Social Impact Criticism: The use of influence for advocacy and production. ARPA Journal, Spring, 2018.
Professional conflict of interest standards continue to provide a valuable ethical framework for journalism. However, rather than think of these standards as a dead end, perhaps we can think of them as having a degree of fluidity both in their application in mainstream criticism and in their relevance to efforts to extend journalistic practice beyond the written word. I consider my work under the guise of the Institute for Applied Reporting and Urbanism to be imperfect realizations of the idea that journalism has a potential role to play in producing advocacy. But as explorations testing the limits of discourse related to conflict of interest in design journalism, they can be useful in evaluating the potential for criticism to have a more pronounced social impact in the field and may even encourage others to push professional boundaries and experiment with new ideas.
