Abstract

The god term of journalism—the be-all and end-all, the term without which the entire enterprise fails to make sense—is the public.As a doctrine and a movement, public journalism has suffered through theoretical critiques, practical difficulties, fiscal exigencies, professional resistances, and the explosion of new media technologies. Though public journalism has not supported a single definition, Jay Rosen, the movements' most vocal intellectual representative, suggests that public journalists "are not merely chroniclers of the political scene, but players in the game who can (and should) try to shape the outcome" (1992, 8).1 Hundreds of newspapers and television outlets have taken part in experiments in becoming ..