Why we need advocacy journalism

[Commentary] When "objective" journalism decays into a cowardly neutrality between truth and lies, we need advocacy journalism to lift our profession - and the community leaders we cover - back to credibility. Advocacy is not the antonym of objectivity.

Objectivity is the goal of accounting for your own biases when observing of an external reality, so that your report accurately reflects that reality. By reporting objectively, the goal is that you be able to produce an observation that others, observing the same reality, can reproduce. There's nothing about objectivity that prohibits you from advocating on behalf of your results. In fact, putting your work up for peer review, and being able to defend it, is part of the scientific method that influenced the journalistic concept of objectivity. Every journalist advocates for their stories - anyone who thinks otherwise has never hung around an editor's desk or been to a front-page budget meeting. So advocacy's part of the job. And as journalism schools are supposed to be teaching their students how to advance their careers, they need to be teaching their students how to advocate for their work - whether that's getting an assignment approved, a freelance gig okayed, or a story onto P1 or into the first slot on the website's homepage.