While there have been a number of significant gains in local, home-grown efforts to promote the rights-based approach to development in the context of the Millennium Development Goals, high-impact strategies to increase popular awareness and wide public understanding of their implications for the day-to-day lives of citizens need to be further developed and strengthened. Innovative strategies like media-citizen engagements for good governance through public journalism initiatives or projects could provide important avenues for this to be realized.  Lessons from these engagements in turn could provide valuable lessons for citizens, communities, development agencies, government, and the news media for developing replicable models and influencing policy.

For several years, the Center for Community Journalism and Development (CCJD) has been developing and promoting journalistic approaches on how citizens and the media can begin to invigorate public life through engagement by situating journalists as community stakeholders and catalysts rather than as mere observers and reporters of unfolding events.

It may not have had all the answers but it did point out the direction where the answer may lie.  Often this was in the arena of multi-sector action where different groups of varying persuasions are able to articulate community concerns by focusing on shared values upon which many of their decisions are based.  This became possible through a shift towards a kind of journalism that encourages citizens and communities to identify and solve local problems, to increase participation in public life and in governance: it is called public journalism.

Public journalism is 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 voices of the community be heard.  It likewise requires journalists to focus not only on what’s wrong but also on what’s working, not only on problems but also on stories of success and hope.

Several media groups, newspapers, radio stations, and individual practitioners in several areas around the Philippines have initiated public journalism projects that somehow demonstrated that the community media can help refocus and add sinew to popularizing good governance initiatives at the local level without necessarily losing their cherished traditions of autonomy and independence.

These include:

* Working with multi-sector groups and local governments in adopting governance monitoring and feedback strategies using RBA in an MDG context (news weekly and press associations in Iloilo City)

* Developing a regional radio network (Bicol region) to consistently tackle governance reform issues in relation to mainstreaming RBA in governance

* Getting people to exercise their citizenship roles by actively engaging the local government in environmental protection, electoral exercises, development projects using a rights-based monitoring-feedback approach (Palawan community newspaper and the Palawan Community Media Council (PCMC)

* Sustaining interactive radio dialogue between citizens, multi-sector groups, and local government  on transparency and accountability issues (radio program in Kidapawan City)

* Media and citizen groups working together to strengthen multi-sector, community-based efforts in localizing the MDG (Calbayog City, Samar and Catbalogan, Western Samar)

* Mobilizing citizen action to support rights-based governance practices (using MindaNews video documentation of good governance practices in Mindanao as take-off strategy)

* Moro volunteers for peace developing communication strategies with community media (Tingog Mindanao Radio Alliance working in Sulu and Tawi-Tawi))

The project aims to:

1. Popularize RBA and localize MDG-responsive governance practices through public journalism approaches that result in published/aired stories and multi-sector dialogues
2. Develop and strengthen media-citizen councils or action boards as local mechanisms for media-citizen dialogues
3. Cascade media reform initiatives to local areas to address media issues such as ethics, professionalism, and the killings of journalists and their implications for people’s right to know