When Dr. Louise Reid Ritchie worked as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, she also coordinated a community service project at the newspaper called the Gift of Reading, which was responsible for collecting and distributing more than 500,000 books to underprivileged children in Detroit. Ritchie said she "tutored kids and wrote articles soliciting books and supplies for area schools from readers."

Ritchie is now spearheading a similar type of project as an associate professor of journalism and advisor of the student newspaper at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, FL. With a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust, the school's biweekly student newspaper, The Famuan, devotes a "FAMU First" page to covering social and political issues both on campus and in the surrounding community.

"It was well designed with a Kente cloth-type border to give it its own identity. It stood out and students noticed it," Ritchie said. Student-written stories have ranged from examinations of the homeless and battered women to the NAACP and local elections. These articles also pointedly featured problem-solving recommendations to alleviate some of the conditions that were reported.

Getting Involved

Through articles on the FAMU First page, Ritchie said students were encouraged to vote and volunteer for community service work. "Every week we featured a student, faculty member or administrator who was doing off-campus volunteer work and gave information on how to get involved," Ritchie said.

This style of reporting that FAMU's journalism students, are learning is called 'Public Journalism' -- a movement that is sweeping the news industry. Not only are newspapers experimenting with public journalism, but they are working with colleges to develop public journalism projects.

Although it is still evolving, most industry experts would agree that the difference between traditional reporting and public journalism is emotion -- the reporter does not aim for detachment or objectivity. The reporter, in effect, takes responsibility for the immunity where he or she works, plays a role in finding solutions to community problems and determines, through discussion forums and surveys, what readers want to read.