Engaged Journalism explores the changing relationship between news producers and audiences and the methods journalists can use to secure the attention of news consumers. Based on Jake Batsell’s extensive experience and interaction with more than twenty innovative newsrooms, this book shows that, even as news organizations are losing their agenda-setting power, journalists can still thrive by connecting with audiences through online technology and personal interaction.
At the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, we believe that journalism sustainability is rooted in building stronger relationships between communities and newsrooms. While the distinction between “building with” instead of “building for” feels at first like semantics, when we begin to use it as a lens to examine journalism as both a process and a product, we see numerous ways it challenges the status quo.
Abstract: As the numbers of African-Americans with Internet access, particularly via smartphone, have grown, so have digital artifacts that point to evidence of a narrowing digital divide between Blacks and Whites in America. As Nakamura (2007) observed, race has been made visible in online social discourse. This truth is made evident in news reporting on the emergence of so-called “Black Twitter.” To date, mainstream news media texts describe Black Twitter from the perspective of the deficiency model of technology adoption among African-American users.
We often hear questions like this one: how can our station reach new audiences? One way to start is with community listening sessions. In a recent webinar, we heard from two stations that have sessions to build relationships in communities that are underserved by the media. KCUR community engagement director Ron Jones shared how community listening sessions have helped form the reporting initiative Beyond Our Borders, a multi-platform look at how geographic borders affect the daily lives of people in Kansas City.
Harvis is a mobile web tool for collecting live contributions from audience members. It creates the capacity for users to react in real-time to events and measure their engagement and responses and have conversations around those reactions. Harvis’ public reveal was at the Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive Day 2014. Here’s a write-up from The New York Times, Fast Company, and A Fourth Act.
This section of the toolkit provides guidance on the issues to consider when planning and designing community engagement. It focuses on quality and effectiveness, process planning and designing engagement tailored to the particular issue, level of participation to be achieved, timeframe and range of stakeholders affected.
Abstract: Drawing on a structural theory of reciprocity, this essay introduces the idea of reciprocal journalism: a way of imagining how journalists might develop more mutually beneficial relationships with audiences across three forms of exchange—direct, indirect, and sustained types of reciprocity. We introduce this concept in the context of community journalism but also discuss its relevance for journalism broadly.
GroundSource is a platform that newsrooms and nonprofits use to engage audiences via text and Facebook Messenger. GroundSource has been used to solicit input/feedback from community members, to build customized data services for low-income communities, and to share content and push out live updates. Related references here and here.
Developmental evaluation (DE) offers a powerful approach to monitoring and supporting social innovations by working in partnership with program decision-makers. In this book, Michael Quinn Patton illustrates how DE can be used for a range of purposes: ongoing program development, adapting effective principles of practice to local contexts, generating innovations and taking them to scale, and facilitating rapid response in crisis situations. Here’s a quick explanation of developmental evaluation, and check out how DE was applied to the Elevate Engagement conference and JTM’s Civic Communication report.
This book describes a wildly popular approach to organizational change that dramatically improves performance by encouraging people to study, discuss, learn from, and build on what’s working, rather than simply trying to fix what’s not. Whitney and Trosten-Bloom use examples from many different types of organizations to illustrate Appreciative Inquiry (AI) in action. The authors have included a new chapter on the community applications of Appreciative Inquiry, as well as a host of new examples and other enhancements. More on AI here, here, and here.
Public Journalism 2.0 examines the ways that civic or public journalism is evolving, especially as audience-created content—sometimes referred to as citizen journalism or participatory journalism—becomes increasingly prominent in contemporary media. As the contributors to this edited volume demonstrate, the mere use of digital technologies is not the fundamental challenge of a new citizen-engaged journalism; rather, a depper understanding of how civic/public journalism can inform citizen-propelled initiatives is required.
Parse.ly is a web metrics and analytics platform designed to help companies “understand, own and improve digital audience engagement through data, so they can ensure the work they do makes the impact it deserves. Reviews from TechCrunch, New York Observer, and ZDNet.
