Although it has been hailed as the salvation of American journalism, public journalism poses many dilemmas. While the most immediate of these arise from its definitional imprecision, some of the most significant are in the area of journalism ethics. Some of the problems emerge from public journalism's disregard of traditional notions of journalistic objectivity, others from the inherent conflict between serving the public and serving the market. At the same time, the public journalism movement has yet to confront the fact that ethical debates in journalism have generally been constructed around the individual, thereby ignoring the reality that most ethical problems originate at the level of ownership and management. While it is too soon to determine just how well public journalism will adapt to Australian conditions, it is clear that it has a long way to go before it justifies the extravagant claims that have been made in its name.
