"The Public Journalism Movement in America: Evangelists in the Newsroom"
By: Don Corrigan
Longtime St. Louis professor and newspaper editor Don Corrigan has published a scathing critique of the public journalism movement in America. "The Public Journalism Movement In America: Evangelists In The Newsroom" takes a hard look at the movement, sometimes referred to as civic journalism, to reform journalism practices in both print and broadcast.
According to Corrigan, a major flaw in the public journalism creed is that it fails to view the industry as a business, and consequently, much of public journalism’s critique is misdirected. Writers and working journalists are not the cause of the industry’s problems. The decision-making at the top of this industry is primarily responsible for the public’s disenchantment with the news media. Corrigan contends that public journalism practices, which began in the 1990s, are not the answer to the decline of newspapers and a decline in the public’s rescpect for the news media. Among Corrigan’s prescriptions for reviving the news media:
• Investigate. Make people mad. Write about outrages and injustice.
• Tell us things the authorities don’t want us to know.
• Make us laugh. We don’t have to be serious all the time.
• Turn writers loose. Spend less time agonizing over the product.
• Liberate the op-ed pages. Let the people have a forum.
• Start looking at the product and stop squeezing the bottom line.
Corrigan’s book, “The Public Journalism Movement In America:
Evangelists In The Newsroom,” is available at amazon.com.