This playbook by jesikah maria ross is a guide to participatory journalism. The playbook is intended to help you select and develop stories in conversation with the communities most affected by a certain issue; design a reporting process that generates understanding, connection, and trust; and strengthen existing networks and forge new alliances that build community resilience beyond reporting.
Newsrooms that leaned into audience engagement strategies during the fast-evolving coronavirus health crisis have found new ways to connect with audiences and ensure that their coverage is addressing community needs.
Local Voices Network hosted dozens of small group community conversations utilizing Zoom working with news organizations across the country to host larger town hall meetings and more focused topical small group conversations. This guide helps to think through these digital gatherings, from the more significant philosophical questions to the nitty-gritty of the tech.
KOSU has recognized the need for sharing our human experience during unstable times like these throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Communities are coming together now more than ever, and this is the quintessential time to gather safely and digitally to listen to each other’s stories.
How can journalists surface community perspectives through doing, not just talking? CapRadio in Sacramento, Calif., collaborated with an elementary school to host an activity-based listening event to find out. Here’s what happened.
CapRadio celebrated (and shared) the six-part documentary podcast called “Making Meadowview,” which profiled community leaders tackling big neighborhood problems in South Sacramento. It was a year-long project, born through a process of relationship-building with Meadowview residents.
When we started our Locked Out investigation into the lack of routes out of homelessness, the follow up to our Dying Homeless project, we knew this on paper. But what we did not necessarily understand was the disorienting reality for so many of living like this. The Bureau Local project is a young one, and we are still exploring how journalism in the UK could better serve communities. We want to understand how people who live through the issues at hand can help conceive and shape media narratives, rather than being fodder for them.
What if you based your election coverage on what your community has told you they actually want candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? Join our hosts, Brittany Schock from Richland Source, Bridget Thoreson from Hearken, and Joy Mayer from Trusting News as they talk about what that process actually looks like and what they hope it achieves. Read more about The Citizens Agenda.
Join this special hour-long chat with two finalists in the first-ever ONA Gather Award for Engaged Journalism! We’ve got Eve Samples and Leah Voss from USA TODAY Florida to talk about their nominated project, “Florida Voices,” and Lauren Katz will share more about Vox’s nominated project, “Hospitals Kept ER Fees Secret. We Worked with Patients to Uncover Them.”
Before hosting an event, ask what your community will get out of it. This chat will focus on how to design an event with your potential participants in mind with hosts Tiney Ricciardi of The Dallas Morning News, and Kristin Walters of Illinois Newsroom
City Bureau focuses on engagement journalism being for the people and by the people, and they’ve created guidelines with the intent of fusing traditional journalism with engagement journalism. The resource explores what community engagement is, and where it’s leading the future of journalism.
With dwindling time and resources in newsrooms, does it make sense to invest in citizen-powered journalism and training? These programs might accomplish the mission of many newsrooms and improve democracy as a whole, but do they actually change communities? There are plenty of places to seek answers, because there is no shortage of programs that seek to train and “empower” people on behalf of journalism.
