The South African National Editors’ Forum, or SANEF, is a powerful body in that country’s media environment, and in a paper on media sustainability, worth reading in more depth, it provided its working definition of public interest journalism as follows:
“Public interest journalism refers to journalistic activity that is central to the democratic function and the protection and promotion of the South African Constitution, including investigative journalism, reporting on the daily affairs of public institutions, and local journalism focused on the generation of public interest stories in towns and villages and underserviced rural areas.”
In fashioning this statement, it takes recent definitional work undertaken by the UK Cairncross Review and the Australian Future of Public Interest Journalism process into account.
Public Interest News 