David O. Loomis
Civic Journalism Interest Group
AEJMC
June 8, 1998
Is public journalism cheap journalism?
Putting public journalists' money
where their mouths are
By
David O. Loomis
Ph.D. student
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
815-B Edwards St.
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
919-969-7083
[log in to unmask]
Citizen-based journalism traces its intellectual roots in America to the early
20th century, when educator and philosopher John Dewey proposed his idea of a
free press in a democracy, partly in response to journalist Walter Lippmann's
more elitist view.[1] Citizen-based journalists claim more recent descent from
the social responsibility theory of the press, as enunciated by the 1947
Hutchins Commission and its Report on Freedom of the Press.[2] Citizen-based
journalism adherents also claim spiritual kinship to the concept of
communitarianism, citing Confucius, Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx,
Niebuhr and, more recently, sociologist Amitai Etzioni.
Citizen-based journalism is a relatively new practice that dates to the late
1980s and early 1990s.[3] The practice still defies agreement among its
adherents on how to define it[4] and even what to call it.[5] The debate
extends to traditional journalists, who have criticized citizen-based journalism
for perceived threats to such core professional values as objectivity. Where the
traditional ethic of journalism calls for enlightening audiences and then
letting them find their own way to solving community problems, citizen-based
journalism leads them to a discussion of issues, serving as community convener,
as well as chronicler.[6] Citizen-based journalism is dedicated to solutions,
not just descriptions, of social problems.[7]
This more activist model of journalism has not been well received when it has
been proposed to the profession in the past. In the early 1950s, for example,
Associated Press editors debated inserting interpretive reporting into straight
objective accounts of news events -- particularly the Communist-hunting of U.S.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy -- to add meaning and foster understanding. The argument
divided journalists for years before pro-interpretation editors won the debate
and the wire service began to include basic background information in its
routine reporting. In the more recent citizen-based journalism debate,
traditional journalists once again have been opposed to a new form of journalism
for its willingness to shed the profession's tradition of objectivity and
standoffishness. But by the early 1990s, the economic climate in the newspaper
industry had become more conducive to change.[8]
When the innovation of citizen-based journalism was being advocated by
newspaper managers in early 1990s, the newspaper industry was undergoing a
recession.[9] Staff reductions -- or "downsizing" and "flattening newsroom
hierarchies" -- swept newsrooms. Daily newsroom employment peaked at 56,900 in
1990. Over the succeeding six years, 3,100 newsroom jobs were eliminated, a bit
over 5 percent of the journalistic labor force.[10] "Re-engineered newsrooms"
began to reorganize traditional geographic news beats into topical teams
intended to "empower" reporters.[11] At the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, for
example, newsroom workers by the early 1990s were cut to about 220 from around
280 as the paper re-engineered its news operations, converted to topical teams
from geographic beats and adopted public journalism.[12]
Former journalist and professor Ben Bagdikian, among others, asserted that the
trend proved that some newspaper publishers were cutting expenses in favor of
boosting short-term profits.[13] Other critics charged that citizen-based
journalism was merely a profit-maximizing strategy for newspapers.[14] Gene
Roberts, former managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former editor
of The New York Times, criticized what he called public journalism for "cutting
back on news hole and staff," which he said "has a lot to do with P.T. Barnum
and hocus-pocus. But it doesn't have much to do with journalism and public
responsibility."[15]
Research question
Critics have charged or implied, then, that the philosophy of citizen-based, or
public, journalism provides a cover for junk journalism -- journalism on the
cheap, in which, for example, publishers are more likely to use less-expensive
wire-service copy than stories produced more expensively by their own staffs.
