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.
Topic: Changing Culture
Project Manager Playbook for Collaborative Journalism
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.
Building healthy membership communities: Lessons from newsrooms around the world
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.
Dialogue – community-inform newsroom style guide
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.
Build for a crisis: ideas for the future of local news
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 Impact Report 2021
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.
America Amplified Guide to Community Engagement Journalism
This playbook for leaders and journalists at public media stations is a practical exploration of how public media newsrooms can better engage with and amplify the voices of their local communities. America Amplified partnered with eight journalism collaborations across the country encompassing more than 50 public radio stations.
Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public
Imagined Audiences draws on ethnographic case studies of three news organizations to reveal how journalists’ assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences. Jacob L. Nelson examines the role that audiences have traditionally played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public.
Practical power sharing: How Might We Create Opportunities for Power Sharing With Communities Through Stories?
This open, community document by P. Kim Bui is intended to present and evaluate different storytelling techniques that demonstrate what power sharing and true audience involvement look like in journalistic organizations. It aims to do so by breaking down barriers between communities and reignites the journalist as listener and convener, helping to heal wounds and build relationships.
The Discourse’s 10 Principles to Community-Powered Journalism
The Discourse is building a new kind of journalism from the ground up: community-powered journalism that genuinely reflects all of us. But what does that actually mean? These 10 principles guide their editorial and business decisions.
KQED Source Diversity
The goal of the audit is to provide a baseline understanding of KQED’s source diversity using five measures: gender, race/ethnicity, age group, geographic location, and profession. These data will be used in the creation of a sustainable source diversity tracking system, as well as to help inform decision-making and goal setting.
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.