From this side of the Atlantic it seems just typical of US journalists that when they decide to examine their craft they have to give the exercise a pompous name and call it a movement.
"Civic" or "public" journalism is the latest fad in the US, where journalism-school academics and working journalists write long articles about the failure of journalism to connect with communities.
But before we dismiss our American colleagues for their self-importance, it is worth giving them credit for at least examining what they do. There is little doubt that US journalism is going through a crisis. The circulation of daily newspapers continues its relentless decline: 5.5 million fewer people buy a newspaper daily in the US today than did a decade ago. In addition, fewer people are watching TV news; more and more Americans tell pollsters that journalists are making America's political problems worse and its electorate increasingly cynical.
"Public journalism" is a response to these problems. It talks of re-connecting journalists to the communities they serve; of how journalism can be a tool of democracy; of why journalists should be writing about issues rather than processes. Public journalism is about rescuing struggling newspapers, yes, but its champions say it is first and foremost about the breakdown in public discourse and the need to draw back into public life the ordinary people who have been reduced to being passive spectators to carefully orchestrated political events. And it is about addressing the feeling that journalists are simply another part of the establishment. The "movement" dates from the end of the 1988 US presidential campaign, when debate had been drowned out by sound-bites and photo opportunities. The editor of a Kansas newspaper, Davis "Buzz" Merritt wrote in his Wichita Eagle: "Something is broken. Public life isn't going as well as it should, and journalists have some responsibility for it."
Later, David Broder of the Washington Post wrote: "It is time for those of us in the world's freest press to become activists, not on behalf of a particular party or politicians, but on behalf of the process of self-government."
And James Batten, chairman of Knight-Ridder, the second biggest newspaper chain in the US, added a commercial angle: people who are "connected" to the place they live - by serving on school boards or being active in politics - are twice as likely to read newspapers, he said. "If we can help revitalise our communities by cracking through the apathy and indifference, we . . . look after our own important interests."
The Wichita Eagle launched its coverage of the 1990 congressional elections by announcing that the voters were entitled to have the candidates talk about the issues in depth. It cited poll results which indicated the 10 issues that most concerned citizens and said it would track the candidates' views on those issues.
By now hundreds of civic journalist projects have taken place. The Akron Beacon Journal won a prize for a civic-journalism series on race relations and solicited 22,000 pledges from citizens to work to improve the situation. "Batten Awards" were given to the Charlotte Observer for a 19-month series on crime in inner-city neighbourhoods and to the Kansas City Star for a yearlong exploration of the core values that drive society and of how those values have been distorted. But not everyone likes the idea. There is a view that journalists are becoming do-gooders, community activists, social workers, allowing readers to make judgements about what is news. Where does that leave the paramount values of objectivity and detachment? The New York Times, Washington Post and the New Yorker have all run articles critical of public journalism. Last autumn James Yardley wrote in the Post that public journalism was arrogant and elitist: "It assumes that politicians are no longer competent to decide the public agenda, that the job should be assumed by journalists."
Professor Jay Rosen, the director of the Project on Public Life and the Press at New York University, says that these elite, nationally-oriented publications in the big cities have a problem with public journalism because it originates in America's regional and local press: "This is not an idea communicated itself downward from a professional hierarchy, like a Pulitzer prize, but an idea coming up from below." The Boston Globe is the one "elite" paper that has been involved in public journalism through its project, "The People's Voice". It arranged town meetings that it covered at which people would quiz politicians.
A much smaller paper, the Bergen Record of Hackensack, New Jersey, was involved in a two-year "Quality of Life Project" to stimulate public dialogue about the choices faced by people. With a mix of polls and questionnaires the paper identified threats, opportunities, strengths and weaknesses facing its region. The Record organised task forces to initiate ideas. Its special sections, reporting its findings, became the agendas for workshops, conferences and town meetings.
Other projects have focuses on education, seeking views from parents and children on what the education system should be offering and what improvements they want to see.
Rosen says the public-journalism experiments range from "the solidly professional to the absurd". With some of these projects, newspapers "hype it like a commercial product, which is a bad idea.
"One of the peculiarities of public journalism is that it has both a radical and a banal dimension to it, in that at some level we are saying journalists should be in touch with their communities. That's the banal level.
"The radical part is saying, journalism is not a self-justifying art. It is not done for the sake of doing journalism. It is supposed to be about democracy at some level and that requires journalists to think about what they are trying to accomplish with their journalism."
Veteran journalists get annoyed, Rosen says, when he talks of the press's need to be connected to communities and being part of those communities: "When I talks with journalists who are 60 years old or retired, who became journalists when it was a working-class thing, they get enraged because they knew that is what it was like - when journalists were part of the life of the city in a way that today's mobile-phone-talking journalists are not."