Traditional publishers, on the other hand, are therefore seen as more likely to
invest in their news staffs by printing proportionately more staff-written news
stories and fewer wire stories. The Little Rock Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, for
example, is owned by a traditionally inclined publisher who is critical of
citizen-based journalism and who has increased his news staff.[16]
After roughly seven years of citizen-based-journalism experimentation, what do
actual citizen-based-journalism results show? Are citizen-based-journalism
publishers more inclined than their traditional-journalism peers to run more
wire copy in their papers and fewer staff-written stories? To answer these
questions, this paper draws from data gathered by Philip Meyer and Deborah
Potter in their research on the effects of citizen-based journalism in the 1996
national election.[17] The Meyer and Potter data include a content analysis of
campaign coverage in a sample of 10 newspaper issues in each market on random
days during the seven-week period before the election. Using that primary
content-analysis data, this study relies on a secondary analysis showing what
proportion of national election stories was staff-written. Its hypothesis is
that citizen-based journalism, coupled with re-engineering, meant downsized news
staffs, which would lead to fewer staff-written news stories. Or, put another
way:
CBJ + re-engineered newsroom x (downsized news staff) = fewer staff-written
stories
One cause of this phenomenon, if it exists, could be a proliferation of new
media, a process that makes a social-responsibility philosophy of news reporting
harder to practice because the competition creates pressure on the paper's
bottom line. Citizen-based-journalism newspapers would contain more wire stories
than staff stories on the theory that citizen-based journalism is journalism on
the cheap, and cheap journalism is downsized journalism that must rely on wire
copy to fill the news hole.
The hypothesis was not supported by the data. After adjusting for circulation
size differences among the 20 newspapers sampled in the Meyer-Potter study
citizen-based-journalism newspapers were shown to produce more staff-written
copy than did traditional papers. Citizen-based-journalism publishers,
therefore, were not practicing journalism on the cheap.
Method
Every story mentioning a presidential or senatorial candidate and the election
from a sample of 10 newspapers in each of the 20 markets -- 1,873 stories in all
-- was coded. This secondary analysis used the data gathered in the
content-analysis portion of the Meyer-Potter study.
Two of the content-analysis variables recorded by the Meyer-Potter study were
key to this analysis. One of the variables measured the area -- the physical
space occupied in the paper -- of each campaign story analyzed. The other
variable characterized the author according to nine categories, including "staff
writer" and various wire-service categories.[18] By collapsing the author
categories into two -- local and other -- it was possible to compute a
percentage of campaign coverage in each newspaper devoted to staff-written
stories by dividing the sum of the square centimeters devoted to campaign
stories into the area occupied by locally written stories, or:
pctstaff = staff / (staff + other) [19]
When the created variable showing each paper's percentage of locally written
copy was correlated with each paper's intent to practice citizen-based
journalism, the Pearson correlation was .434, a measure with two-tailed
significance at a marginal .056 and an R-square of .1883. Thus, 19 percent of
the variability in the percentage of locally written news stories is explained
by intent to practice citizen-based journalism.
However, the full effect is masked by variation in circulation size. Larger
papers can afford more staff coverage of national elections because of their
economies of scale.
(Insert Graph 1 and correlation about here)
A comparison of two tables -- one ranking the percentages of locally written
news copy in the Meyer-Potter newspapers and the other showing the Meyer-Potter
ranking of newspapers according to their intent to practice citizen-based
journalism (see appendixes 1 and 3) -- shows that some newspapers ranked low in
the citizen-based-journalism intent but ranked relatively high on locally
written news content, and vice versa. Atlanta, for example, ranked in the bottom
half on the Meyer-Potter list but in the top 10 on rankings for locally written
content. The created variable showing each paper's percentage of locally written
material was correlated with a new circulation variable created with figures
drawn from Editor & Publisher, a trade periodical. The resulting Pearson
correlation was .549, indicating 30 percent of the variability in the observed
percentage of locally written news stories is explained by each paper's market
circulation (p = .012).
(Insert Graph 2 and correlation about here)
Inspection of the two plots suggests that circulation does have a confounding
effect. The comparatively small Portland, Maine, paper ranked high in
citizen-based-journalism intent in Meyer-Potter's study, for example, but in the
scatterplot above the paper ranked low in actual citizen-based-journalism
output, as measured by the percentage of locally written election content. The
slightly larger Wichita paper -- right behind Portland. Maine, on the
Meyer-Potter citizen-based-journalism list -- ranked high both on intent and
output in the scatterplot. Atlanta, on the other hand -- tops in circulation but
low in citizen-based-journalism orientation -- ranked high in its percentage of
locally written stories.
