The Making of Citizen Journalists

I’m speaking this afternoon as Co-chair of the new Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council and as a theorist and practitioner of the public work framework of citizenship and democracy.

After ten years as the leading organization in America building respectful relationships across partisan divides, Braver Angels developed a new large mission for its work in September, 2025: the promotion of “courageous citizenship:" the willingness to take risks in action with other citizens for public-spirited purpose.

To help advance this goal, it created a Civic Scholars Council of twenty members bringing together leading scholars and reflective practitioners to define and shape the meaning and practice of courageous citizenship in modern American life and to work for culture change to make it an honored norm. We have sponsored outstanding papers, including a number with the public work approach, several of which address the formation of “citizen professionals,” professionals who learn to work with fellow citizens not on or for them.

Such an understanding of professional work speaks to the feeling of crisis of agency and morale in many professionals who feel like “cogs in a machine,” including this week’s crisis for journalists and journalism in the wake of Donald Trump’s banning three news services from White House coverage. I am delighted to have many journalism faculty and students here. You have the opportunity to take leadership in professional challenges that are widespread.

The main response of journalists to the Trump shutdown has been to emphasize independent journalism and freedom of the press. This response is understandable but not enough. A larger understanding of journalists as fellow citizens is suggested by the new self-description of the Christian Science Monitor Weekly, a leading voice of quality journalism.

The Monitor Weekly amplifies and clarifies how we deliver on the Monitor’s purpose, to benefit humanity by reporting what is happening in the world and why – and how this information matters to you. To achieve this, we will do three things.

• We will challenge conventional thinking. As forces from politics to social media try to break us into competing tribes – political, racial, or economic – together we’ll rethink the question “Who is my neighbor?”

• We will listen to you, our readers. What issues concern you and your neighbors? What information is useful to you? Inspire us with what inspires you. Together, we can build a community of people who ask more from their news.

• We will change how you see news. News must be accurate and trustworthy, but facts alone can miss the bigger story – the story of what touches and connects us, energizes us, impels us to reimagine what can be. We are much better than much of today’s news portrays us to be. The Monitor will have the courage to look into both the best and the worst in us – and not to blame, but to demand better.

Journalism can be a force for good, for inspiration and progress. But only if we all make it so.

Today I begin with traditions of what I call civic journalism which feed the Monitor’s aim to work with readers as civic partners. I describe older traditions of civic journalism and how they were eroded with the spread of what can be called “technocratic creep,” a term I borrow from my South African colleague Xolela Mangcu.

I conclude with a story illustrating the power of journalism to amplify and shape a story of courageous citizenship: the Biblical narrative of Nehemiah used by civic-minded journalism in America and beyond.

“Back to the people” journalism

To return to the formative period of civic journalism is to go back to young intellectuals and professionals involved in what Lewis Feuer called the “back to the people” movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

Notable parts of higher education, including state universities like Ball State whose precursor was founded in 1899, were sites for the “back to the people” movement. Colleges with public purpose and their expressions in different professions recognized that higher education had a key role in shaping the identities and practices of civic-minded professionals.

The University of Michigan in those years illustrated. James B. Angell, Michigan’s president from 1871 to 1909, believed that public universities needed to both embody and shape the dynamics of a changing democracy. He built on the pioneering admission of women in 1870 to create a “democratic atmosphere” on campus, full of debate, discussion, experimentalism, open play of different viewpoints and wide engagement with the society. The seminar as a teaching method was increasingly used to engage students in interactive education. Students were able to take a wide selection of courses. The Michigan curriculum also emphasized “science” with democratic overtones, far different than “science” has come to convey in recent decades.

In Science, Democracy, and the American University, a masterful reinterpretation of American intellectual history from the Civil War to the Cold War, Andrew Jewett demonstrates that democracy-oriented philosophers of science like John Dewey and William James were not isolated figures but part of a movement of what Jewett calls “scientific democrats.” All saw their major contributions as promoting democratic values and practices. “When these early scientific democrats spoke of the ‘scientific method’, they referred to a particular style of free and open dialogue [more than] a set of empirical techniques”, Jewett writes. “They portrayed scientific communication as involving no imposition of coercive authority…the scientist’s humanitarian approach to communication acknowledged that lay citizens were free beings in control of their own destinies.” Scientists saw themselves as part of Jane Addams’ “common lot”, sharing the fate and participating in the struggles of their fellow citizens.

Democratic professional practices took a variety of other forms. Thus, for instance, public and land grant institutions of higher education were called “democracy’s colleges” in the twentieth century, as the intellectual historian Scott Peters has detailed. Many democratic, civic-minded academics and professionals stressed contributions to rural democracy through research, teaching, and sustained partnerships with communities.

The Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs began our civic engagement efforts in 1987 with the aim of revitalizing the citizen professionals, free space qualities, and civic identity of local institutions. I had seen these qualities in local businesses, churches and other settings full of public spirit as a teenager and young adult working for Martin Luther King’s organization. A largely forgotten history that I have recently discovered is the story of thousands of Rosenwald schools and libraries which were centers of power and civic development and organized by a remarkable network of Black teachers, called Jeanes Teachers. They were striking examples of citizen teachers, as Robert Ceresa, a colleague on the Council, has shown in his essay published in the Harvard Social Impact Review.

The idea that professionals’ work should aim at developing the productive and political capacities of people and communities, not provide dependency-creating services, was illustrated in Harlem on a large scale. In the 1920s and 1930s during the African American cultural movement called the Harlem Renaissance, professionals of many backgrounds and disciplines – journalists, artists and poets, labor organizers, teachers, ministers, musicians, and others -- saw themselves as having a civic obligation to develop the capacities of “the common people” and make them visible in the larger society.Civic-minded professionals in Harlem helped to create and sustain free spaces ranging from newspapers and radio stations to jazz spots like the Cotton Club to churches, labor study groups, locally owned businesses, union locals, the Harlem library, schools, and theater projects. These settings mingled with fluid boundaries to create vital local public culture where people learned skills of dealing with others who were different. They developed public identities and a sense of their impact on America.

Popular politics had a local dimension which stressed the democratic possibilities in diverse communities. This was codified in the first book in 1946 by community organizing pioneer Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals. Alinsky, distilling wisdom from many kinds of organizing in the Great Depression, emphasized the need for popular organizations to be rooted in and work through local community life. The organizer “should have a familiarity with the most obvious parts of a people’s traditions”. Organizers would often disagree with local traditions or groups. But efforts at democratic change must always be undertaken in the terms and histories given. “The starting of a People’s Organization is not a matter of personal choice. You start with the people, their traditions, their prejudices, their habits, their attitudes, and all of those other circumstances that make up their lives”. To know a community “is to understand the traditions of a people is . . . to ascertain those social forces which argue for constructive democratic action as well as those which obstruct democratic action.”

Such themes animated civic-minded journalism during the Great Depression, turning local organizing efforts to address challenges like unemployment, soil erosion, and poverty into a vision for the American future as “the century of the common man,” the title of a speech by Vice President Henry Wallace in 1942. Wallace’s vision countered top-down futures like that of Life publisher Henry Luce, who called for an “American Century” when America would dominate the world.

The Depression-era journalist Ernie Pyle pioneered civic journalism by reporting on the lives and organizing of everyday citizens. As Susan Faludi conveyed, Pyle’s reporting fed the narrative of the 20^th Century as the Century of the Common Man. It emerged from years of his stories about the struggles and lives of everyday citizens. As Faludi puts it, during the Great Depression

“in his columns he had crafted…while touring small-town and rural America chronicling the quiet struggles of Alabama sharecroppers and Mississippi shrimp-canary workers, Oklahoma ditch diggers and Great Plains Dust Bowl farmers trying to survive the nation’s economic devastation…an [alternative] model… in which ‘no longer was competition considered superior to cooperation.”

These shaped Pyle’s approach from the front lines of World War II which wove together as a compelling narrative of “GI Joe”, everyday Americans whose quiet heroism and cooperative ethos came into their own in the battle between democracy and fascism. Pyle contrasted GI Joe with celebrity “Fly Boys”, fighter pilots from economic and professional elites.

The Triumph of the Fly Boys

In the decades after the war, Fly Boys gained the upper hand. An elite movement of intellectuals and professionals resulted in the rise of experts on top.

In 1902 Jane Addams had warned a class of experts who saw themselves outside the life of the people. In her view, detached expertise reinforced existing hierarchies based on wealth and power and created new forms of hierarchical power. Her warnings applied to a group of architects of a new way of seeing the world that replaced “politics” with scientific administration of the state. Over time expert claims to unique authority, based on “objective” ways of knowing, reshaped the nature of science, academic life, politics – and journalism.

As Andrew Jewett describes, “The scientists who powerfully shaped the national discourse on science in the middle years of the twentieth century drew a sharp line between science and society,” says Jewett. “They portrayed science as utterly deaf to human concerns and sought to insulate the research process [as]…a space untouchable by both the state and the horizontal communication between citizens.”

