Boston University to Host Batten 2000 Awards

“Civic Journalism: The Public, the Media and the Campaign” will be the topic of next year’s Batten Awards and Symposium, which will be hosted by the Journalism Department of Boston University’s College of Communications in April.

The symposium is held in conjunction with the annual $25,000 Batten Awards for Excellence in Civic Journalism. The award is named in honor of the late James K. Batten, former chairman of Knight Ridder Inc., who pioneered some of the early thinking in civic journalism.

“Boston, the birthplace of American democracy and the nation’s first newspaper, is the perfect setting for the millennial year symposium on civic journalism,” William Ketter, chairman of B.U.’s Journalism Department, said in his proposal.

“… Boston is also a media focal point in the presidential primary campaign because of the importance of New Hampshire and Massachusetts to the candidate-selection process.”

Next year’s symposium will seek to examine how news organizations served the public interest during the primary season; how they are planning to cover the general election; and whether the public perception of the information it needs to make election-day judgments converges or diverges from media assumptions.

The symposium would return civic journalism to some of its earliest roots – experimenting with making election coverage more useful and relevant to citizens. The Boston proposal was selected by the Batten Award Advisory Board, which vetted the competing proposals.

Supporting B.U.’s proposal are many of the region’s media organizations, including The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, The Patriot Ledger, the Cape Cod Times, the Springfield Union-News, Community Newspaper Co., the Concord (N.H.) Monitor, WBZ-TV/AM, WCVB-TV, WHDH-TV, WGBH-TV and WBUR public radio.