Public Journalism:The US journalistic reform movement known as “public” (or “civic”) journalism has during the past decade inspired like-minded initiatives in other parts of the world, including Africa (Malawi, Senegal, Swaziland), the Asia-Pacific Rim (Australia, Japan, New Zealand), Europe (Finland, Spain, Sweden), and South America (Argentina, Columbia, Mexico). Since 1988, when the first public journalism project was launched by the Ledger-Enquirer, a local newspaper in Columbus, the vast majority of projects have been conducted by newspapers, many television and radio stations, both private and public, have experimented with public journalism.Categories of Public Journalism Projects:The public journalism projects conducted to date fall within two broad categories: election initiatives and special projects. Election Initiatives During national and local elections, news organizations committed to public journalism have made efforts to focus their reporting on topics of concern to citizens rather than on the campaign agendas of candidates for office. This has been accomplished by identifying citizen concerns through large-scale telephone surveys, focus group discussions, and indepth interviews, soliciting questions to candidates from citizens and relaying their answers in the news pages, facilitating actual interaction between citizens and candidates in the form of town-hall style meetings, and reporting back on the outcomes of such citizen-candidate encounters.Special Projects Similarly, news organizations committed to public journalism have engaged in special projects aimed at focusing attention on political problems of particular concern to citizens, such as race-relations, educational inequalities, and poverty, among others. This has been accomplished by reporting on those problems from the perspectives of citizens rather than politicians, experts, and other elite actors, offering citizens opportunities to express and debate their opinions in the news pages, elaborating on what citizens can do to address given problems in practice, organizing sites for citizen deliberation and action such as roundtables, community forums, and local civic groups, and following up on citizen initiatives through on-going and sustained coverage.Public Journalism in News Organizations:Aside from such project-based initiatives, many news organizations have taken steps to make public journalism an integral part of their routine information-gathering, reporting, and evaluation practices, including by restructuring their newsrooms from conventional beat systems revolving around institutional sources of information to include multiple teams focusing on particular topics of concern to citizens, reporting on those topics from the perspectives of citizens rather than various elite actors, and offering citizens opportunities to evaluate news coverage on a regular basis.

Citizen Journalism:The ability of the ‘ordinary person on the street’ to create and distribute their own content has increased exponentially over the last decade. Factors for this include technological developments that have reduced the price and increased the availability of user-friendly content capture devices, such as Flip cameras and mobile phones, alongside the

absorption into popular consciousness of free distribution sites such as Youtube and Facebook. The result of this production is certainly a lot of footage of sneezing animals and laughing babies but there is also more depth and heart to the application of these social media tools, and this is the ground held by citizen journalists. Citizen Journalism is defined in We Media as, “public citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information." Popular examples of citizen journalism breaching the mainstream media on an international and national field include the Arab spring uprising, the Occupy movement or the commentary in the blogosphere that tracked the summer riots in the UK. The influence can also be felt at a local level, where there are numerous examples of community blogging sites reporting on causes and campaigns, a role formerly championed by a local press now heavily in decline.From both the formal and informal interpretations of Citizen Journalism, one message seems to come through more clearly than others: the relationship to news. The term seems to relate to ordinary people creating, reporting from or commenting on key newsworthy events. It is this close relationship to traditional journalism that has led to some professional journalists criticizing, “the unregulated nature of citizen journalism…for being too subjective, amateurish, and haphazard in quality and coverage.” By sharing the term ‘journalism’, there seems to be an in-built expectation from the mainstream that citizen journalists should be maintaining the standards and mimicking the guidelines by which professional trained journalists tell their ‘news’. In reality though, individual citizen journalists can enjoy the freedoms of telling their stories in their own ways using social media to do so – and the results can therefore be wide-ranging in efficacy, effect and form.

