In this Lighting Chat, the panel of experts identify and talk about all the ways in which you’re probably project managing — even if it’s not in your job title — and learn tools and best practices to support your work.
Topic: Changing Culture
How to grow an audience and engagement team
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?
Creating Healthy Work Cultures: How ‘User Manuals’ Can Help Colleagues Understand and Support Each Other
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.
Let’s talk change: What tools do we have to prevent burnout, align values and make newsrooms revisit problematic assumptions?
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.
How to share power within communities for deeper, non-extractive engagement
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.
Changing the Face of News
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.
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.
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.”
Three tools for journalists to explore systems change
Kayla Christopherson and Cole Goins (The New School’s Journalism + Design program) guide us through three powerful exercises from their systems thinking toolkit, and Yvonne Wenger of the Baltimore Sun shares a practical take on how each exercise deepened her reporting process.
Media 2070 for media reparations
Free Press is launching “Media 2070,” an in-depth research essay and organizing hub that documents and analyzes the history of media harm. Alicia Bell from Free Press talks about the origins and goals of the project, how they plan to engage their communities, and how you can stay in touch.
Creating Newsroom Change
Let’s have a chat on how to create change in newsrooms. Doing engagement work often involves getting colleagues (and bosses) to try new things — even to be *excited* about trying new things. Some newsrooms do that well. What do they have in common? Join the discussion with Kristen Hare of Poynter Institute, Julia Haslanger of Hearken, and Joy Mayer of Trusting News and Gather’s community manager.