The Project on Public Life and the Press (PPLP) was established in June 1993 through the Kettering Foundation of Dayton, Ohio, with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Funding also came from New York University and the American Press Institute. The project was originally funded for two years, and when the grant expired in 1995, it was renewed for another two years; the project ended in the summer of 1997. Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, was PPLP's project director while Lisa Austin, a former staff writer at the Wichita Eagle newspaper, worked as research director.
The project was designed to develop and promote a journalistic idea called public journalism (in some contexts this was called civic journalism), which emerged in the early 1990s in response to perceived citizen disengagement from political and civic life. The notion behind public journalism was for news organizations to reconnect with their communities and foster public discourse. PPLP sought to develop and publicize this movement by discussing, evaluating, and promoting public journalism; by becoming an authoritative source of information on all aspects of public journalism; and by serving as a vehicle through which individuals in the journalism community could connect with each other. It accomplished this through seminars, research, and public discourse.
One of PPLP's primary activities was its seminars. From November 1993 to June 1995, PPLP held three seminars per academic year, in November, March, and June. From June 1995 to June 1997, seminars were held twice a year, in the summer and winter. Most seminars were held at the American Press Institute in Reston, Virginia. The January 1996 seminar was held in Austin, Texas, in conjunction with the National Issues Convention, a citizen's forum sponsored in part by the Kettering Foundation. PPLP Seminars were intended to serve as a forum where journalists and academics could learn about public journalism, discuss its philosophy and practice, and generate ideas for new journalistic initiatives. The eventual goal was to go beyond the experimental stage and integrate public journalism into everyday reporting.
Throughout the mid-1990s, news organizations across the United States implemented public journalism initiatives. These took the form of town meetings, citizen polls, and newspaper articles discussing and encouraging citizen involvement in civic issues such as elections, education, and neighborhood crime. PPLP tracked the projects, actively soliciting clippings, project summaries, and supporting documentation from news organizations regarding their initiatives. PPLP then published and shared with participating organizations reports summarizing these examples of public journalism, including the groundbreaking work of the Wichita Eagle, edited by Davis “Buzz” Merritt. Merritt was a prominent figure in the public journalism movement and a central force in the PPLP. Other notable projects were those of the Charlotte Observer and the Akron Beacon-Journal; Akron won the Pulitzer Prize in April 1995 for a series of articles written as a public journalism project.
In August 1994, PPLP published a short pamphlet entitled, “Doing Public Journalism: A Guide for Journalists,” as a means of disseminating information about public journalism to editors who weren't familiar with the term. This was later published as a book authored by Arthur Charity. PPLP also published and collected research papers written by professors of journalism, including the case study “A Public View of Public Journalism,” written for PPLP by Cheryl Gibbs, a professor at Earlham College.
Once it gained recognition as an idea, public journalism became widely discussed and debated in the journalism community. Rosen and others associated with PPLP played a prominent role in this debate, defending and promoting public journalism through speeches, panel discussions, journal articles, and newspaper editorials. The project collected writings and speeches commenting on the topic of public journalism, whether positive or negative.
After the Project on Public Life and the Press ended in 1997, Rosen, Austin, and others continued the work of disseminating information about public journalism and its accomplishments. Rosen incorporated information from the PPLP files into his book What Are Journalists For? published in 1999 by Yale University. In 1998, Austin assisted Lewis Friedland, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in designing the Civic Practices Network website (www.cpn.org) which included reports (referred to as case studies), bibliographies, and syllabi produced and collected by PPLP.