Community Journalism:And how does all of this relate to our definition of Community Reporting or Journalism? Well, the principal starting point for Community Reporting as we define it is story. And why story rather than news? Well, as Owen Flanagan puts it, “Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers.”Story can be the means by which we work out our thoughts and ideas about who we are and how we connect to those around us. It can be an exploration, a search for meaning or an offering up to others. From a community development point of view, story is an extremely useful tool for helping people to locate themselves in their own lives and their communities.We all have something to say and stories to tell about our lives and this is our starting point for Community Reporting. From here, we support people through a process of refining communication, developing new skills, thinking more about the audience for their stories and the impact they want those stories to have. Some of the stories that Community Reporters tell might be considered ‘newsworthy’, but the heart of Community Reporting is in individuals telling stories about their own lives rather than reporting on news, an approach that serves to benefit both the individual and the community.

Let’s consider an example. An asylum seeker fighting for their right to stay in a country, challenging a court decision or arguing injustice, is a news story. There is human interest and a clear trajectory of beginning, middle and end; they arrived, there was a ruling, there will be a final outcome. The news story will end when they are either deported or gain leave to remain. Community Reporting however is more interested in all the other stories that make up the person at the centre of the news…and to give them the tools and the platform to share those stories. So we might learn about the foods that remind them of home, or their bemusement at how we shop in large supermarkets, or even better, they might just want to tell a story about the sports day at their children’s local school. This is true integration and true empowerment and our hope is that it can contribute to the vision of ‘sustainable communities’ for all.

Concept of Community Journalism:The concept of community journalism can be understood by considering such questions,Does this concept called community journalism, developed largely by studying “small” news media outlets (mostly in the U.S., Canada, and Australia) explain something similar in all countries and cultures?When we make generalizations about “community journalism,” do we risk diluting the very aspect of community journalism that makes it distinct—its cultural relativism? Furthermore, how do differences in cultural settings affect the journalism-community relationship?The first step toward answering those questions is, once again, developing consistent definitions for the concepts in play, particularly the term community media. Almost instinctively, U.S. scholars see community media as meaning newspapers, magazines, radio/television stations, and websites serving specific geographic regions or niche audiences. However, in a global context, the term does not have universal application. In their discussion of community journalism, for example, Moore and Gillis (2005) contrasted community media with community journalism, arguing that the latter defines a “process” of doing journalism that is similar to the advocacy style of journalism espoused by scholars of civic or public journalism such as Jay Rosen.Community Media Things get more complicated when the term community media is brought in. Jankowski, one of the most cited scholars in electronically mediated community journalism, used “community media” as an all-encompassing term to refer to “a diverse range of mediated forms of communication: print media such as newspapers and magazines, electronic media such as radio and television, and electronic network initiatives that embrace characteristics of both traditional print and electronic media” The International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) explain that community media “originates, circulates and resonates from the sphere of civil society. This is the field of media communication that exists outside of the state and the market (often non-government and non-profit), yet which may interact with both”Fuller’s (2007) definition of community media did not seem as inclusive; she used “community media” to define electronic media that is operated by citizens, has roots in social justice movements of the 1960s in North America, and has begun to take hold in developing nations through the support of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). By community media, it refers to grass roots or locally oriented media access initiatives predicted on a profound sense of dissatisfaction with mainstream media form and content, dedicated to the

principles of free expression and participatory democracy, and committed to enhancing community relations and promoting community solidarity.If those distinctions between the concepts of community journalism and community media meant only differences in the type of media channel, it would be one thing, but those differences may also speak to differences in the roles those media play in their communities— differences based on those media’s organizational structures, community relationships, and what they consider to be news values.Characteristics of community media: Jankowski defined the characteristics of community media asObjectives: to provide news and information relevant to the needs of the community members, to engage these members in public communication via the communityMedium; to empower the politically disenfranchised;Ownership and control: often shared by community residents, local government, and community based organizations;Content: locally oriented and produces;Media production: via the ether, cable television infrastructure or other electronic network;Audience: predominantly located within a relatively small, clearly defined geographic region, although some community networks attract large and physically dispersed audience;Financing: essentially non-commercial, although the overall budget may involve corporate sponsorship, advertising, and government subsides.Major Functions performed by Community Media• To provide information transfer fro giving community members access to• knowledge• To watch the community environment• To mobilize to direct people’s actions• To establish networks for community members• To establish community identity• To create new value and culture• To transform member’s experiences/problems into a community’s common• experiences/problems