DURING the US presidential election last November the Fox Network decided against a special election night programme and ran Beethoven, the film about a shaggy dog, instead.

Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch and whatever one's view of him, he has rarely failed in judging the public mood.

This was proof, if indeed proof was needed, that the public has become cynical about public affairs, and that despite huge issues facing the American people, debate is not really taking place.

Jay Rosen is professor of journalism at New York University and director of the NYU's Project on Public Life and the Press. He is also the philosopher king of a movement within the US media called public, or civic, journalism.

Rosen and the project he heads is based in NYU, in Greenwich Village. His offices are crammed with papers, articles and books about the crisis in US journalism, its failure to engage with the political system and the unhealthy state of the US newspaper industry.

Public journalism is a response to all those studies. It is a movement trying to re connect journalism to the communities it serves to concentrate on issues rather than on how the political process works - what could be described as the "horse race" element. Above all, it is about questioning whether long held assumptions about journalism hold true any more.

The movement probably goes back to the presidential election of 1988. If there was one event that symbolised that campaign it was Michael Dukakis climbing aboard a tank to illustrate his tough policies on defence. Instead of serious discussion of complex issues, Dukakis was forced to offer a photo opportunity.

That campaign was so "appalling" Rosen says, that journalists began to question their role, asking whether the system they were part of, the media, had ceased to serve the real needs of voters seeking information about politicians and the issues they stood for.

Public journalism has also emerged as a response to complicated political and commercial issues, such as the declining sales of US newspapers. It is, Rosen says, "an experiment a number of people are engaged in to attempt to understand how serious journalism can recover its public, because that is the serious only way you will have a press.

Rosen speaks with passion and not just to visiting journalists. He campaigns for public journalism and is evangelical in a quiet way. He travels the US with his message and has published extensively.

Rosen makes a distinction between journalism and media. Media he does not worry about. It will survive. But "this public art that we call journalism - this democratic practice, as academics might say - has its own future and what I am interested in is where is it going to be found."

Within some newspaper companies, it might be found by seeking a stronger connection to community and public life.

"MY belief is that a form of public journalism will be put into play by others if the American press decides it's is not the right thing for them." He suggests journalism can find outlets other than just through major media organisations. The Internet is one such example. "Some form of public interest media is coming, along with a lot of other media that is very different from traditional journalism."

Some foundations are now funding public journalism projects and the Boston Globe has been involved in public journalism projects since 1993, following a suggestion from the Pointer Institute for Media Studies in Florida and a local radio station in Boston. The idea was the Globe would join with the station in a project that would focus campaign coverage on issues and involve citizens.

The project, was called "The People's Voice". Rosen was involved in planning this project.

It involved taking polls, holding focus group meetings and finding out what people wanted to know and believed the issues should be. The results of the research were published each week. People were also asked to submit questions to candidates that were put to them by journalists and in other instances meetings were held at which candidates, including Senator Ted Kennedy, faced a panel of ordinary people. The meetings were reported in the newspaper and ran live on radio.

In Boston one of the effects was that traditional responses from politicians did not work with ordinary people. It meant that the media realised there were areas that concerned ordinary people, that had not been identified by journalists. The election project changed the way the newspaper's specialists responded to local issues and even now the newspaper organised its "beat" system, so reporters could respond to issues.

Other projects included the Detroit Free Press's project, "Children First, Making Young Lives Safer" which focused on violence against children and sought solutions to improve the lives of Michigan's children.

The Rochester Democrat in Rochester New York, looked at the issue of education. With its radio station partner it investigated not just what was wrong with the school system, but how education was funded in other cities and looked at what alternatives for funding were available.

At one level public journalism is a simple statement, saying journalists should be in touch with the communities they serve. But the concept is also about democracy as some level, and journalism's role in a democracy, and that requires journalists to think about what they are trying to accomplish.

Of the top newspapers, only the Boston Globe has been involved in a public journalism project.

Editors of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the news weeklies have interpreted public journalism very differently from editors outside the major US cities who were working on public journalism projects. Articles have appeared in the Times, the Post and the New Yorker warning journalists to be on their guard, accusing enthusiasts for public journalism of having abandoned professional judgments by turning over the news agenda to readers for essentially commercial reasons. It has also been suggested that such journalists are becoming community activists and dumping the time honoured journalistic codes of objectivity and neutrality.

According to Rosen, the elite press are suspicious of ideas that come from the margins.

The elite press cannot believe an idea has come from outside Washington and New York, because they believe journalists who are any good would be in Washington or New York. "This is not an idea communicated downwards from a professional hierarchy, like a Pulitzer, but is an idea coming up from below," Rosen says.

"This was not a gimmick dreamt up by MBAs in Wall Street, trying to find ways to increase circulation. It was out there with its philosophy, its history, the 1988 campaign the experience of editors who said we have got to go in a different direction."

Rosen is now teaching public journalism: "We are saying that journalism only exists within a culture, in fact, within a community. It might be the community of the nation, but for most journalists it is more local. Your craft has meaning because the civic culture of that place has meaning, it is not the other way round. If that community cannot find in your journalism something useful, something they recognise as theirs, some story they can share, then you have failed as a journalist, even if you have lived up to your own professional code. That is what public journalism is saying."