Founded in 2015, City Bureau is a nonprofit civic journalism lab based on the South Side of Chicago. Their programs mainly focus on training and equipping people with little or no journalism experience to lead community conversations, provide oversight of public meetings, and conduct investigations into local sociopolitical issues.
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’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.
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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
