American Public Media announced Monday it has received a three-year, $2.95 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The grant will support St. Paul-based American Public Media’s Public Insight Journalism, a system that encourages radio listeners and Web site users to become “citizen sources,” providing news tips and information for use in news gathering. More than 70,000 people already have signed up to participate.

Here is more:

The Knight Foundation grant will help American Public Media:

• Seek as many as 15 additional media partners nationwide;

• Evaluate the composition of the Public Insight Network to enhance the quality of the database;

• Strengthen the technical infrastructure of the Public Insight Network to better serve partners by assuring the network’s reliability and viability;

• Produce a working version of the Audience Insight Repository system — the software used for the Public Insight Network — under an open-source license;

• Assess the impact of Public Insight Journalism on media partners and audiences;

• Connect with journalism schools to promote Public Insight Journalism as a new model for news gathering; and

• Form a national advisory board by recruiting diverse professionals from journalism, media technology, civic engagement and academia.

Starting today, registered United States voters can share their voting experiences via the Video Your Vote YouTube Channel. Some of the best videos will be showcased on PBS television, as part of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer’s Election Day broadcast.

I love this sentence fragment: “In the first presidential election since YouTube’s inception…” Can you believe that YouTube has been around less than four years? Any how, the press release continues:

In the first presidential election since YouTube’s inception, this program aims to gather massive amounts of polling place video, with the Channel serving as an online library for Election Day footage.

Go here to learn more about the project and the legalities of shooting video at polling places in your state. Here is a Judy Woodruff video:

Through Friday, of 270 news articles published in The Times about the election since the national tickets were formed in late August, only 29, or a little over 10 percent, were primarily about policy substance. And that is a generous tally that includes some very brief items.

That count by my assistant, Michael McElroy, is similar to figures compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which has been closely monitoring election coverage in a wide range of media. The group found that only 8 percent of front-page articles in The Times from late August through last Sunday were about policy. Nearly three-quarters were about the horse race, political tactics, polls and the like. The Times numbers are about the same as for the news media in general, including cable television and blogs — not a standard to aspire to.

Apparently, that does not make the public happy; Hoyt writes:

Early this year, roughly three-quarters of voters of all political persuasions surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said they wanted more coverage of the candidates’ stands on issues. For the most part, they were disappointed, and their satisfaction with the news media has declined, according to Pew. In February, 55 percent said the election coverage was good or excellent. By June, 54 percent said it was fair or poor.

Those interested in civic and public journalism have been taking on this issue since the public journalism reform movement began  after the 1988 presidential election. Jay Rosen has been one of the most informed critics. Here is what he said back in January, 2008. Here is what I wrote in October 2007 and if you want to keep going back, here is Rosen again in 2004 with his PressThink piece Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race. Forever!

If I were surveyed, I would answer that I want more issue oriented stories. However, here is a confession: I can’t help myself, apparently like a lot of political junkies, each day I visit places like FiveThirtyEight.com which provides fantastic horse race coverage, just like inside baseball. It is addictive. Here is what FiveThirtyEight posted last week about the site’s audience growth:

Seven months ago today this site … went live, with 80 visits. Yesterday we reached 693,216 … Glancing at the daily circulation figures for US newspapers, it looks like we’re at or about the top ten and rising with a bullet.

So for me I want my polls and my substantial reporting too. Right now we are obviously getting more of the former and too little of the latter and that is the big problem now, has been the problem in the past and will probably be the problem forever.

If you just keep clicking on the video advance button on the video, it will take to that 26-minute place.

The lead panel discussion is entitled: Civic/Public Journalism 2.0, and the panelits, Rosen, Lambeth, Mark Deuze of Indiana University; and Burton St. John of Old Dominion University aim try to answer these questions:

Where do principles and practices from the public journalism movement now inform the press? How does the past inform us about where Civic/ Public Journalism may influence future avenues toward press re-engagement with citizens?

Another panel Meet the Press: Hyperlocal, Community and Citizen Media in Chicago will feature Adrian Holovaty of www.everyblock.com and mastermind behind the Chicagocrime.org ”one of the original map mashups, combining crime data from the Chicago Police Department with Google Maps.”

I also will be on a panel entitled: They Blog for Journalism Change – And It Pays Off with Rosen and Mindy McAdams.

It should be a fun afternoon, please drop by, you are welcome.

The conference entitled “The Past, Present and Future of Civic/Citizen Journalism,”  will be held on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 between 2 pm and 6 pm at the journalism convergence lab, at Columbia College, Chicago. Here are full details.

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

As you probably know Rosen was one of the founders of the Public Journalism movement. I just finished writing a book review of The Pursuit of Public Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism by Tanni Haas. The review will be published eventually in the International Journal of Press/Politics.

Haas writes that public journalism’s:

…founding scholarly and journalistic advocates — Rosen included — have arguably failed to clearly articulate public journalism as a journalistic philosophy in its own right.

So Jay, is this definition the first step in clearly articulating citizen journalism as a journalistic philosophy in its own right? It would be nice.

By the way as I pointed out in a comment at Rosen’s site: Type in the URL citizenjournalism.org and see who owns it. Go ahead type it in now, I will see you back here in a couple of seconds.

Also in an earlier response to Jeff Jarvis, who was promoting “networked journalism” and wanting to kill off the phrase “citizen journalism,” I wrote:

I like the networked journalism concept, but to me the phrase networked journalism is a cop out, a phrase used to offend no one…

When we founded the Public Journalism Network, I did not want us to give up the name public journalism, even though, it was a hot button issue and had lots of baggage….

