The three finalists for the 2021 OJA/Gather Award in Engaged Journalism in the Overall Excellence category, including The New York Times, Arizona Daily Star, Anchorage Daily News, and ProPublica, offer lessons learned from their community-engagement projects.
Lightning Chats
How to Build Healthy Membership Communities
Join researchers Rohan Grover & Jennifer Kho as they share lessons from newsrooms around the world. In their Membership Puzzle Project report, four newsrooms share the diverse tactics, strategies and operational considerations that have helped them cultivate healthy member communities on their own terms.
Network mapping: Steal this marketing strategy to design your engagement outreach
Learn how Bridget Thoreson of INN, Katherine Nagasawa and Jennifer Hack Wolf applied this simple exercise to their own reporting at WBEZ in Chicago and The Beacon in Kansas City after participating in a Hearken-led training through Election SOS in 2020.
Toward an Antiracist Journalism Education
This Engaged Journalism Exchange AEJMC pre-conference session explored where efforts seeking to push toward antiracist journalism have the potential to collide—in journalism education classrooms and beyond.
Keeping it Local: How the National Trust for Local News aims to preserve and sustain community journalism
National Trust for Local News (NTLN) recently engineered the purchase of a family-owned newspaper chain in Colorado in order to sustain its irreplaceable local journalism. Is this business model a viable strategy to prevent vulture capital acquisitions of local media and closure of local papers across the country?
Letting the Community Lead
Community-led journalism requires giving people outside of the newsroom the power to make decisions about what you cover and why. But what’s the most constructive way to do that? Do advisory boards work? Can you toss Solutions Journalism into this strategy?
ISO CRM+ » Building (or cobbling together) the right tools to put community at the center of our work
This Lightning Chat invited audience development and engagement practitioners to discuss their evolving needs for relationship management software (typically referred to as CRM), solutions others have found or developed, and the need for potentially new tools or approaches.
Listening Up: How WFAE made inclusion the north star of its content strategy
WFAE embarked on an ambitious journey to look and sound like the community it is licensed to serve. WFAE leaders Ju-Don Marshall and Joe O’Connor explain how they are reaching beyond the traditional “core” audiences of public media to understand and meet the information needs of people in their region.
Democratizing Journalism: News of, by and for the community
City Bureau, a digital startup on the South Side of Chicago, has been attracting attention and funding for bringing “journalists and communities together in a collaborative spirit to produce media that is impactful, equitable and responsive to the public.” Co-founder Darryl Holliday explains City Bureau’s innovative model for participatory reporting and accountability journalism.
People Before Problems: Building Trust To Tell A Community’s Story
Embarking on a two-year project to cover a public housing neighborhood on the verge of a rebuild, WCPN reporter Justin Glanville and editor Mike McIntyre wanted to avoid reinforcing stereotypes and tropes of both Black and low-income communities. Justin and Laura Fillbach share some lessons learned from his reporting and the resulting podcast “Inside the Bricks: Woodhill Homes.”
Behind the scenes of a high impact project on anti-Asian hate
Kristine Lois Villanueva knew she wanted to create a project examining the rise in COVID-19 related anti-Asian hate from a national perspective, but finding ways to bring in engagement was a constantly moving target. Join this chat to learn about how Kristine made strategic decisions when challenges arose, and how the project was cited in legislation from the local to national levels.
In Conversation with Andrea Wenzel & her book
In this slightly different Lightning Chat, Andrew DeVigal talked with Andrea Wenzel about her book “Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust.” In the book, Andrea “models new practices of community-centered journalism that build trust across boundaries of politics, race, and class, and prioritize solutions while engaging the full range of local stakeholders.”