Introduction to JDD

1. Introduction to JDD Part 1: Public journalism Part 2: Youth, journalism, politics

2. What do you think? • Do you consume news? • What news do you consume? • How do you consume news? • Why do you consume news? • What do you think of Grocott’s Mail, daily newspapers, weekly newspapers, TV news, radio news, internet news sources, magazines? Strengths, weaknesses? Do they “speak to you”? Do they serve your needs? • Are you a citizen? Of? • Are you “political”? • Do you belong to a community, a public? Many?

3. Lecture overview • Part 1: Why public journalism? • A response to the “crisis” in mainstream press and politics; • JDD bridge between fortresses of journalism and academia – a fusion of theory and practise. • Part 2: Why youth, journalism and politics? • The crisis of youth political apathy and their alienation from mainstream news. • JDD youth focus: participatory journalism by young people for social change/ development.

4. Public journalism: definitions • From Jay Rosen (1999): “The Action of the Idea: Public Journalism in Built form.” • The press promotes and improves the quality of public/civic life (not merely reporting on or complaining about). • “Journalists not merely chroniclers of the political scene, but players in the game who can (and should) try to shape the outcome.”

5. Rosen… • An argument – a way of thinking about what journalists should be doing. • An experiment – has been tried by hundreds of journalists attempting to break out of established routines. • A movement – loose network of journalists who want to improve their craft, academics, researchers, foundations, think tanks. • A debate – about the proper role of the press in a time of trouble (for newsrooms and democracy). • An adventure – open-ended and experimental.

6. “Public journalism imagines a different kind of press, one that would: • Address people as citizens, potential participants in public affairs, rather than victims, spectators or consumers of products. • Help the political community to act upon, rather than just learn about, its problems • Improve the climate of public discussion, rather than simply watch it deteriorate.”

7. But, there is no authoritative account of what public journalism is and what it is not. • There are lots of examples of public journalism practice, but little explication – this leads to inconsistencies and even contradictions in its premises and principles. • Public journalism celebrates the absence of clear and precise definitions. Rosen: “We’re still inventing it.”

8. Common ground? • Agreement: • Public life needs to improve and the press needs to redefine and reinvigorate its commitment to democracy and democratic participation. • Disagreement: • What is “democracy”, where “public life” exists, or should exist, what constitutes “participation” – and what role the press should play in making it all work.

9. Where did public journalism come from? • Response to: • Political alienation of citizens - disaffection with American politics and press in the 1980s; • Monopolisation, commercialisation of press and the problem of “fortress journalism” – press criticised by all, in conversation with none; • Declining circulation.

10. “Fortress journalism” • Journalists rely on their professional (peer) culture for approval and status. • Journalism is what journalists do, not what democracy may need done. • Conventions of the craft are defended as if they were first principles rather than familiar practices. • Journalists want to believe that the nature and quality of dialogue about public issues is none of their business, that they just report the news.”

11. Weak spirit of experiment in journalism – journalists don’t put their ideas about democracy, citizenship, and public life at risk. • Journalists do not regularly explain to their communities what they are trying to accomplish by doing journalism the way they do it. • They just do what they do, following the rules of their profession, and define whatever they do as “journalism”. • Fortress disavows “weighty reflection” on the proper task of the press.

12. Attacking the fortress • Smuggle some weighty terms into the fortress: democracy, participation, community, deliberation, public life. • Once inside, move from the vocabulary of public journalism to the vocation of it: the real-world experiments and changes in practice that both illustrate the idea and push it further.

13. Some useful questions from public journalism • If there are different ways of thinking about democracy, and each has implication for journalism, what model of democracy should journalists adopt? • If journalism at its best addresses us in our capacity as citizens, which forms of journalism do address us in that way and which do not?

14. If the press is not only an observer of but a participant in our political life, what kind of participant should it be, playing what kind of role? • What kind of relationship should there be between the political community and the journalists pledged to serve that community if it is not only journalism but also communities that are to thrive? • And what are journalists for, anyway? What do they stand for? And what are they willing to stand up for, or defend, at this moment in our democracy?

15. Making ideas public • Jurgen Habermas’s work on the public sphere – big in academic circles. • Most of these academics believe that democracy, the media, and public life could somehow be better; • Habermas’s public sphere – where reason, discussion, and the force of the better argument prevail; • Habersmas’s work has itself created a public sphere, an academic public – his thinking is open to debate.

