Public Journalism: Stop the Shooting   

Get me Richard Holbrooke. It's time for a cease-fire in the Battle of Public Journalism.

Actually, peace may already be at hand.

üor the past couple of years, public (or civic or community) journalism has been one of the profession's most hotly debated issues. Proponents have argued that journalism – and democracy – are in deep trouble. It's critical, they say, for news organizationå to "reconnect" with their alienated communities by paying much more attention to what the people think. It's time for newspapers and broadcasters to get off the sidelines and actively work to solve the problems of their towns.

Traditionalists warn darkly that public journalists cross the line between reporting and advocacy, putting journalism's ebbing credibility in further peril. They portray public journalism as a marketing tool, as boosterism, as a gimmick to make publishers feel better about themselves as they slash their staffs and shrink their news holes.

The issue has been dissected in print (including in these pages) and at panel discussions with divisions depicted as starkly as those in the abortion debate (an irony in that public journalism rejects the all too common practice of framing stories as a battle between two extremes at the exclusion of the quiet middle). The apotheosis of the public journalism faceoff as blood sport came at last year's Associated Press Managing Editors convention, when Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and editorial page legend Richard Aregood, he of the withering one-liner, eviscerated public journalism's defenders in the Thrilla in Phila.

But the protracted polarization seems to be easing. That's become clear to me at a number of recent events, most notably a discussion featuring two public journalism fans – Edward M. Fouhy, executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, and Phil Currie, Gannett's senior VP/ News – along with arch critic Downie.

After listening to their presentations, I was struck by the wide swath of, as they say in Cliché Corner, common ground. Among the significant areas of overlap:

kÃJournalism must get beyond the official agenda and the official sources. We need to delve deeply into reality, with intensive reporting on the aspirations and views and problems of real people.

k We need reporting that doesn't simply stress the clash of the extremes, and instead reflects reality with all of its nuance and ambivalence and complexity.

k It's not enough to simply illuminate the problems. We need to focus on how to solve them.

ýone of these propositions ranks up there with Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Perhaps we should hold these truths to be self-evident. But everyone knows how often they are ignored in the daily rush to publish and broadcast, how much time and effort it takes to carry them out, how much richer our news reports would be if we honored them more rigorously.

ýouhy spotlighted the confluence when he cited two examples of what he considered excellent civic journalism. Both had appeared in Downie's paper: Leon Dash's eight-part series on the family of Rosa Lee Cunningham, a portrait of Washington's underclass; and Post reporting on the Million Man March that concentrated not on the organizers, politicians and "leaders" but on the views of individual participants.

Neither featured the focus groups or town meetings or advisory panels that often are elements of public journalism. But both got beyond the rhetoric and the officialdom and reported in depth on things that matter.

ýouhy's emergence as a prominent spokesman for public journalism has contributed to detente. A distinguished broadcast journalist for more than two decades, he embraces the values of traditional journalism, including objectivity, and sees the movement a  a way of building upon it. By contrast, public journalism pioneer Jay Rosen, a New York University professor, has taken a much more confrontational approach.

Downie, for his part, was far less combative than he had been at the APME wrestlemania. And after the panel discussion, he invited Fouhy to the Post to talk about civic journalism.

But there's still room for super-negotiator Holbrooke; significant divisions persist. Downie and others remain concerned that in some public journalism endeavors news organizations become too deeply enmeshed in the political process. Once that happens, how can the newspaper or TV station report with credibility?

ònd, as the current wave of downsizing rolls onward, skeptics worry that high-profile public journalism projects serve as a fig leaf to cover the fact that news organizations have too few reporters to comprehensively cover their communities.

Because that, in the end, is what it comes down to: reporters. In journalism as in the NBA, no matter how brilliant the coach, you win or lose with the athletes.

Like Peggy Townsend and Tracie White of the Santa Cruz County Sentinel in California, whose work recently was honored by the Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families. In "Children of the Streets," they painted a vivid and disturbing picture of the lives of homeless teenagers.

ýacked with firsthand reporting on their subjects, their efforts shocked a community that had been unaware of the homeless young people in their midst, triggering a drive to build a youth shelter. The only reporters on the 27,000-circulation paper's Bay3Living department, Townsend, 43, and White, 34, hung out with their at first reluctant subjects on their own time and in between writing cooking features and carnival advances.

"This is what the business is all about. It's the reason I got into journalism," Townsend says. "There's all of this confusion these days about what newspapers are supposed to be. This is what they're supposed to be." l