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The present study revisits the relationship between the civic duty to keep informed and news media use in the new media environment, then discovers that the civic duty to keep informed functions as an intervening variable between education and news media use. Of particular theoretical interest is that the civic duty to keep informed was found to be a consequence of education and a determinant of use of new news media, specifically cable news and national news on the Internet, news media that did not exist when the civic duty to keep informed was first measured using a Guttman scale more than twenty years ago. The civic duty to keep informed was also found to have the same strong monotonic relationship to traditional sources of news, newspapers, and network television, as was found in numerous settings more than twenty years ago. Moreover, one new relationship emerged here that was not found in earlier years, a clear relationship between a civic duty to keep informed and use of local TV news. The demographic patterns found in the new media environment among citizens in this southwestern metropolitan area—strong monotonic, or near monotonic, links between the civic duty to keep informed and education, income, and age—replicate the patterns found in earlier years. For education and income, the patterns are very similar. For age, the pattern is even stronger than in previous years.

After an earlier study found the public's dominant expectation of the press was to be a good neighbor & not a watchdog, the present study set out to determine what being a good neighbor meant for different segments of the public. The analysis revealed that being a good neighbor was strongly valued by women, African Americans, & Hispanics. Many in these groups wanted more coverage of education, health & medicine, science, & arts & culture. The segment of the public that expected the press to be a good neighbor was concerned about crime & social issues, & television was viewed as best able to address these concerns. This study fills a void in the empirical public journalism literature that has primarily focused on journalists' opinions, the content of public journalism projects, & the impact of public journalism projects on the public. Unlike most of the previous literature, which has ignored the public's opinions about journalistic practices associated with public journalism, the present study connects the public's expectations of local news as a good neighbor with techniques that epitomize public journalism, that is, caring about the community, reporting on interesting people & groups, understanding the local community, & offering solutions. Tables, References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2006 by the President and the Fellows of Harvard College.]

After an earlier study found the public's dominant expectation of the press was to be a good neighbor and not a watchdog, the present study set out to determine what being a good neighbor meant for different segments of the public. The analysis revealed that being a good neighbor was strongly valued by women, African Americans, and Hispanics. Many in these groups wanted more coverage of education, health and medicine, science, and arts and culture. The segment of the public that expected the press to be a good neighbor was concerned about crime and social issues, and television was viewed as best able to address these concerns. This study fills a void in the empirical public journalism literature that has primarily focused on journalists' opinions, the content of public journalism projects, and the impact of public journalism projects on the public. Unlike most of the previous literature, which has ignored the public's opinions about journalistic practices associated with public journalism, the present study connects the public's expectations of local news as a good neighbor with techniques that epitomize public journalism, that is, caring about the community, reporting on interesting people and groups, understanding the local community, and offering solutions.

A survey found the public does not strongly endorse traditional journalism norms of watchdog and rapid reporting. Furthermore, when opinions of survey respondents and journalists were compared, survey respondents were significantly more likely to say providing a community forum, a public journalism principle, was extremely important. African Americans, Hispanics, women, and adults with less education and income strongly endorsed the public journalism principle of offering solutions to problems. A factor analysis of thirteen public and traditional journalism roles and characteristics revealed four dimensions of journalism as perceived by the public: good neighbor, watchdog, unbiased and accurate, and fast.