Civic journalism

Overview

Civic journalism is the process of integrating journalism into decision-making processes. The idea is that well-informed and engaged citizens are better able to participate in deliberative decision-making and democratic practices. Some civic journalism projects are supported by citizen journalists, whereby citizens produce news about, by, and for their communities. These reports seek to engage the local community, prompt debates, and encourage readers to believe that they can participate in decision-making and change. In the 2020s, civic journalism increasingly functioned not only as a participatory model but also as a response to the decline of traditional local news outlets, filling gaps left by shrinking or closed newspapers. Other civic journalism projects work by encouraging media and corporate news producers to include local news and/or multiple viewpoints in their reports. While people predominantly think of civic journalism occurring online, civic journalism has existed for a long time through print media.

The emergence of digital media has prompted new questions and reinvigorated old debates regarding the role of civic journalism. Traditional debates focused on what citizens should do with the news they receive and on how journalists should produce their reports to best engage citizens and encourage them to participate in democratic decision-making. The availability of multiple news platforms, including blogs, web pages, social media, and access to international media, has required traditional news corporations to find new ways to compete with one another and engage their readers. This competition has been further shaped in the twenty-first century by platform algorithms that influence which civic stories are seen, shared, or suppressed, adding a layer of technological mediation to public engagement. For example, in 2015, Hedman examined how journalists use Twitter—since 2023, known as X—to encourage new types of reporting and, in doing so, prompt new questions regarding journalists’ ethics. Contemporary scholarship has extended these concerns to include the instability of social platforms and journalists’ increasing reliance on newsletters, messaging applications (apps), and community-based digital spaces to maintain direct relationships with audiences. In Sweden, Hedman found that journalists normalized Twitter, but they continued to debate how their tweets could be used as a form of civic journalism. These changes to journalists' practices have also required a new type of citizen and reader education to evaluate multiple types of media and determine which reports are most trustworthy, reliable, and unbiased. In 2017, Hackett analyzed how these changes have affected environmental communication and information provided through civic journalism. They argued that journalists need to address the public's general lack of interest in environmental topics. The issue, for Hackett, was the oversaturation of reporting and information available to the public and the lack of public response to the information they received.

The need to encourage readers to act prompted new debates and attempts to expand the practice of journalism. New media offers many opportunities for journalists to reach their readers, but it is not yet clear how effective their attempts are. The original goal of civic journalism, to educate citizens and encourage them to participate in decision-making, has not changed. However, the method of engagement and the ways to evaluate if an impact has been made have changed quite a bit. In 2016, Simmons et al. have studied how journalists measure the impact of their work, prompting the question of whether new methods are needed to measure the impact of journalism distributed through new media. In the 2020s, many civic journalism organizations began using concrete impact indicators, such as policy changes, community participation, and service uptake, rather than relying solely on audience size.

Further Insights

Some scholars have debated the merits of civic journalism in contemporary society, where new media allows readers to access a diverse array of information in a short period of time. One line of inquiry examines whether citizens are sufficiently educated and informed to write and evaluate news about their own communities. Contemporary studies have shifted this debate toward the concept of co-production, in which journalists and community members collaboratively define news priorities rather than treating citizens solely as contributors or audiences.

Scholars have also explored whether citizens could be trusted with all the details about a situation, that is, whether civic journalism might result in opinionated citizens who were misinformed. This misinformation could come from readers who would not know the difference between professional journalists and civic journalists or readers who did not have the critical thinking skills to evaluate multiple and, at times, opposing viewpoints. Many scholars, such as Allcott and Gentzkow in 2017, have studied how “fake news” affected the US presidential elections in 2016, 2020, and 2024. The 2020 and 2024 election cycles further intensified concerns about platform responsibility, algorithmic amplification, and the role of civic journalism in countering misinformation at the local level. Scholars questioned whether the American public was able to differentiate between real events and fabricated news stories. They also ask what responsibility social media platforms and news providers bear to regulate news stories and ensure that they are adhering to journalistic ethics. These debates are, in many ways, similar to those that occurred more than a century ago regarding the role of journalists in democracies.

One early example of these debates is the discussions between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann in the 1920s. John Dewey argued that citizens made good journalists because they were engaged in public issues, they cared about the outcome of discussions, and their participation in journalism was proof of a well-functioning democracy. He admitted that journalists had opinions but believed that when they acted well and ethically, both professional and civic journalists could ethically contribute to a discussion. These opinionated pieces would then educate the reader, preparing them to participate in public discussion and deliberation on political and community topics. Walter Lippmann, on the other hand, believed that journalists merely recorded what was said in public meetings, debates, and discussions. As such, it didn't really matter who recorded the event, because journalists were not expressing an opinion, they were simply reporting. This debate again gained attention when new media prompted scholars to ask when and how the public should participate in journalism. In 2016, Hellmueller, Mellado, Blumell, and Huemmer argued at this time that civic journalism had to work to repair the damage that had been done by past journalists who sought to dictate public opinion rather than encourage the public to make up their own minds on topics of public deliberation. Furthermore, civic journalism has increasingly involved communities in deciding which issues deserve coverage in the first place.