A shriveled view of the citizen accompanied this conception of professional practice. The general population were reconceived as consumers serviced by experts, while citizenship itself was narrowed to practices like obeying the law, having legal status, voting, and petitioning government for redress. Professional education played a key role. As the historian Thomas Bender has shown, the civic practices and identities of professions like teaching, journalism, business and others once a larger public, democratic meaning to governance and community building, rooted professionals it in local civic cultures. This largely disappeared. Training in professions such as teaching and ministry lost connections to the real life, history, and cultures of actual places. The result was a shift from “civic” to “disciplinary professionalism.”

Expert-knows-best dynamics included journalism, as David Thelen shows in his study, Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television. The new media, no less than other professionals, came to see “the people” needy and deficient, even dangerous when activated, easily manipulated. “On the one side were the professionals with the training and insider credentials that entitled them to interpret events. On the other side was everyone else…who viewed ‘the news’ as amusement.” Thelen quotes John Corry of the New York Times to make the point that shrinking views of the citizen would “emerge more clearly when the evening news broadcasts and other television programs determine which ones were important.” The journalistic establishment saw “the American people” as almost entirely concerned with entertainment. “Having stripped from viewers the capacity to think or speak except when spoken to, journalists then complained that ‘audiences lose the habit of memory and let slip their hold on the ladders of history and geography’, in Lewis Lapham’s words.”

Democracy reduced to elections and state-centered politics generated the major strand of liberalism in the last century, what I called “mass politics” in a Kettering Foundation working paper, Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert. Mass politics stresses universal claims, distributive justice, individual rights, and a consumer view of the citizen. A one-dimensional view of the person took hold among opinion elites—ordinary people (if not themselves) are singularly concerned with how to meet needs and wants, not with questions of life purpose, creativity, civic contribution, or meaningful work. Mass politics crystallized in the mobilizing approaches to citizen action and elections that emerged in the 1970s. Mobilizing techniques included the robo-calls, direct mail fundraising, internet mobilizations, and other mass communications methods, taking “us versus them” to new levels of psychological sophistication. They use a formula: find a target or enemy to demonize, stir up emotion with inflammatory language using a script that defines the issue in good-versus-evil terms and shuts down critical thought, and convey the idea that those who champion the victims will come to the rescue.

This legacy is one dynamic that Braver Angels addresses. And such polarizing techniques spread across the world with global telecommunications. In the US, they dominate across the political spectrum. Mobilizing won victories for disadvantaged groups in a difficult political culture. But it is a “slash and burn” approach, which ravages the civic culture.

Against the grain of us versus them politics, citizen politics survived in the 1970s and beyond and is gaining international expression this year.

A return to citizen politics

I want to touch on what can be called citizen politics, widely owned and practiced not simply in government and by professional politicians but also by lay citizens. Such politics negotiates different, sometimes conflicting interests and views in order to address common challenges. It has been flourishing in community organizing in networks like the Industrial Areas Foundation. Often it does not achieve consensus. But citizen politics contains conflicts, generates common work on challenges, and achieves broadly beneficial outcomes.

Such organizing is based on a narrative view that recognizes each person as a unique, meaning-making, and immensely complex individual. It involves developing public skills. Members of broad-based community organizations learn to understand the stories and motivations of others of different income, religious, cultural, or partisan political backgrounds through what are called “one-on-ones”, the foundational method of citizen politics. People learn to think in strategic ways and in the longer term. They pay close attention to local cultures and networks. All this is not to do away with conflict, but to use conflict for productive ends and public purposes.

The Nehemiah Homes Project was a dramatic illustration of citizen politics and also of the power of public story-telling in which journalists played key roles.

The Nehemiah Project was undertaken by East Brooklyn Churches (EB), an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a community organization based largely among African American churches in impoverished neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. The group began modestly in 1978 with a small group of Catholic and Protestant clergy and laity to discuss the formidable array of community issues they faced. They followed the organizing dictum to start with small "winnable" issues around which poor and powerless people can experience confidence-building success and develop clear-eyed assessment of risks. EBC members forced clean-ups of rotten meat in local food stores, pressured the city to install hundreds of street signs, forced renovation of local parks and worked together to clean up vacant lots. Slowly they forged a sense of solidarity and potency. "We are not a grassroots organization", thundered the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, a key leader in the organization, at one rally. "Grass roots are shallow roots. Grass roots are fragile roots. Our roots are deep roots. Our roots have fought for existence in the shattered glass of East New York."

At the beginning of our work at the Humphrey Institute in 1987, I researched and wrote about EBC and their initiative to stabilize the whole community through thousands of homes affordable for low-incoming working families. Their effort shifted from a housing project to a vibrant project of community renewal when they made parallels to the Biblical story of Nehemiah.

