Civic journalism is both a philosophy and a set of values supported by some evolving techniques to reflect both of those in your journalism. At its heart is a belief that journalism has an obligation to public life – an obligation that goes beyond just telling the news or unloading lots of facts. The way we do our journalism affects the way public life goes. Journalism can help empower a community or it can help disable it.
The Pew Center’s beat is to report on various civic journalism experiments around the country, sharing the lessons learned with the rest of the profession and tracking how those experiments are evolving.
The Center does this through its quarterly newsletters, through training publications and videos, through conferences and workshops for journalists and academics, through research and through public speaking. To explore the various ways journalists are doing civic journalism or talking about it, click on the menubar to the left.
What’s New
Four 13-minute videos — perfect for training and discussion.
New video set: “A Journalist’s ToolBox”
Tapping Civic Life is about how to find out what’s happening in your community that should be reflected in your news reports. This Journalist’s Toolbox will help reporters, editors and producers ask better questions, find better sources, discover new stories and report them better.
It draws on the techniques and experiences of working journalists at The Charlotte Observer, The Orange County Register, the Tampa Tribune, the Virginian-Pilot and Tampa’s WFLA-TV. It builds on the work of Richard Harwood, President of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, who has served as a consultant for many news organizations and has conducted Civic Mapping Seminars for the Pew Center for Civic Journalism.