This step-by-step guide by Alicia Bell and Mike Rispoli can help newsrooms examine their own power and design engagement strategies that don’t perpetuate transactional or extractive relationships with the public. To foster a new future for journalism, it’s crucial for news outlets to share and build power with local communities.
Increasingly impatient with a lack of impact from investigative projects, journalists have become more willing to partner with civil society organizations, many of whose reason for being is making change. With the drive for impact comes complicated ethical questions that the journalists wrestle with, but have found ways to negotiate.
This playbook aims to identify the role of the collaboration manager, the person who oversees the day-to-day operations of a journalism collaborative. When many journalism jobs are in flux, there’s an aperture to recognize and define how the collaboration manager role can help shape the industry’s future. Via: Want to be a collaborative manager? Check out this playbook.
The Community Editorial Board comprises seven members of the Long Beach community from different life journeys, different parts of the city and different socio-economic experiences. The board writes on issues and subjects in which it has a personal interest, experience or expertise.
This report studied four newsrooms from around the world – the Honolulu Civil Beat, Krautreporter, The News Minute, and Tortoise – who have cultivated strong communities among their members. The report offers takeaways and lessons that can help other newsrooms interested in a community-building approach to membership.
Launched in May 2021, Dialogue is an initiative from Southern California Public Radio to redesign its style guide informed by the desires of our communities and staff. Before this guide, LAist/KPCC used the Associated Press Stylebook (a style guide commonly followed by American newsrooms). Via: How KPCC/LAist made its style guide more inclusive to build trust — in and out of the newsroom.
In a follow-up to this Ecosystems Toolkit, the author Fiona Morgan shares lessons from how she and others undertook aspects of news ecosystem assessments during the pandemic, and how this listening was itself an investment in communities. Via: How to listen during a pandemic and other lessons from recent local news ecosystem research.
The seven members, one for each Oakland district, will be reading the organization’s stories and giving feedback to ensure they stay true to their founding values. This paid group of community advisors is the heart of The Oaklandside’s Mission Metric initiative.
This book provides an in-depth examination of socially-responsible news reporting practices, such as constructive journalism, solutions journalism, and peace journalism. Chapter 7, in particular, focuses on Engaged Journalism as a way to shift power dynamics to increase public participation.
Lessons learned in designing a brand-new education beat that covers how and why different students make it to college, or don’t make it, and the obstacles they face along the way.
Outlier Media’s first white paper on how local news can be an essential service by working first to meet local information needs. This was developed with the belief that for local news to have a future, it has to be built for people when they truly need information before it is built for people when they are just curious.
El Tímpano’s first impact report outlines how they expanded their work and organization to inform, engage, and amplify the voices of communities most directly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The organization filled a gap in Spanish-language news and information and provided a platform for more than a thousand Latino and Mayan immigrants to share, in real-time, their experience of the pandemic.
