A few weeks ago, at a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Change Committee in Columbia, S.C., Jay Rosen challenged editors to be more assertive in defending civic journalism from the recent outbreak of vitriolic, inflammatory, unfair, and mostly inaccurate attacks from the journalism establishment.

For many reasons, some of us who advocate civic journalism have opted in the past to let the criticism slide. No sense getting into a fight with our profession's icons.

But there are several good reasons to step up to the recent challenges. For one, leaving the field to the critics hurts our ability to take civic journalism into the nation's journalism schools. For another, it makes it harder to discuss the subject in our own newsrooms where young, ambitious journalists look up to and emulate the people they believe embody the profession's noblest values.

For those reasons and others, it's time to get down and dirty with the critics.

The title of today's session is "Civic Journalism: An Elite Conspiracy or Better Journalism?"

From where I sit, it seems as if public journalism is being victimized by the media elite. It is striking to me, as I travel around the country talking on the subject, that there is so much less debate over civic journalism in the South, the Midwest (the crucible of civic journalism) and even the Far West.

But the big guns from Washington, New York and Boston -- and the big gun wannabees -- are the folks who have targeted journalists like me, and like you.

Yet they are the journalists most removed from newspapers like mine, from communities like mine.

They don't read my paper. They never before concerned themselves with my journalistic values or practices. They don't know or care about the problems facing my community. Or yours.

And I don't expect them to.

I don't know how to define civic journalism for a national newspaper like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post. As far as I'm concerned, how or even whether these concepts are embraced by Times, Journal or Post editors is their affair.

But I do care how civic journalism is defined, defended and ultimately, embraced by editors of community papers like my own.

If I distill the message of the critics--not the specific criticism but their essential message -- it is this: Traditional journalism, having been invented at some time in the past, ought to be immune to change, experimentation and innovation.

Challenge the orthodoxy, as defined by Pulitzer-obsessed editors -- many of whose papers are bleeding circulation, by the way -- and you somehow cross the line into heresy.

But when did journalism become a fixed science? The best American journalism, and the most innovative and exciting journalism, always has come from thoughtful editors viewing the room, as it were, from a different place at the table and exercising their best professional judgment. There is no heresy in that.

And why, as a journalist engaged in this grand experiment, must I devalue the effort and the intent by apologizing for elements of that experiment that have gone awry? Some civic journalists have engaged in practices that make me uncomfortable. But that doesn't invalidate the experiment.

How many investigative reporters have been called upon to abandon their journalism because Michael Gartner's "Dateline" reporters blew up a truck? Were the nation's best feature writers sent to a corner in shame when the Post's Janet Cooke made up a story out of whole cloth?

And did our profession survive both scandals? Of course.

Just as all of us will survive the inevitable lapses of some civic journalists.

Now, having taken off on our critics, I must also point out that part of the problem is of our own making.

So much of civic journalism has been defined in project terms or focused on fixed-time election efforts. That makes it easier for the critics to separate civic journalism from the journalistic mainstream. In the last year, as we've struggled to understand how civic journalism informs our every-day work at The Gazette, I've come to see that our efforts are totally compatible with so-called traditional journalism. In fact, civic journalism brings an essential dimension to all that we do, another layer of richness and complexity to everything from night cops to arts and entertainment coverage.

Which leads me to this last point concerning our own culpability. I think we have been too quick to seek accord with some of our critics by agreeing that civic journalism is "just good ol' fashioned journalism" freshened for the '90s.

That's a wonderful way to dismiss the most provocative elements of the experiment. Implicit in that patronizing and dismissive statement is the assumption that all of us either have been doing just that sort of good old journalism or are capable of doing it if we decide, someday, maybe, that it's important.

I think it's important to use the language of civic journalism in defending the experiment; it forces the debate that is so necessary to move journalism forward.

I don't see civic journalism as an elite conspiracy. I see it as populist journalism, born in the heartland, nurtured in the South and Midwest and growing out of the hopes, fears, and dreams of journalists like me -- editors of small and mid-size newspapers struggling to connect with their communities in more meaningful ways.

It isn't heresy. And it doesn't deserve the hack criticism we've seen in recent weeks.