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Book Review: Stephen Cushion and Justin Lewis (eds) The Rise of 24-Hour Television News: Global Perspectives New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 350 pp. ISBN 978 1 4331 0776 4

These issues do occasionally surface here, but teasingly so. Tanni Haas raises these fundamental conflicts, arguing that blogs need to separate themselves as much as possible from the mainstream corporate news media, if they hope to achieve public journalism’s goals of deliberation and problem-solving across ideological divides. As Haas explains, mainstream journalism glosses over these divides by emphasizing the notion that localities are cohesive communities with common values, rather than places where different communities with conflicting values struggle to coexist. The problem is that public journalism often made the same assumption. Haas’s inclination to avoid the misleading use of community is reminiscent of Schudson’s contribution to 1998’s The Idea of Public Journalism. Although Schudson’s acknowledgement of the historic significance of public journalism is cited several times in Public Journalism 2.0, the remainder of his essay is overlooked. Schudson notes that public journalism’s hope to improve community life tends to forget that community values are defined by the more powerful religious, class, and ethnic groups in ‘the community’. There is precious little consideration in this volume of how citizen journalism responds to this. In his interview Lewis Friedland does question whether citizen journalism is an unabashed good as so often portrayed, or if it is a means by which the actions of a few drive the coverage for many, and Burton St. John notes that participatory journalism can marginalize those who don’t participate. But for the most part the notion of community is assumed here rather than examined, a missed opportunity that must be addressed before citizen journalism can be thoroughly assessed and developed theoretically. Citizen journalism in practice continues to fragment into a multitude of variations. Contributors here examine hundreds of examples of citizen journalism and find a corresponding range of mission statements, standards, and motivations among participants. Yet throughout this range it seems that citizen journalism is shaped by values established by a particular community – in several cases, specifically, the traditional journalistic community. The tension between having a clearly stated mission, and/or journalistic goals, and being open to widespread public participation often compromises one or the other. This often results in fewer sources and less diversity of viewpoints within stories on citizen journalism sites, or sometimes just a lack of participation, leading some efforts to fold prematurely while others cede more responsibility and freedom to contributors. It becomes obvious by the end of Public Journalism 2.0 that, as the editors provocatively claim in the book’s introduction, citizen journalism has not done much to improve public life. Their hope is that it still might, if it looks back to the experience of public journalism. This book is a place to start.