said "good journalism" would be a better label.
Buckner, moderator of the public journalism roundtable, edits the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, a public journalism pioneer. "Public journalism is good journalism without the bad habits," she said.
Cole Campbell, a leader in the use of the form, said, "I don't call it public journalism."
Campbell, editor of the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, said a difference between public journalism and the traditional approach is the frame through which the journalist sees the world. For example, he said, the traditional political reporter would see a political contest through "a horse-race frame," while the public journalist would view it through "a problem-solving frame."
Another difference, he said, is where the writer puts the reader. To the public journalist, readers are not just consumers, but citizens participating in the life of the community connecting "disparate elements to make sense of the world."
It has been said that public journalism reduces accuracy, rewards subjectivity, strips journalists of their detachment and turns newspapers into advocates. Some say the movement puts a premium on printing expressions of opinion from the middle at the expense of valid extreme views.
Buckner said it is harder to explore "the vast, ambiguous middle ground and make it sexy," but doing so is vital to reduce the complaint of readers that "this isn't a paper about me."
Joel Rawson, deputy executive editor/news of the Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin, said the hardest challenge "is to make the ordinary interesting. To really understand what's going on in people's lives is hard."
The reporters' skills must be extraordinarily high, he said. "You must get people who empathize, who think, who care."
Doug Clifton, executive editor of the Miami Herald, said those were skills the best newspapers had been looking for all along. He said public journalism need not be "terribly avant-garde." It can show people how to get government to pick up brush and fix potholes or inform them how to persuade police to better patrol in their area.
Public journalism need not embrace the idea of newspapers convening public meetings, editors who spoke at the roundtable said. Buckner, for example, said, "I absolutely believe it can happen without convening meetings."
She said the distinguishing feature of public journalism is that it wants only for public life to go well.
When public journalism is done well, she said, the people "have a better
public life and we have a better relationship with our community." 
Howe is editor of the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald.