Their ambition to build thousands of houses affordable for working class and low- income people dwarfed not only their own prior activities but any other low-income housing development initiative in the country. EBC turned to housing out of the conviction that only widespread home ownership could create the kind of “roots” essential for renewed community pride and freedom from fear. Teaming up with a well-known newspaper columnist I.D. Robbins, they adopted his controversial argument that for half the cost of high-density, high rise apartments, it would be possible to build large numbers of single-family homes that could create stable neighborhood anchors in East Brooklyn.

EBC named their undertaking the “Nehemiah Project,” recalling the Old Testament prophet sent back to Jerusalem by the King of Persia in 420 to lead in the rebuilding of the city after the Babylonian captivity. Nehemiah held together a motley crew – 40 different groups are named, including merchants, priests, governors, members of the perfume and goldsmiths’ guilds, and women. All participated in the work, undertaking tasks appropriate to their skills and backgrounds. At one point Nehemiah organized a great assembly to call to account nobles making excessive profit from the poor. As the Jewish people rebuilt their walls, they renewed their purpose and identity.

EBC envisioned a similar process of cultural renewal. Although the group had won financial commitments from an impressive array of backers, the project’s success depended on city funding for a loan pool. They had been stymied by the New York mayor Edward Koch, who refused to meet with them citing a negative experience with a sister organization in the Queens area of New York.

Leaders held a press conference in 1982 to publicize his indecision and declare their hopes. That evening, the local CBS television affiliate broadcast clips of the desolate area, and a reporter told the story of the organizing which had led to the plan for low income houses. Meanwhile an announcer read from the Book of Nehemiah: “You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer disgrace”.

The CBS story was democratic journalism at its best, practiced by citizen journalists who told an inspiring, energizing story and activated the viewing audience on an enormous scale. The following day, in an expedient about-face, Mayor Koch declared himself the new Nehemiah and pledged his support for the effort. He gave Nehemiah speeches for several months and participated in the groundbreaking. Poles and Italians and other ethnics from Catholic parishes in Queens also joined an interfaith religious celebration at the event. More than six thousand homes have been built. Nehemiah homes became the backbone of community revitalization.

Decades later, their work and the impact of Nehemiah Project received extensive coverage on CBS Morning News September 11, 2022 and again this year, in 2026.

Nehemiah story goes global

The Nehemiah story connects community organizing 40 years ago and Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The story – and the work of IAF – were featured in a Vatican forum for Catholic leaders and others from North and South America on September 12^th of this month.

The Pope’s encyclical calls for the Nehemiah way as the path to taming the dangers of Artificial Intelligence and other threats facing humanity. It contrasts the bottom up, pluralist approach of Nehemiah with the story of Babel, a top-down effort that sought to impose uniformity on a multitude of peoples and resulted in disaster. Magnifica Humanitas lays out the challenge before humanity.

The September 12th Forum began two years ago, fourth in a series of meetings begun by Pope Francis and continued by Pope Leo. These brought together Catholic leaders, business representatives, development banks, labor groups, universities and community organizations from the Americas. Leo stressed the importance of a “culture of negotiation” in his address, resembling language of IAF. He said, “Your presence expresses a desire to continue a dialogue that can lead to more humane, sustainable and solidarity-based models of development, capable of protecting the dignity of every person and paying particular attention to those at risk of being left at the margins.”

The Catholic newspaper America reported on the meeting, stressing Leo’s proposal for culture of negotiation among diverse groups and a different kind of politics far beyond government to meet the challenges of AI and other questions. The paper quoted Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO: “To me, it is incredibly impressive to see the power that the church has to convene. You would normally not have people in a room like we have [at this event] without the personal intervention of leaders in the church saying, ‘We need you here.’”  She added, “The encyclical ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ is to me the most powerful signal that you can send because who has more authority to speak on the dignity of people and making sure that we are creating systems around the world that put people at the center, and if we’re taking on big challenges, that we have to have people at the table who are often voiceless.” 

Indeed, “voiceless people” were present, the paper also reported. Their concerns were represented by members of the “popular movements” (grassroots movements) and by leaders of community organizations including Joe Rubio, national co-director of the Industrial Areas Foundation.  Rubio told America: “While the session tackled such dire topics as climate change, the technological upheaval of A.I., and extreme wealth inequality, the main challenge was to build trusting relationships across sectors which don’t traditionally collaborate.”  Moreover, he said, “the promise of on-going social dialogue is that it will stir our imagination to create the power to bring about a just society,” and he underlined that “most fundamental to its success will be the inclusion of those who are bearing the sheer brunt of the profound dislocations, vulnerable workers, immigrants, and communities on the margins. The recognition that community organizing belongs in the discussion is vital.” 

It was recognized, as was the power of the Nehemiah story to frame a different view of the future and the role of everyday citizens. Also clear throughout has been the power of communicators and journalists to be courageous citizens, bringing such stories to public life bringing such stories to public life.