| Public affairs journalism is a subcategory of all journalism, but it lies at the core of the profession because the practice of journalism is, finally, inseparable from the practice of democracy. Doing journalism of any sort requires two important sets of talents—reporting the news and presenting the news. For the most part, journalists' understanding of how to report the most relevant events and situations of the moment is based on the traditions and routines expressed in news values and news beats. Those notions of how to present this news also are grounded in the honed norms and routines of the newsroom.
Implementing these two sets of talents largely defines the working days of professional journalists. Teaching these talents to future journalists largely defines the working days of professors in journalism schools. In neither situation is there much time left over to reflect on why journalism does its work in these particular ways even though the current modes of reporting
and presenting the news are far from the only available options.
Increasingly, questions are asked about whether these talents are being put to the best possible use. In some cases, these questions even suggest that the current implementation of these talents has significant negative consequences for society.
About the Authors
Davis "Buzz" Merritt was a reporter and editor for Knight Newspapers and Knight Ridder Inc. for 43 years, retiring after 23 years as editor of The Wichita Eagle. Since leaving The Eagle, he has taught media ethics and a seminar on journalism and democracy at the University of Kansas and Wichita State University, consulted with news organizations and written articles,
newspaper columns, and books. He wrote the seminal book on public journalism, Public Journalism and Public Life: Why Telling the News Is Not Enough, published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. The 1996 second edition received a citation from Pennsylvania State University for media criticism.
Maxwell McCombs, who is internationally recognized for his research on the agenda-setting role of mass communication, holds the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and is a professor on the associated faculty of Catholic University in Santiago, Chile. Prior to joining the Texas faculty, McCombs was the John Ben
Snow Professor of Research at Syracuse University and also served simultaneously for 10 years as director of the News Research Center of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. McCombs has been on the faculties of the University of North Carolina and U.C.L. A. and a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. |
