Robert D. Fowler Endowed Chair

The endowed chair is held by Prof. Leonard Witt. In 2002, the focus of the chair was decided by the Communication Department as to advance the scholarship, teaching, and practice of public journalism.

Public journalism's main premise is that for a democracy to work best citizens have to be well informed. To reach that goal journalists have to think of their audiences as citizens and not just consumers. They have to listen to the citizens and ensure that all citizen voices, not just elite voices, get heard.

Professor Witt, who has more than 25 years experience in journalism, realized that journalists would reach out only so far to the citizens. So in addition to working with journalists, he would have to work with citizens so they could learn how to be heard by the news media.

Professor Witt is founding president of the Public Journalism Network (PJNet) was formed after he invited 24 of the top public journalism academics and practitioners to Kennesaw State University in January 2003. Founded as a professional organization for journalists and scholars, it is has become, thanks to Professor Witt's weblog PJNet.org, a virtual network of 10,000 unique visitors each month with more than 600 returning each day. As an international information clearinghouse, the PJNet, especially through its website PJNet.org, is a navigation tool to take public and citizen journalism into the 21 st century.

With the advent of the citizen journalism, we media movement, made possible by weblogs and other digital publishing tools, the power of the Internet is changing how the media interact with their audiences, which opens wonderful opportunities and challenges for all journalists. Public journalism provides the practical and theoretical framework to help journalists, citizens and academicians navigate this sea change. The Fowler Chair will be spending ever-increasing time studying the potential of this emerging arena and helping all scholars, citizens and journalists better understand its dynamics. Professor Witt helped define these dynamics with his paper that appeared in the National Civic Review entitled: Is Public Journalism Morphing into the Public's Journalism? (pdf, 217 kb).

He has produced two full day conferences addressing these issues, each preceding the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) annual convention. The first in Toronto in August 2004 was entitled: Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism, and the second in San Antonio, in August 2005 was entitled: A Wake Up Call: Can Trust and Quality Save Journalism? The first, attended by more than 60 journalists, academics and citizen content producers, was underwritten in part by the Canadian Newspaper Association. The second was part of the year long project, Journalism and the Public: Restoring the Trust developed by the Fowler Chair and the Reynolds of School of Journalism at University of Nevada, Reno and underwritten by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. More than 100 journalists, academics and citizen activists attended.

Professor Witt also is past chair of the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group of the AEJMC, and, via the Fowler Chair, hosted the AEJMC's 2005 Mid-Winter academic conference at Kennesaw State University, with some 80 academics attending from some 50 universities nationwide.

In the spring, 2004, he developed a university class entitled Multi-Media Visions of Community in which students use the City of Marietta, Georgia as their “lab” to help them better understand the diversity and complexity of community life, which is a primary to public journalism.

He also forms partnership with academic, print, broadcast and Internet entities to enhance the theory and practice of public journalism. For example, in the spring of 2003, WABE public radio, Kennesaw State University and the Fowler Chair produced a project entitled Children and Fear that included a parent and teacher workshop, radio programming, printed brochures and a public Internet site. He also is a frequent contributor to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's op-ed pages.

He frequently makes academic presentations and gives community and professional lectures as close to home as the Atlanta Press Club to as far away as Quito, Ecuador, where in the summer of 2005 he developed and taught a week long workshop on public journalism for journalists, students and citizen activists. He also introduced the concept of public and citizen journalism at a lecture at Quito's CIESPAL, the International Center for Advance Communication Studies in Latin America , and co-wrote an article on public and citizen journalism within North American for the Spanish language Chasqui, the Latin America communication magazine. All of which is a part of the mission to make the Fowler Chair an international catalyst for improved civic engagement and civic discourse via the intersection of the academy, the community and media.