After back-to-back mass shootings, firearms are once again at the center of the national conversation. Inevitably, journalists across the country are writing and talking about guns. But do they know what they’re talking about?

It doesn’t take long for community engagement journalists to realize that we can’t reach our entire community by only providing content in English.

Whether it’s a listening session or one-on-one, heavy and divisive topics are hard to talk about. It’s important to approach these issues thoughtfully — transparency and empathy will go a long way in building trust. Here are some tips to help those conversations go smoothly:

Your newsletter strategy should dictate everything about your newsletter: the type of newsletter (prose vs. link heavy, number of content blocks), the data you collect, your engagement and loyalty building tactics, and how you approach monetizing your newsletter. In turn, the information, engagement and loyalty you create with your newsletter should cycle back to your newsletter strategy.

AP’s Local News AI initiative spent the latter part of 2021 receiving surveys from local newsrooms across the U.S. to understand tech capacity, concerns and reservations news leaders have. What we learned is that while our program has “AI” in the title — AI for artificial intelligence — more than anything what local newsrooms need are basic automations.

One way to embed engagement into the culture of your organization is by having reporters weave some engagement tools into their everyday reporting. Giving reporters time to connect with the communities they are covering will enrich their reporting as they will better understand the information needs of that community. This may require reevaluating what’s on a reporter's plate and what can give way for this work.

Community engagement journalism is all about surveys — we use them to get feedback on listening sessions, to find out about our audience, and to learn what kinds of information any given community needs. Those first two surveys are a little easier to do, though. The last one, not so much.

There are dozens of papers and case studies and academic research and tip-sheets all about measuring journalism’s impact and measuring the impact of community engagement. It is an evolving science and impact can be as individual and unique as each station or each project.