Contemporary centers for civic journalism, such as the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, are designed to study how the international press is used to engage citizens. Additional civic journalism initiatives have expanded beyond research to include nonprofit and cooperative newsrooms that explicitly define journalism as a public service rather than a commercial product. For example, a 2004 study by the Pew Center analyzed how the Brazilian media informed Brazilian citizens. This report highlighted the potential of civic journalism to return journalists to their historic role of informing citizens, rather than expressing political viewpoints or advancing corporate interests. In this study, we see a return to Walter Lippmann's conception of civic journalism, that reporting should state only the facts. However, the Pew Center also supported building better stories and connecting with readers, which does require a level of human interest and engagement in stories. Throughout the report, the Pew Center warned that journalists must maintain a strong division between their own reporting and commentary. This division needs to be apparent for both journalists and their readers, who must be able to tell what kind of report they are reading. This Pew Center report highlights the difficulty of news organizations, which want to engage citizens and journalists through civic journalism, but also want to encourage citizens to make up their own minds.

While some news organizations seek only to spotlight critical issues affecting the community, others are determined to serve as watchdogs, ensuring that journalists do not engage in unethical activities. Oftentimes, watchdog journalists have decided to maintain a focus on a specific topic, office, or government official. This watchdog role has increasingly intersected with civic journalism, as local reporters rely on community input and collaboration to identify underreported risks and accountability gaps. Their targeted attention might shine a light on a specific scandal, or they might work to draw attention to an underreported event to prevent a scandal or problem from occurring. Sometimes this form of civic journalism is risky for the reporter who is asking questions about topics powerful politicians and corporations would prefer stayed a secret. Other times, journalists risk violating their own ethics by using overly aggressive methods to gather data for their reports. In 2017, Hollings, Hanitzsch, and Balasubramanian have studied the reasons why journalists are willing to take these risks. They find that journalists are more willing to take risks when they feel that their reports will have an effect on changing behavior or might stop a problematic event from occurring.

Studies have also found that journalists engage in different types of research and reporting depending on the type of news outlet and the section they are writing for. For example, in a 2016 analysis of 1,421 stories from major American newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, Hellmueller, Mellado, Blumell, and Huemmer found that front-page news often engaged in civic journalism, while stories contained further back in a newspaper did not. Additionally, this study found that some topics, such as housing and human rights, were most likely to be covered by civic models of journalism. This may be because topics such as housing are areas where individual readers have the greatest ability to act, or it may be because journalists are educated and trained to think about their profession in particular ways.

Debates about the roles of journalists in modern society are not occurring only in the United States. In Russia, similar debates are occurring over the difference between media and smaller media organizations. These debates question the extent to which citizens should be encouraged to participate in decision-making processes. While civic journalism is not as widely studied in Russia as in Western democracies, it has been promoted by international aid agencies, which have sought to inspire participatory journalism since the fall of the Soviet Union as a way to engage citizens in local decision-making processes. This change is seen in examples such as the Youth of Tartarstan newspaper, which spotlights local and important issues in ways that national media would not do, either because the local issues would not be interesting to the larger nation or because it would cost a large news organization too much money to report on local issues.

In Chile, the change has been different; as the nation has become more democratic, standards and laws regarding journalism have changed. This means that while it would once have been impossible for civic journalism to occur in Chile, journalists are now seeking ways to inform and engage local decision-makers. These changes include advancing the concept of freedom of the press and changes in news offices, such as loosening editorial control over stories, which gives individual journalists more autonomy in deciding which stories to cover and the angles to take. Yet, while many changes occurred as soon as Chile transitioned to a democracy, later studies of the nation's journalism found that civic journalism remained static, meaning it did not expand further after the immediate changes from the democratic transition. Because of the changes, and at times the lack of changes, occurring in the field of journalism around the world, scholars continue to study civic journalism.

Issues

Contemporary scholars of civic journalism are concerned with questions of ethics, methodology, and basic questions about how the field is defined. At times, civic journalism is defined as occurring only online, with reports spread through social media or web pages designed explicitly to promote community voices. At other times, civic journalism is defined as an alternative source of news or as a form of reporting that can only cover certain topics. Scholars are concerned with the definition of civic journalism because it affects the ways that they organize their studies and reports, as well as the ways that journalism students are trained for their field. These definitional challenges have intensified as civic journalism increasingly overlaps with nonprofit media, engagement journalism, and platform-dependent reporting. The rapid changes created by new media have resulted in some students who engaged in civic journalism before entering a journalism education program. As a result, journalism education has begun to place greater emphasis on ethics, verification, and community accountability alongside technical skills.

The resulting clash is fascinating for intellectuals but can cause confusion for practicing journalists, who need to clearly explain to their editors and readers how and why they are producing specific reports. In 2009, scholars such as Goode have called for new research that addresses these definitional problems. By changing the ways that research is undertaken to understand civic journalism, it will be possible to find more examples and produce more accurate analyses of the ways that citizens are participating in the production of news and reports about their own communities.

Bibliography

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