With the changing landscape of social media and the new emergence of platforms, news organizations are trying to figure out what works best for them and where to invest their resources.
Lightning Chats
The (undervalued) power of rituals: A framework to build intentional communities around Journalism
Rituals are the superglue of communities in most cultures. In a time when Journalism is reimagining its relationship with the communities it serves, rituals can be a useful referent.
Rethinking Journalism Education from the Ground Up
What if we could start building journalism education from scratch, what would we include, why and how would we include it? This Lightning Chat is a practical “let’s build it together” conversation.
Early Results from Our 2023 Gather Community Survey
Impact Architects shared early results from our 2023 Gather Community Survey along with lessons learned from the results, questions answered, and discussions on how we might shape Gather’s future together.
Local News: helping our communities think more like neighbors and less like political adversaries
In this Lightning Chat, we hear from great minds researching polarization in our country and local journalists putting their research into practice in their own towns.
Accountability infrastructure for equitable journalism
Gather’s March 2023 lightning chat invited participants to explore models for “accountability infrastructure” — systems, structures, or programs that facilitate a process of holding stakeholders with more power responsible for listening to and addressing the needs and concerns of those with less.
Readers = resource: how and why to produce reader-centered stories
There are many benefits of featuring real readers in your reporting, but it can be hard to know where to start. In this lightning chat, we talk about best practices for gathering stories from your audience, how to build trust, and why covering divisive political issues through personal narratives is a good idea.
How to grow an audience and engagement team
From the ground up or within existing roles, how do new and growing news organizations build an engagement/audience team? What roles do you prioritize, and when? How do managers and companies continue to grow their audience/engagement folks where they are, even if there isn’t yet a career ladder for them?
Creating Healthy Work Cultures: How ‘User Manuals’ Can Help Colleagues Understand and Support Each Other
Everybody has their unique style of working. But how do we communicate our needs to supervisors, coworkers and teammates? This Gather lightning chat focused on “user manuals,” a simple management practice that can help colleagues understand and support each other.
Let’s talk change: What tools do we have to prevent burnout, align values and make newsrooms revisit problematic assumptions?
Burnout is all around us. It’s an implicit scourge in journalism that might result from diminishing returns on some cultural expectations for the work we do. Let’s talk about what we’ve done and what tools we’ve used to make progress happen.
Best Practices for Texting with Your Audience
During this Gather Lightning Workshop, attendees collaborated on a document that you can take back to your newsroom, including lessons learned from journalists who have incorporated texting as a regular part of their work.
2022 OJA/Gather Award in Engaged Journalism – Medium/Large Newsrooms
Listen to and learn from the finalists of the 2022 OJA/Gather Award in Community-Centered Journalism, Medium/Large Newsroom category. Stefanie Ritoper of Southern California Public Radio and Jenny Stratton & Samantha Cabrera Friend of Catchlight share lessons from their community-engagement projects.