16. Habermas is updated, corrected. But, this movement of thought is not open to many others outside the institution. • One has to master a lot of material, become familiar with the discourse, to get into the game. • Public sphere is an issue reserved for professors by the density of the treatment. • Journalists would have a hard time joining in the discussion – academic work on Habermas and the public sphere is not made for their use. • Fortress (or ivory tower) of critical theory.

17. Making ideas public: the Lippmann-Dewey debate • Walter Lippmann 1922 Public Opinion • Sceptical about citizen’s (rational and deliberative) capacities • “The common interest very largely eludes public opinion entirely and can be managed only by a specialised class.” • “Only the insider can make the decision, not because he is the better man (sic), but because he is so placed that he can understand and can act. The public must be put in its place so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.” • Democrats must posit some sort of wisdom in the hearts of ordinary people

18. John Dewey 1927 The Public and its Problems • A call to improve citizen capacities through the enrichment of public culture. • Public opinion is formed only in discussion, when it is made active in community life. • Purpose of a news story is not to represent and inform, but to signal, tell a story, activate inquiry (systematic conversation). • The press – by seeing its role as that of informing the public – abandons its role as an agency for carrying on the conversation of our culture.

19. Bringing down the twin towers • Mutual breakdown of “fortress journalism”, a product of craft culture, and the academic fortress in which public sphere theory resided, an outcome of the university’s preferred ways of knowing.

20. Examples of public journalism projects • “We the people” (Madison, Wisconsin) • Began in 1992 as a one-time presidential election effort; • Currently an ongoing cycle of four projects a year to inform citizens and increase public deliberation about elections and issues; • Techniques: town-hall meetings, candidate debates, interactive civic exercises (eg. citizen jury on the local budget or on development plan); • Public radio and television partners.

21. Taking back our neighbourhoods (Charlotte NC) • Covering elections from the standpoint of citizen concerns; • Purpose: pinpoint the sources of violent crime in Charlotte and encourage the community to respond with solutions; • Intensive reports on high-crime neighbourhoods and the formulation of ‘needs lists’ for each neighbourhood to offer area residents and agencies some concrete ways to help.

22. Facing our future (Binghampton, NY) • Identifying community problems through newspaper surveys, call-ins and focus groups; • Formed citizen teams to devise solutions to these problems, reporting in depth on the relevant issues and encouraging local leaders and citizens to work together to map out the road ahead.

23. Youth, journalism, politics • Buckingham (2000): The Making of Citizens: Young People, the News and Politics. • Pessimism about decline of democracy, ‘civic virtue’, ‘social capital’ in late modernity – lower levels of political knowledge and participation. • Youth seen as ignorant, apathetic – growth of “cynical chic”. TV entertainment blamed. Do youth substitute vicarious experience for authentic social interaction and community life? • News journalism: • No longer a grand educational and political mission, or a guarantor of healthy democracy, or a producer of ‘informed citizens’? • Concern about young people’s declining interest in broadsheet newspapers and ‘flagship’ television news broadcasts.

24. Are traditional notions of citizenship still relevant? • Definitions: Membership in a political community which carries with it rights to political participation. Citizenship often also implies working towards the betterment of community through participation, volunteer work, and efforts to improve life for all citizens.

25. Decline of rational public sphere • This view of decline is based on conception of public sphere as a domain of open, rational communication. • Habermas’s ideal citizen conceived as a rational public individual who dutifully exercises his (sic) civic responsibilities, while eschewing such dubious practices as story-telling or entertainment. • But, the public-private, personal-political distinctions have been attacked by feminists as they reflect gender bias. • Should news embrace more popular, entertaining formats (enable us to engage more with private concerns) OR is this a sign of the decline of democratic societies?

26. Youth alienation from news • Should we reject rationalistic position and distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’? Will this lead to more participatory or democratic possibilities? • Newly emergent popular forms of news journalism appeal to young, who are alienated from conventional forms of political discourse. • But, Colin Sparks presents a modernised version of Habermasian position – he bemoans growing separation between the ‘quality’ and the ‘popular’ press. Decline of quality press in the face of increasing commercialisation. • Tabloids cover human interest stories and the immediate issues of daily life (ignore serious political issues).

27. Is entertainment replacing information? • ‘The disparate pursuits of the individual come to occupy the space once filled by the citizen’. • Societies diversify, audiences fragment – sphere of private individuals, political quietude. • But, Fiske offers alternative to Habermasian approach – challenges the ‘subjected, believing, reading relations’ that it attempts to foster. • Realist discourse of the news presenter attempts to repress the chaos of unruly events. • But, residual openness can be exploited by the ‘undisciplined’ reader – learn to treat news texts with freedom and irreverence.