To control for circulation size an adjusted variable for local percent was
created by using the residuals from the plot in Graph 2. The residuals of the
dependent variable, percentage of locally written stories, were saved as a new
variable to show the relative proportion of locally written stories as though
each paper had the same circulation.[20] When the new variable of the residuals
was correlated with the variable for each paper's intent to practice
citizen-based journalism, the Pearson correlation strengthened to .573 (p =
.008) with an R-square of .33, meaning that a third of the variability in
circulation-adjusted local effort is explained by intent to practice
citizen-based journalism. This is a considerable improvement over the earlier
scatterplot using the uncontrolled circulation variable.
(Insert Graph 3 and correlation about here)
Summary and conclusions
This analysis found a statistical connection between citizen-based-journalism
newspapers and the percentage of campaign stories their news staffs produced.
The connection showed that citizen-based-journalism papers published more
staff-written stories than traditionally oriented newspapers. The connection was
strongest after adjustment for circulation size.
Therefore, the hypothesis that publishers of citizen-based-journalism
newspapers are practicing journalism on the cheap was not supported by the data.
Charlotte, Norfolk and Minneapolis, for example -- three re-engineered papers
practicing citizen-based-journalism -- all produced a higher percentage of
staff-written stories than the Atlanta paper, a traditional paper that posts the
largest circulation of the 20 papers. When performance was compared after
adjustment for circulation, the Atlanta paper dropped and the
citizen-based-journalism newspapers improved on staff-written news-story
production. Thus, traditional newspaper publishers seem to be more likely to
practice cheaper journalism than the citizen-based-journalism publishers.
Additional questions raised by this analysis deserve more study. For example,
what explains the performance of Portland, Maine, where the paper is highly
ranked on intent to practice citizen-based journalism but performed poorly on
staff-written stories and worse after circulation was held constant?
Further, is the high staff-written-story output sustained at
citizen-based-journalism newspapers when campaign season concludes? What about
their efforts between elections?
Further research should evaluate the staying power of these publishers'
commitment to citizen-based journalism and its attendant expenditure of
resources by their news staffs. Until then, the publishers of
citizen-based-journalism newspapers in this study have demonstrated that they
are putting their money where their mouths are.
Bibliography
Ben Bagdikian, The media monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
John B. Bare, "Toward a definition of public journalism" (Ph.D. diss., 1995).
Renita Coleman, "The intellectual antecedents of public journalism" (paper
presented to AEJMC Southeast Regional Colloquium, Knoxville, TN, March 1997).
Amitai Etzioni, The spirit of community: rights, responsibilities and the
communitarian movement. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993).
Max Frankel, "Journalists should leave reform to reformers," The Masthead, Fall
1995, 21-22.
Kathleen A. Hansen, Neuzil, Mark, and Ward, Jean, "Newsroom topic teams:
Journalists' assessments of effects on news routines and newspaper quality"
(paper presented AT annual conference of AEJMC, newspaper division, Chicago,
Ill., July 1997)
Richard Harwood, "When downsizing hits the newsroom," The Washington Post, 2
April 1996, sec. A, p. 13, col. 6.
Robert M. Hutchins, A free and responsible press (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1947).
Philip Meyer, "The media reformation: giving the agenda back to the people," in
The elections of 1992. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1992),
89-108.
Philip Meyer, "Public journalism and the problem of objectivity" (address
delivered to Investigative Reporters and Editors convention, Cleveland, Ohio,
September 1995).
Philip Meyer and Deborah Potter, "Effects of Citizen-based Journalism in
the 1996 National Election" (paper presented at National Press Club seminar,
Washington, D.C., 17 March 1997). (Condensed version available at
www.unc.edu/~pmeyer/)
Philip Meyer, "Assessing public journalism, Chapter 14, further research is
needed" (in press), 1-26.
Peter Parisi, "Toward a "philosophy of framing': news narratives for public
journalism," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly Winter 1997), 673-686.
Gene Roberts, "Corporatism vs. journalism: Is it twilight for press
responsibility?" (lecture delivered at Press-Enterprise Lecture Series, No. 31,
University of California, Riverside, 12 February 1996).
Jay Rosen, "The impossible press: American journalism and the decline of public
life" (Ph.D. diss., 1986).
