Skip to content
New to Engagement? Start Here: Engaging Your Communities
Gather

Gather

A platform to support community-minded journalists

  • Lightning Chats
    Discuss challenges, brainstorm ideas and explore projects
  • Newsletter
    Our bi-weekly newsletter recaps the pulse of the community
  • Membership
    Join Gather to connect with members by region and interest
  • Join Slack
    Engage with other members on specific topics in near-real time
  • Home
  • About Gather
    • Contact Us
    • Medium Publication
    • Community Agreements
  • Learn
    • Resources
    • Case Studies
    • Lightning Chats
    • Guide Archives
      • Start Here: Engaging Your Communities for Better Journalism
      • Journalists in Relationship with Community: Introduction
      • Ethics of Engagement
    • Featured Projects
  • Filter By Topics
    • Building Power
    • Changing Culture
    • Collaborations
    • Community Participation
    • Dialogues
    • Evaluating Impact
    • Solutions Journalism
    • Storytelling Events
    • Teaching and Learning
    • Tools and Technology
    • — All Topics —
  • Log In
  • Sign Up

Topic: Engagement Basics

Sort: Most Recent, Most Favorites
Filter: All, Featured Projects, Resources, Case Studies, Lightning Chats, Guides
1-12 of 12 total Results

Engaging Audiences, Battling Misinformation: The Social Media Dilemma for News Outlets

Adriana Lacy, Jake Wasserman, Madeline Faber, Sara Aniano | December 2023

In this Lightning Chat, we discussed the challenges posed to journalists by the platforms and strategies for how newsrooms can think differently about serving their audiences online.

Review Lightning Chat

2020 OJA Finalists: Reckon Women and Southern California Public Radio

Adriana García, Alabama Media Group, Ashley Alvarado, Caitlin Hernandez, Giuliana Mayo, KPCC, KPCC-LAist, Rebecca Walker Benjamin, Southern California Public Radio | October 2020

Learn about Southern California Public Radio’s engaged journalism work and Alabama Media Group’s project “Reckon Women: Motherhood.” Both are finalists for the 2020 OJA Gather Award in the Overall Excellence category.

Review Lightning Chat

Why Should I Tell You?: A Guide to Less-Extractive Reporting

Natalie Yahr | May 2019

What Vulnerable Communities Stand to Gain — or Lose — from Sharing Their Stories with Reporters, and What Reporters are Doing About It. With this guide, I aim to help journalists navigate the ethical dilemmas they encounter as they interview people who have experienced harm. While there are numerous practical guides on such interviewing, especially on trauma journalism, I have yet to find a guide that explores the deeper ethical questions of what conditions, if any, make such journalism morally justifiable and not purely extractive or voyeuristic. Here’s the backstory from NiemanLab.

Visit Resource

What Engagement Reporting Does — and Doesn’t — Mean at ProPublica

Adriana Gallardo, Ariana Tobin, Beena Raghavendran, Logan Jaffe, ProPublica | January 2019

Engagement reporting at ProPublica is about giving you a place to share that kind of information. Our job is about connecting with, mobilizing and marshaling communities who have information that becomes more powerful when it’s all put together. We operate as kind of journalistic community organizers, both online and off.

Visit Resource

Pathways to Engagement: Understanding How Newsrooms are Working with Communities

Angelica Das, Democracy Fund | October 2017

As Democracy Fund seeks to support new tools and practices that can expand community engagement in journalism, we wanted to understand the landscape of the field in more detail. We commissioned this paper to help us create a taxonomy of engagement practices. In this paper, we document a broad spectrum of efforts that help position communities at the center of journalism. We understand that each model meets different newsroom goals and community needs. We refer to the full spectrum of ideas presented here as ‘Engaged Journalism.’

Visit Resource

The Continuum of Engagement

Andrew DeVigal | October 2017

Based on the post, Engagement is Relational, not Transactional, this continuum visualizes the continuous loop between journalists and communities when the public is at the center of our journalism. “The question we often forget to ask ourselves is: How can we motivate more journalists (and journalism students) to put the community at the center of their work, be better listeners, and understand more precisely the needs of the public? Until we can think of the public not just as “audiences” and “consumers,” but also as experts and partners in the communities we aim to serve, we shouldn’t expect to receive the public’s complete trust.”

Visit Resource

Civic Communications Framework

Journalism That Matters, Michelle Ferrier, Peggy Holman | September 2017

Peggy Holman, Michelle Ferrier and their Journalism That Matters colleagues hosted a chat on how journalism and communications ecosystems can support communities and democracy to thrive and build resilience. Take a look at their report for background.

Review Lightning Chat

How to Introduce Engagement Efforts to Your Newsroom

Hearken, Jennifer Brandel | September 2017

This 10-step guide offers practical tips and exercises to create the optimal conditions in your newsroom for meaningful engagement efforts to take root and thrive. This guide will help cultivate lasting culture change in your newsroom that results in producing more relevant content in a more authentic manner.

Visit Resource

Listening Post Collective Playbook

Listening Post Collective | July 2017

The Listening Post Collective provides journalists, newsroom leaders, and non-profits tools and advice to create meaningful conversations with their communities. Whether you are a journalist, media outlet or civil society group, these steps will get you into a flow of listening to your community, creating stories that resonate, and fostering an ongoing conversation with people. Learn more about the Listening Post Collective from Poynter, MediaShift, and journalism.co.uk.

Visit Resource

Journalism for Democracy and Communities: A New Framework

Journalism That Matters, Michelle Ferrier, Mike Fancher, Peggy Holman, Stephen Silha, Yve Susskind | March 2017

This report focuses on what we have learned using Developmental Evaluation with several community engagement projects, two of them in partnership with journalism organizations. In brief, we found that when journalism is at or near the center of focus, it gets in the way of reinventing thriving local communications ecosystems. Innovations are more likely to come by imagining this emerging ecosystem through a broader perspective, one that considers digital, cultural, demographic, and technological shifts while also drawing from traditional elements of journalism.

Visit Resource

Creating an Engaged Newsroom: A Toolkit

Fiona Morgan, Free Press, Mike Rispoli | November 2016

This guide will show you how newsrooms can engage the communities they serve using techniques that help journalists better understand and address residents’ needs and concerns. That understanding helps newsrooms produce outstanding journalism that gives community members a greater voice in public affairs.

Visit Resource

What We Mean When We Talk About “Engagement”

Hearken, Jennifer Brandel | August 2016

When uttered outside of journalism circles, the word “engagement” means something fairly specific involving rings, love, wedding bells, commitment, and the like. If there’s no pathway for input from your audience to shape the content decisions your newsroom is making, then it’s not audience engagement. Engagement happens when members of the public are responsive to newsrooms, and newsrooms are in turn responsive to members of the public.

Visit Resource

Jump To

  • Home
  • About Gather
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletter
  • Community Agreements

About Gather

Gather is a collaborative project led by the Agora Journalism Center, the gathering place for innovation in communication and civic engagement, at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism & Communication.

Our Supporters

This project is funded by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the News Integrity Initiative.

 

2025 Gather
WordPress Powered | Prosperity Theme by Themes Harbor | Hand Built