In addition to investigative and interpretative reporting, journalists might adopt a new approach to the news--preventive journalism. Preventive journalism would concentrate on news and information that could be used to prevent crises and conditions upon which the mass media thrive. In one area, public health, preventive journalism could be used…

Noting that urbanization is a useful context in which to study the communications system, this paper offers suggestions for newspapers to help them adapt the realities of the urban community in order to redefine news gathering procedures and reorganize newsrooms around the process of urbanization. The paper proposes six areas for both the study…

A comparison is made between the tools of observation and research used by journalists to study society and the media, and the qualitative and clinical research tools used in the social and psychological sciences. The first part of the paper, a journalistic approach to sociology, traces the notion of the sociologist as a super-reporter using…

A survey of 80 city and regional magazines was undertaken to examine articles of media criticism. Of those, 78.5% responded. A total of 420 articles were received and were divided according to subject and geographical distribution. A critical analysis of representative articles determined that they represented significant criticism as defined in…

High school journalists are beginning to look beyond the restrictions of reporting the news of the campus to the larger responsibility of reporting the news of the community. Such a functional approach to news gathering can help school journalists to see the relationship between their school and the community and to discover that learning how to…

Urges urban high school journalists and their advisers to assess the nature of press responsibility to report, interpret, and comment on community problems. (RB)

The predicament of journalism as both an objective observer and a subjective participant is examined in this paper. Among the topics discussed are some basic ethical entanglements involved in the dilemma; regional newspapers that have been legendary for personal-involvement journalism; current evidence that journalistic performance is being…

The "Texas Monthly," a one and a half year old magazine begun in February 1973, provides upper income readers with both booster and critical content. In its first year, the magazine moved from 10,000 circulation to 60,000, from six to thirty-five pages of ads, and from a staff of six to twenty-one. Nearly half of its readers are in the $20,000 and…

The "Chicago School" is the communications legacy left by late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chicago sociologists and journalists. It represents a research tradition of participant-observation and urban journalism concerned with the quality of urban life, as well as a commitment to solving urban problems through civic…

The second of a two part series urging community involvement by the college press. (RB)

An assessment of newspapers from ghost towns in the United States is proposed in this paper as a means of improving the definitions of frontier journalism beyond national time periods, expansion over geographical space, and primitive policy and practices. It is suggested that an evaluation be made by measurement and appraisal of those newspapers'…

It is difficult for newspaper editors and reporters to maintain journalistic objectivity when covering a city's urban structure and development because of their traditional civic involvement and because of a civic ideology shared with urban experts and chamber of commerce boosters. News values and editorial policy are often implicit varieties of…

Magazine journalism is not dead, despite the demise of many giant publications, but is thriving in new forms on the threshold of a new era whose trademark is urbanism. New publications recently appearing are primarily special audience magazines designed to fill the specific information needs of new groupings of readers. Since most of these new…