Luther W. "Sonny"Sanders, Jeanne Norton Rollberg, and M.D. Buffalo, "David slays
Goliath: The death of the Arkansas Gazette," Southwestern Mass Communication
Journal 9:1 (1993): 54-64.
Alicia C. Shepard, "The gospel of public journalism," American Journalism Review
(September 1994): 29.
Carl Sessions Stepp, "Reinventing the newsroom," American Journalism Review
(April 1995): 28-33.
Doug Underwood,When MBAs rule the newsroom: How the marketers and managers are
reshaping today's media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
Doug Underwood, "Reinventing the media: The newspapers' identity crisis,"
Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 1992): 24-27.
Jonathan Yardley, "In Arkansas, profiting from print," The Washington Post, 20
April 1998, sec. 2, p. 2, col. 1.
Appendix 1
Newspapers in the Meyer-Potter study are ranked according to their orientation
to citizen-based journalism. Rankings, based on a three-point scale (with 3
indicating the highest orientation to citizen-based journalism and 1 indicating
the lowest), are included.[21]
Citizen-based journalism rankings
Charlotte 3.0000
Norfolk 2.8929
Portland, OR 2.7214
Portland, ME 2.7143
Wichita 2.6976
Minneapolis 2.6667
Boston 2.6429
Rockford 2.6190
Raleigh 2.5143
Columbia 2.3714
Chicago 2.3095
Des Moines 2.1786
Richmond 2.1429
Atlanta 2.0286
Austin 1.9286
Birmingham 1.7857
New Orleans 1.7143
Houston 1.4405
Little Rock 1.2000
Grand Rapids 1.0000
Appendix 2
Following are Meyer-Potter study newspapers and circulations ranked by size,
largest to smallest (in thousands).[22]
Newspaper circulation size
Atlanta 687
Houston 545
Boston 452
Minneapolis 394
Chicago 345
Portland, OR 324
New Orleans 260
Charlotte 236
Norfolk 234
Richmond 209
Austin 181
Little Rock 172
Raleigh 172
Des Moines 170
Birmingham 165
Grand Rapids 140
Columbia 122
Wichita 92
Portland, ME 75
Rockford 74
Appendix 3
Following are newspapers in the Meyer-Potter study ranked according to their
percentage of locally written stories, without adjusting for circulation size.
Percentage of locally written stories
Boston .78
Wichita .72
Chicago .66
Charlotte .64
Minneapolis .62
Houston .59
Norfolk .58
Atlanta .55
Raleigh .46
Portland, OR .46
New Orleans .44
Birmingham .42
Austin .40
Richmond .35
Rockford .34
Little Rock .34
Columbia .32
Des Moines .31
Portland, ME .22
Grand Rapids .18
Appendix 4
Following are newspapers in the Meyer-Potter study ranked according to their
adjusted circulation. The column of numbers on the right lists the
unstandardized residuals of the dependent variable for percentage of locally
written stories after being regressed against circulation. Positive values fall
above the fit line on Scatterplot 3; negative values fall below it. The figure
should be interpreted as a gauge of actual citizen-based-journalism performance.
Citizen-based-journalism performance
Wichita .34164
Boston .19827
Charlotte .18029
Chicago .13872
Norfolk .12142
Minneapolis .07104
Raleigh .03645
Birmingham .00040
Rockford -.02819
Austin -.02864
New Orleans -.03327
Houston -.04427
Portland, OR -.04942
Columbia -.07531
Little Rock -.08355
Richmond -.09445
Des Moines -.11242
Portland, ME -.14875
Atlanta -.16449
Grand Rapids -.22547
[1] Jay Rosen, "The impossible press: American journalism and the decline of
public life" (Ph.D. diss., 1986).
See also: Coleman, Renita (1996). "The intellectual antecedents of public
journalism," paper presented to AEJMC Southeast Regional Colloquium, Knoxville,
TN, March 1997, p. 2.
[2] Robert M. Hutchins, A free and responsible press (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1947).
[3] Davis W. "Buzz" Merritt of the Wichita, Kan., Eagle often is cited as a
pioneer in the development of public journalism, beginning with the 1990
elections.
[4] Alicia C. Shepard, "The gospel of public journalism," American Journalism
Review (September 1994): 29.