28. 2 positions – 2 very different constructions of the role of the audience/ citizen • Fiske’s ideal reader in search of hedonistic pleasure – tabloid news produces a disbelieving subject, tone of sceptical laughter, its pleasure that of not being taken in. • Sparks’s ideal reader is close to Habermas’s rational citizen, eschewing entertainment for an objective analysis of issues of public concern.

29. Buckingham: How might connections be drawn between the micro-politics of everyday life and the macro-politics of social structure and political action? • If we concentrate on micro-level – personal politics, struggle to gain control over one’s immediate conditions of existence – could news become more popular and more entertaining? • Examples of tabloid forms, soap opera as a means of engaging with readers’ everyday lived experience – mounts a challenge to what counts as serious journalism, or what counts as politics. • Questions view that audience for popular forms is ignorant and culturally deprived. • Serious news has a lot to learn from more informal, less monotonously reassuring approaches of popular forms.

30. But… • Could tabloidisation of press or of TV news be part of cultural and political decline? • Popular news could be seen as a form of political cynicism and moral conservatism. • What are the consequences of such audience activity (political action/ participation)? • There is personal politics in such material – but is it progressive? • The Daily Sun may give voice to a degree of resentment against the powerful, but the crucial question is what they propose we should do about it.

31. Micro politics should not become a substitute for macro politics – must build connections between the two. • Fiske’s polarity between the educational and the popular, between informing people and making things relevant to them is dubious. • A stance of boredom and deliberate ignorance may well represent a strategic response to exclusion and alienation from the adult sphere of political debate. • Or they may be struggling to connect their everyday understandings with the official discourse of politics – relationship between the personal and the political.

32. The limits of politics • Youth are alienated from politics, but do they simply have a radically different conception of the relationship between the public and the private? • More inclusive notion of politics – includes daily experience. • Young people’s views on unemployment, racism and marriage could be seen to be implicitly political. • Politics defined as “means by which humans regulate, attempt to regulate and challenge with a view to changing unequal power relationships” (Bhavnani). • Personal issues can become political by virtue of the discourses in which they are framed and defined – particularly by virtue of discourse that define individual experiences in terms of wider collective or social categories.

33. New social movements reframe issues previously seen as personal as political. But, personal is not automatically political. • Process of definition is one of contest and struggle. • Banal conclusion that “everything is political”. • To celebrate domain of personal and subjective as though it were inherently and inevitably political is a recipe for political quietism. • Sustain meaningful distinctions between personal and political. • Central educational issues is of building connections between these domains (micro-politics of everyday life and macro-politics of political institutions and collective political action).

34. Youth participatory journalism as democracy and development • Participatory/ empowerment paradigm: • Focus on unequal power dynamics. • Goal is no longer information delivery and diffusion. • Work at the grassroots so people and organisations there may eventually have a voice in political, economic, and ideological processes. • Implies change where community members influence the agenda, design and processes. • Product or process? Participation-as-end?

35. What is empowerment? • Provides skills, confidence and countervailing power to deal effectively with social change in a world that distributes needs, resources and power unequally; • Privileges multiple voices and perspectives and facilitates equal sharing of knowledge and solution alternatives among participants in process. • Your role (JMS3 students, journalist, media professional, development communicator?) A facilitator, collaborator, advocate.

36. What works in youth media Christiane Amanpour: “What Works in Youth Media: Case Studies from Around the World looks at how young people are harnessing the power of media to educate the public about issues they care about. It also explores the tremendous power of youth media programs to promote young people’s personal growth and development—to equip them with essential “skills for life” that will enable them to succeed.

37. “Those programs profiled here aren’t as much about teaching young people journalism skills, as about enabling young people’s voices to be heard, and helping them to learn and grow in positive ways. “While many of the young people engaged in these programs may never pursue a career in journalism, most will apply the skills they’ve gained in their relationships with others, in their school lives, and future work environments.

38. “For many, the experience they gain in analyzing and presenting the news will make them more informed consumers of the news they receive, and more active citizens in their communities and nations. Youth media programs serve as a vital entry point from which youth learn about themselves and the world around them. These programs capitalize on young people’s creativity, passion, and idealism, offering their valuable perspectives on some of the most critical issues of our time—education, the environment, human rights, child abuse, the growing divide between rich and poor, and the impact of globalization.