The Historiography of Public Interest Journalism
Perhaps you regard public interest journalism as a process involving the writing and re-writing of history as it occurs.
Initial assessments of potentially significant, new events should always be questioned carefully.
Significance must be examined contextually, through the most relevant expertise and experience.
An event is significant if it is likely to have long-term consequences for the people directly experiencing it.
If decisions associated with events are also likely to have long-term consequences for the people directly affected by the decisions, the decisions are political.
The process of making those decisions is also political.
Political decision-makers usually want history to be recorded in their favour.
The job of a public interest journalist is, instead, to record the truth
of history as it occurs, or at least to do so very soon afterwards.
Once an initial assessment of events is made, an initial assessment of the subsequent, political decisions, is also necessary.
Then the process of re-writing history as it occurs becomes most necessary.
Public interest journalism has much in common with the historiography of art history.
What, then, is the historiography of public interest journalism?
What have you been learning through Very Necessary News, and how?
What have you been learning through Civility Today, and how?
How do you usually learn about public interest journalism?
And how do you usually learn about history, and the future?
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