This document discusses public/social journalism and its potential impact on the public sphere. It provides background on public journalism and its goals of involving audiences and making practices transparent. It also discusses how a social journalism CMS was developed to build on these principles and increase collaboration between journalists and users. While some evidence suggests this model can provide a space for reasonable discussion, it's unclear if it can facilitate truly rational-critical debate or lead to significant cultural change. The document maintains a cautious outlook on the potential for these systems to positively impact the public sphere."

1. The scion of public
journalism
Case Study Evidence of a Link
between
Public and Social Journalism and the
Potential for an Atomized Public
Sphere

2. Mark Poepsel
Loyola University New
Orleans
Assistant professor &
journalism sequence
head*
*Soon to move to Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville

3. Public journalism
• a.k.a. “citizen journalism”
• 1988 – 200?, per Merritt and Rosenberry & St.
John
• Practical applications
• Involving audience members in setting agendas
• Making practices transparent
• Hope: Communicate structural functionalism
with an eye toward progressive change

4. Public journalism
• Theoretical implications
• Flew (2005): Open, collaborative, distributed
• Denton & Thorson (1998) took interest in research
involving collaboration; took issue with theorists
making assumptions about content
• Per McCombs (1997): “pro-active agenda setting”
• Merrill (1997) called it: Communitarianism's
Rhetorical War Against Enlightenment
Liberalism.

5. Altschull’s retort
Altschull offers a counterpoint: “I would like
to agree with [Merrill], for I admire his
cheerful optimism and his belief that
somehow America’s journalists will yet
arrive at the sunny uplands that he sees as
still within their reach. I used to believe that
myself, before I had come to recognize that
individual tilters at windmills are simply
unable to challenge Money” (1997, p. 145)

6. the social journalism cms & how it follows
public journalism
• Built on Ellington
• Social media functionality added (creator equates social
networking with public journalism)
• Create groups
• Follow individuals and groups to create a news feed
• Re-post
• Increased collaboration between journalists and users
• Journalist expected to lead, encourage conversation
• Users had access to the same publishing platform with most
of the same tools
• CMS design process was collaborative, iterative

7. WE HAVE A SCION, STFW?!

8. Public sphere?
• Space between public power actors and
private power sources for rational-critical
debate
• Habermas argues it has been “re-
feudalized” by “manufactured publicity”
(1989).
• Papacharissi (2002) and many others
point out this is not a search for the
panacea promised in the mid-90s

9. NO HOPE?
“The problem is that this entity, this public which
is deemed to exist somewhere at the end of the
communication process…often do[es] not seem
to embody the qualities of the ‘enlightened
citizen’ at all” (p. 133).
2004

10. THE LAND OF LIMITED
EXPECTATIONS
Gitlin (1998) describes two-
tiered media system with
functioning “sphericules”
rather than a broad-based
public sphere.

11. GOT TO START
SOMEWHERE

12. potential
This paper looks for potential:
• Is there space for discourse?
• Could it be rational and
critical?
• Could there be cultural
change, edification?

13. SPACE
“The other sites had really, really snarky commenters,
and the way that this was designed that you had to
verify that you were a real person and you had to
present as yourself with a name was very very very
important in the site taking off at all.
I had the feeling that had the HealthSite been
launched without the real name commenting, it might
have just crashed and burned with how some
participants on [the newspaper’s website] use the
site.”
(ad_marketing2, the social media manager)

14. Space II
“We got to the point later where the same advisory
group that was all worried about nobody’s getting
in unless they’re approved and everyone in their
real names actually asking for more, easier ways
for people to interact, which is a pretty awesome
step for them mentally to come from where they
were when we started.”
(design1, web developer)
Downside: health topic

15. Rational-critical?
• Less evidence of critical debate than of reasonable
discussion and dissemination of information.
• Regarding advertisers, debate was welcomed:
“These conversations, they’re happening, and we’re
letting you know, and we’re trying to train you how to
respond to them, so you can go in and have a
discussion as part of a community because it’s the
content providers, the audience, and then the
businesses. They’re all part of the community, and
that’s a very natural sort of conversation to have.”
(ad_marketing1, project’s ad sales manager)

16. Cultural change?
“The [key] experiment with the HealthSite was getting the
advisory board together and taking these different people
from the community that work in the same health industry to
sort of work together on this project, and there’s the potential
for lots of interesting things to happen there as far as getting
news out in your community.
I’ve read lots of things that I didn’t realize just by looking at
the site, and it doesn’t just come from [news1], so I think that
that’s probably a slow process, I would say, but yeah I think
things like that have changed.” (design2, web developer)