API’s discusses the significant impact of community listening on shaping election-year coverage. It highlights the importance of engaging with the community to understand their information needs, concerns, and the political stories that resonate with them. By conducting listening projects, newsrooms can set their coverage agenda based on real community priorities rather than politicians’ narratives, discover gaps in public understanding, and build trust with their audience.
Source: American Press Institute
How the Long Beach Post’s community editorial board provides more than opinion
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.
Track the diversity of your sources with Source Matters
Source Matters is an automated tool designed to help news organizations track and diversify their sourcing. By automating the identification and categorization of sources across stories, this tool aims to reflect community diversity better, encourage more inclusive journalism, and facilitate the auditing process by saving time and effort in data collection.
Forming a community advisory board for your newsroom
Community editorial boards or advisory boards are one way to start your journalism from a place of listening. Depending on the board’s makeup and recruitment processes, they can point you toward stories that have gone uncovered and people whose information needs are not being met. And they can help you repair relationships with groups that are often marginalized or misrepresented by the news media.
After a Decade, It’s Time to Reinvent Social Media in Newsrooms
It’s time to rethink the newsroom social media team: its structure, mission, responsibilities and skillsets. In this strategy study, the American Press Institute, in conjunction with a fellowship awarded by the Knight Visiting Nieman Fellowship program, examines a reimagined social media team that refocuses its efforts on urgent issues impacting today’s media.
Better News
Better News is an interactive database of industry tools, tips, best practices, and tactics for newsrooms in general and legacy newspapers in particular. Content is curated by industry experts and comes from a variety of sources, including from newsrooms participating in the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative. Related articles are NiemanLab and API.
How to Engage Readers with Digital Longform Journalism
Major enterprise stories—stories that take deep dives and attempt to inform readers in substantive ways or to elicit impact—these are the types of stories that encourage readers to move beyond binary and dogmatic thinking about local, national and world events. However, these enterprise stories require considerable resources: time and effort from reporters and a financial investment from the news organization. And once the story is published, the potential audience is limited … So how can journalists get readers to complete these long pieces
The Best Ways to Build Audience and Relevance by Listening to and Engaging Your Community
Now more than ever, journalists can engage their audiences as contributors, advisors, advocates, collaborators and partners. This study describes in detail how newsrooms and independent journalists can grow their readership, boost their relevance and find new sources of revenue by listening to and learning from their audiences.