Romy Elusfa, a Cotabato City-based journalist and founding member of the Federation of Reporters for Empowerment and Equality (FREE) Mindanao, said "They (journalists) do not bother to explore and probe the underlying issues, the quest for peace, our efforts at development and how there are other voices out there aside from the spokesmen of the military and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front."

The two journalists (who later formed the Center for Community Journalism and Development to spearhead the public journalism movement) were then doing research on local initiatives and good governance practices for a book on decentralization. They were surprised to discover how very little, if any, of the travails and triumphs of local communities have seen print or been aired on radio and television. It was as if the news media had simply turned their backs on what clearly were stories of success and hope, failures and problems. More importantly these were stories of people trying to reconnect with public life, of voices saying that they are charting their own destinies and that could have inspired others to do the same.

So it was not by accident that the concept of public journalism in the Philippines began to slowly and painstakingly take root. It began as modest experiments in local communities to help citizens understand the impact of the news on their lives, how journalism can provide opportunities for community debates to take place, and how they can likewise actively participate in building the news agenda, an agenda that has always been set by journalists in the newsroom.

Which brings to mind what Daniel Yankelovich said in his book Coming to Public Judgment, allow me to paraphrase him: "Journalists are expert at agenda setting. We have so much fun with it that we dash around raising consciousness here, raising consciousness there, then rush on to raise consciousness somewhere else, leaving all previous crises unattended."

Public journalism goes beyond mere agenda setting. It is an evolving principle, a philosophy, a framework that encourages and provides a forum for public debate over issues that are most important to citizens and how they can address these. It also requires that when these public debates do occur, all the voices of the community be heard.

It is active in the sense that civic engagement is expected of all citizens and that "urban problems, for example, cannot be solved by news organizations or local elites acting on others' behalf. Common problems require common discussion and common solutions." (Lewis Friedland, National Civic Review)

An editor in the Visayas in the Central Philippines believes that public journalism works because the local media every day impact on every aspect of community life. She said: "Public journalism works well in local communities because members of the media are also looked up to as citizen leaders and are seen as stakeholders in community life."

However, journalists are not "civic engineers" whose only role is to build community. Their main job is to observe and report with a certain degree of detachment. But public journalism requires that they re-examine that role, that they should challenge communities to seize opportunities for charting their own future. Public journalism is reengineering what the news media do to shape them into more useful tools for dynamic citizenship.

But as in any form of change, there is also resistance to public journalism. Some see it as contributing to the waning of journalistic enterprise. Other journalists fear it is a reinvention of the Marcos-era "dev-com" method of propagandizing through the news media. Still others think it is nothing but advocacy journalism that takes up a particular cause.

The concept is being debated still.

But it would do well to remember that in doing public journalism we simply need to hold on to the basics like fairness, accuracy, balance, timeliness, and objectivity, as in the kind of journalism that we are most familiar with. But then again for good measure, we should throw in such ingredients like stewardship, justice and humanity sautéed with a dollop of ethics and a dash of human values.

I would like to believe that public journalism goes beyond the Five Ws, and One H. Rather it asks the question, So What? After I have written the story, so what? What happens next? What can citizens do as a result of that story? What do I care?

In the Philippine setting, the early experiments in doing public journalism worked within the framework of the So What question: What citizens can do to reclaim their rightful participation especially in governance to help shape viable and livable communities. What newspapers and other news media should be doing to capture the different voices of the community. What avenues for citizen engagement should be explored by journalists.

Many community journalists around the Philippines have shown that public journalism is worth a try despite the inherent challenges it brings. One of these is how to tell stories differently and how to focus on the different but interconnected layers of public life.

Other public journalism initiatives, like in the island of Palawan, actively engaged local communities in the participatory management and preservation of the environment. A series of community dialogues initiated by the weekly Bandillo ng Palawan resulted in the formation of a citizens' environment task force to work for the declaration of the Estrella Falls, a majestic cascade located in a remote inland village, as a protected area.

In the island of Mindanao, which many of you probably read about as a place of never-ending conflict and mayhem, (nothing could be further from the truth) journalists felt there was little understanding of why those pocket wars keep on erupting. Media attention was focused on conflict alone, viewed from the perspective of the war correspondent, relying most assuredly in the old newsroom adage that if it bleeds, it leads.