I also pushed for the former AEJMC Civic Journalism Interest Group to become the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group.

If we remove the words citizen, public, civic from the equation, it will be too easy to forget that this is about public, civic, citizen participation. This is not just about helping news operations to get a free staff or even developing better coverage, it’s a way of getting an engaged public to help build a bigger, better and stronger democracy.

Elizabeth Edwards says it all again, but this time about the present campaign coverage. In The New York Times she writes in part:

The problem today unfortunately is that voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do… 

She asks why Fred Thompson, who was a non-candidate from beginning to end, was anointed as a front runner by the news media even before he declared, while Joe Biden got no coverage even though he was in the race with fine ideas.

Her’s is worth a read and when you are there click on her interview too, it’s a good listen.

If the ABC News Presidential Primary debate debacle had happened back then, people like David Brooks and George Stephanopoulos with their now totally neanderthal view of quality news and information, would have had the megaphone and totally trumped any criticism and put the Public Journalism people on the defensive. The movement had the right ideas, but lacked the DNA to make them heard and happen. In a figurative sense public journalism lacked the equivalent of thumbs. But alas it has the thumbs now.

In 2004 I wrote:

The new weblog-infused DNA makes public journalism more nimble and provides it with figurative set of thumbs. It allows public journalism to grasp and do things impossible in the old public journalism… We want to ensure that the … spin doctors do not control our elections..

I do believe if there are any spin doctors out there today thinking like Brooks did in his New York Times column, they are in big trouble. Brooks wrote:

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues. 

This week, some 20 years after the first protests about this inane, neanderthal type of journalism, the spin doctors, Stephanopoulos and Brooks have learned that the people have their own megaphones and that the once struggling public journalism has evolved into the public’s journalism and its new thumbs cannot only grasp, but when push comes to shove, they can gouge.

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that…

Here is my favorite part, Brooks writes:

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues.

Hey David, you forgot to mention that while H. W. Bush was touring the flag factories during the 1988 election the Republicans were also running the racist Willie Horton ads. In fact, it was exactly the very trivia and sleaze that David Brooks thinks is good journalism that led to the public or civic journalism movement. Here is what Charlotte Grimes wrote in a Harvard public policy paper:

The defining event for civic journalism is usually pinned to the 1988 presidential campaign, with its fixation on horse-race polls and focus on Gary Hart’s adultery, George Bush’s visits to flag factories and Willie Horton ads, and Michael Dukakis’ ride in a tank. The campaign was a triumph of trivia, sleaze and manipulation. And it provoked an outburst of soul-searching by many journalists on their role in it.

Apparently it caused no soul searching for David Brooks — he thinks manipulative questions are good journalism. He can make his elitist, well-mannered argument, but on this one I am siding with  my wife, who during the “symbolic issues” questioning Brooks describes above, was screaming: Haven’t they heard how many people died in Iraq today? Ask a question about that. Haven’t they heard how many people are losing their homes today? Ask about that.

David, maybe you haven’t heard, the American people are tired of the trivia oriented, sleazy and manipulative political maneuvering, which you so politely call “symbolic issues.”

Of course, David Brooks, who has sided with the current administration on so many bad policy decisions, would prefer that the real issues get ignored. So David let me ask you a symbolic issues question: Which is more important an American flag lapel pin or the 4,000 plus flag-draped caskets that have come back to America from the Iraq war which you supported? Apparently in a debate you think the former is more important, my wife thinks the latter and so do I and so do most other Americans.

 Help chart the future of local news and community. Apply for a Representative Journalism Fellowship. Leonard Witt, holder of the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, is leading a one-year trial in the college town of Northfield, Minn., 35 miles south of Minneapolis.

The representative journalist will spend a year working with the LocallyGrownNorthfield.org citizen blogger site to report one in-depth story per week on a critical civic or social issue. The reporting will be an open, transparent process where citizens can offer facts, comments, and perspective as the story develops. The final form of the story will be published in digital and print formats. Often, citizens will convene to discuss the findings of the reporting and participate in public meet-ups to discuss the results and next actions. This is not an assignment for an order taker. You must be an enterprising, self starter. You must have a willingness to engage with citizens day in and day out. When needed, you will produce work in multiple formats, including print, web, radio, access-TV and other formats. This will increase civic dialog in a highly educated community of 17,000 people and inspire the community to support and sustain your work. Bringing to this job a magazine-writing sensibility with in-depth reporting experience would be helpful. In the end, we want to talk about Northfield’s strengths and weaknesses, its joys and tribulations, its people and its governmental, civic, educational and economic institutions. Part of our inspiration is the Public Journalism Network’s Charter Declaration, which says in part:

• We believe the diversity and fragmentation of society call for new techniques for storytelling and information-sharing to help individual communities define themselves singularly and as part of the whole set of communities;
• We believe in the value of studying the dynamics of communities and the complexity of public life;
• We believe the best journalism helps people see the world as a whole and helps them take responsibility for what they see.

http://pjnet.org/charter/

Your day-to-day guidance will come from the community and the principals of Locally Grown. As a journalist, however, you will report to one of the nation’s most respected daily newspaper editors. You will receive regular guidance from participants in the Journalism That Matters collaborative and when requested from our highly respected national advisory board. The goal will be to provide high quality, ethically sound news and information, which will enrich the daily and civic lives of the people of Northfield. Email a letter of interest, resume, clips and references to Leonard Witt, lwitt@kennesaw.edu. A personal interview will be required at a mutually convenient location. To start immediately.