The opportunity now is to shepherd and accelerate a transition to an emergent civic media system. This new ecosystem looks different from what it will replace: while the commercial market rewarded information monopolies, what is emerging now are pluralistic networks in which information is fluid, services are shared, and media is made in cooperation with the people it seeks to serve.
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?
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.
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.
Learn how to build reciprocal relationships with communities so your newsroom can truly serve local needs. Alicia Bell and Mike Rispoli will take you through their methodology, using grassroots organizing techniques to develop community leadership and share power.
Agora Journalism Center’s Regina Lawrence leads the conversation with Alexandra Smith of The 19th and Women Do News’s Angilee Shah and Jareen Imam about bridging the gender gap in the journalism industry and reporting inclusively on gender, politics, and policy.
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.
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.
Newly established National Trust for Local News works “with communities to catalyze the capital, new ownership structures, and business model transformations needed for established local and community news organizations to thrive and remain deeply grounded in their communities.”
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.
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.
WFAE’s 2015 transformation aimed to adapt to the digital landscape and have its staff and audience reflect the diversity of the area. Since then, WFAE doubled its content staff, increased its digital traffic seven-fold, attracted new members and grew its general revenues. It developed new habits around audience engagement, publishing frequency, hiring and mentoring, and more.
