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From the late 1980s through the 1990s, a number of newspapers experimented with ways to involve readers more actively in creating news. These experiments in what has become known as public journalism surfaced primarily at midsized daily papers in Kansas, Minnesota, and North Carolina. Davis Merritt, editor and vice president of the Wichita Eagle, one paper that conducted such experiments, described public journalism with these words:

Public journalism emerged as a way to involve citizens and journalists more centrally in civic and political life. Newspaper editors and reporters interested in addressing citizen alienation—and reporter cynicism—began devising ways to engage both groups in conversation about the news. To draw the public into discussions about community priorities, these journalists began sponsoring forums where citizens were invited to have a voice in the news that directly affected them. Reporters then published stories framed from the citizens’ perspectives and created citizen task forces to keep the conversation going about the issues most important to the community.

Public journalism did not directly transform the industry, but an extension of the movement, citizen or community journalism (see Chapter 3), has changed the role of some in the news audience from readers and viewers to actual participants in journalism. As members of a grassroots movement, activist amateurs and concerned citizens use the Internet and blog sites to disseminate news and information. In fact, with devastating cutbacks in newsroom staffs in recent years, many professional news organizations are now using some of their readers/viewers and prominent community citizens to do work that journalists used to do.