The New York Times editor's sudden conversion to public journalism.

The New YorkTimes has been tremendous since Sept. 11. More war-related stories each day than you can actually read. Analytical and investigative pieces that anticipate what you'd want to know. Even the color in the photos, at least in the edition available in Washington, D.C., has had a weird neon intensity that seems somehow appropriate to the magnitude of these events.

The Times must be bleeding money for this coverage. Next year, when the journalistic prizes are rolled out, the Times will obviously deserve quite a few—not for the endless, high-minded series that newspapers crank out as prize bait in normal years but for its organic response to genuinely important news.

The prize I'm most looking forward to seeing awarded is the James K. Batten Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism, which Howell Raines, the Times' new executive editor, should receive next spring. The award will have been richly earned—and its announcement will be an even more delicious moment for me than for Raines. Here's why:

I barely know Howell Raines, but five years ago I found myself in a weird little war with him. I had just published a book about what was wrong with journalism, called Breaking the News. The book said that the news business was becoming too scandal-and-spectacle-minded, that reporters were going bad by turning into talk-show performing bears, that the distinction between "news" and entertainment was disappearing, that television in particular offered an unrealistic picture of life by bouncing from one spectacle to another with no sense of proportion or history. You know, all the obvious complaints—although in fairness to myself, this was before things reached their full, fleurs du mal ripeness thanks to Monica Lewinsky, Gary Condit, Bill O'Reilly plus the whole Fox Cable team, AOL's conversion of Time Inc. into a "content" provider, and so on.

Thinking that some part of the book should at least sound constructive, I devoted the last chapter to suggestions about how news coverage could improve. Some useful ideas, I said, could be drawn from a reform movement in the newspaper business known as either "public journalism" or "civic journalism."

The main argument of the public journalism advocates was that reporters and editors should think of themselves as being inside society, affecting through their coverage the way other people thought and behaved, rather than being wholly detached observers from outside. When viewing a society somewhere else in the world, members of the American press accept this point immediately. They know that the existence and quality of information flow will have a huge impact on other aspects of that society—whether people can hold their government accountable, how realistic a picture they have of other cultures, how unified or divided they seem. To use the obvious current example: If the media in Islamic societies never blow the whistle on Islamic extremists or their own corrupt regimes, people in those societies won't understand why the United States is now "attacking" Afghanistan.

The public journalism crowd was insisting on the same point about America. News was not just another form of "content," and newspapers and broadcast stations were not just another "profit center" (when profitable). The reason they were protected in the Constitution was that what they did affected everyone else. As I put it in the book: "One of public journalism's basic claims is that journalists should stop kidding themselves about their ability to remain detached from and objective about public life. … They inescapably change the reality of whatever they are writing by whether and how they choose to write about it." (Read a bit more here.)

This was hardly a subversive or revolutionary concept, it seemed to me. Indeed, it was one that any journalist grabs onto when convenient. ("How can you deny me the minutes of that meeting? Don't you care about the People's Right To Know?")  It's also not far from the Times' own motto, "All the news that's fit to print."

Yet for reasons I couldn't quite explain at the time and are even stranger in retrospect, Howell Raines appointed himself the Public Scourge of Public Journalism. He was then running the Times' editorial page, and he did me the favor of devoting an entire editorial to the heresies contained in my book. (Favor? Hey, when you're trying to draw attention to a new book …) One line of this editorial was frequently quoted in later discussion of me and my book—and of Raines himself, when he became the Times' executive editor (big boss) just before the Sept. 11 attacks. This line said that public journalism's prescriptions, as advanced by me, represented "an insidious danger, and that is that reporters and editors become public policy missionaries with a puritanical contempt for horse-race politics."

What was odd about the editorial at the time is that it sounded as if it were written by a dumb guy. Raines is clearly not dumb, but his editorial took the classic Miss Emily Litella stance of first misunderstanding a concept, and then attacking the misinterpreted version. He acted as if he thought public journalists were recommending no political news, no human news, basically no interesting news of any sort, but instead newspapers that were long sermons. Political news is important—I've written my share of it. So is human news—and if what's in the newspapers and magazines is not interesting, no one is going to read it. It's all a matter of proportions, just like in politics. We know that politicians need some amount of wile and ruthlessness; otherwise they can't get elected. We know they need something more than that; otherwise they're just hacks. Balance and proportion are everything—a point that Raines can't really have misunderstood.