[5] Public journalism also has been referred to as civic journalism, community
journalism, citizen-based journalism, reader-based journalism and communitarian
journalism.
See also: Peter Parisi, "Toward a "philosophy of framing': news narratives for
public journalism," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly Winter 1997),
673-686. The author distinguishes civic from public journalism by defining
civic as local in scope and public as global.
[6] Philip Meyer, "The media reformation: giving the agenda back to the
people," in The elections of 1992. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly,
1992), 92.
[7] Max Frankel, "Journalists should leave reform to reformers," The Masthead,
Fall 1995, 21.
[8] Meyer, "The media reformation," p. 95.
[9] John B. Bare, "Toward a definition of public journalism" (Ph.D. diss.,
1995).
[10] Richard Harwood, "When downsizing hits the newsroom," The Washington
Post, 2 April 1996, sec. A, p. 13, col. 6.
[11] Kathleen A. Hansen, Neuzil, Mark, and Ward, Jean, "Newsroom topic teams:
Journalists' assessments of effects on news routines and newspaper quality"
(paper presented AT annual conference of AEJMC, newspaper division, Chicago,
Ill., July 1997),1, 7, 9.
[12] Internal documents in possession of the author.
See also: Carl Sessions Stepp, "Reinventing the newsroom," American Journalism
Review (April 1995): 33. Stepp writes about the Virginian-Pilot , The (Columbia,
S.C.) State , the Charlotte Observer, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and other
"re-invented" newspapers where news editors are aided by "corporate coaches."
See also: Doug Underwood, "Reinventing the media: The newspapers' identity
crisis," Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 1992): 26. Underwood cites a
Knight-Ridder vice president for news as saying that "entrepreneurial think" is
increasingly valued in newsrooms.
Generally, see also: Doug Underwood,When MBAs rule the newsroom: How the
marketers and managers are reshaping today's media (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995)
[13] Ben Bagdikian, The media monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 201.
[14] Philip Meyer, "Public journalism and the problem of objectivity" (address
delivered to Investigative Reporters and Editors convention, October 1995), 3.
[15] Gene Roberts, "Corporatism vs. journalism: Is it twilight for press
responsibility?" (lecture delivered at Press-Enterprise Lecture Series, No. 31,
University of California, Riverside, 12 February 1996).
Roberts affirmed and elaborated on the view of public journalism as primarily
profit-motivated in an interview with the author following Roberts' lecture at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 13, 1998.
[16] Luther W. "Sonny"Sanders, Jeanne Norton Rollberg, and M.D. Buffalo, "David
slays Goliath: The death of the Arkansas Gazette," Southwestern Mass
Communication Journal 9:1 (1993): 54.
See also: Jonathan Yardley, "In Arkansas, profiting from print," The Washington
Post, 20 April 1998, sec. 2, p. 2, col. 1.
The newspaper's publisher, Walter E. Hussman Jr., declared his opposition to
citizen-based journalism and his faith in traditional journalism in a panel
discussion, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Communications Day,
April XX, 1997.
It should be noted, however, that some have asserted that citizen-based
journalism is expensive, particularly its tools of opinion polls, focus groups
and community meetings. See, for example: Meyer, Philip (in press). "Assessing
public journalism, Chapter 14, further research is needed," p. 23.
[17] Philip Meyer and Deborah Potter, "Effects of Citizen-based Journalism in
the 1996 National Election," National Press Club seminar, Washington, D.C.,
March 17, 1997. Condensed version available at www.unc.edu/~pmeyer/
[18] A 10 percent subsample was coded by two coders, whose agreement was 89
percent, Scott's pi = .77.
[19] The percentages of space devoted to staff-written stories in each
newspaper are listed and ranked in Appendix 3. The Meyer-Potter rankings of
citizen-based-journalism newspapers are in Appendix 1.
[20] Cities above the regression line are shown with positive residuals. They
had more locally written campaign stories than expected for their circulation
size. Those below the line had less.
[21] The newspapers that fell into the top 10 of the Meter-Potter rankings all
had a history of citizen-based reporting or community-involvement programs.
[22] Source: Editor & Publisher,1997 Yearbook. Sunday circulation figures.
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