Journalism

Community engagement is a strategy to source and fuel your content. It is also fundamentally a means to discover and meet a community’s information needs and tell stories that matter to them.

Audit results to set goals.

Set specific goals for increasing diversity of sources and embed it into reporters’ workflow and job expectations.

Connect and be flexible.

Give reporters time to connect and engage before they are expected to produce a story and consider different platforms to reach communities who are not listening to your broadcast or visiting your website — they’re on WhatsApp, or TikTok or Instagram!

Create new types of content.

Launch new content products such as newsletters or texting groups for under-served communities or communities you want to reach.

Empower communities to tell their stories.

Crowdsource stories to reflect the community by encouraging communities to produce or record their own stories in the form of audio diaries without narration and embolden communities to produce journalism that you can share.

Spotlight community assets.

In addition to needs and problems, encourage your reporters and producers to identify and highlight a community’s strengths, achievements, and sources of pride to create more authentic and balanced storytelling that will make that community proud.

Share and collaborate as a team.

Foster a culture of communication and collaboration by regularly discussing with your team what they are hearing in their daily reporting as well as during listening sessions or community events to help each other identify throughlines and trends. Work with reporters one-on-one to turn insights and discoveries into stories. Small insights into a community can lead to opportunities to meet an information need.

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Partner with the community

Your reporters can work well with individual community members and leaders, but they may not have time to find and foster relationships with organizations or other news outlets serving a community. As news director, you can deepen the engagement work your newsroom is doing and help it reach a broader audience by forming strategic partnerships.

Partner with other media or nonprofits to share resources and story ideas, and to reach communities you currently are not serving. Develop a content sharing agreement in which you exchange stories to post on each other’s websites, exposing both to more readers than they would likely reach otherwise.

Research the platforms that communities use to get information and find out who on your staff is interested in experimenting with these different platforms.

Look for non-English language communities you want to reach and find bilingual staff who could assist in that effort. Consider partnering with a news organization that publishes in the language of that community and agree to share content or even share a reporter. 

How to engage and report

The basic principle in community engaged journalism is to follow where your sources lead. When creating content, try to be experimental with how you tell and frame stories. 

Here are a few other things to keep in mind: 

Be patient.

Building trust takes time. Enter the space (physical or digital) with an open mind and a willingness to accept what the community members share with you.

If their information is inaccurate, rather than correcting them, focus on finding out how they developed this perspective.

Listen for community joys, celebrations and strengths.

Engage with communities by listening for the good and the bad. But, as always, let the community take the lead. Don’t force a narrative. If a community is grieving, don’t push joy. By telling both kinds of stories, you’ll foster trust.

Discover the information needs of your community.

What information about local life, community issues, civic governance, voting mechanics, school admission regulations, taxes, evacuation routes, road repairs, stop signs, climate change, etc. etc. does your community need to know? What stories are missing, what critical information needs are not being met? Find out what this community is eager to learn about and create resources and/or stories that meet those needs.  

Some engagement style tips to consider:

• Put your recorder/notebook away at first to encourage deep listening, and to establish transparency. 
• Throw away your assumptions. Have people describe their community to you.
• Be OK with silence; give people time to process.
• Ask each community member you meet for recommendations of other people to talk to.

Create innovative community engagement journalism

If you work at a public radio station, radio features and spots may be your bread and butter. But community engaged journalism requires platform flexibility. Some communities get content through Facebook or WhatsApp; others may prefer on-demand digital content. Be nimble and flexible about which platforms and story formats are appropriate for which content. 

Audio Features:

• Use tape in the lead. Include a montage of voices of people you met with host intro so it sounds like you’re passing the mic, in a way.
• Find ways to be transparent in your script. Share behind-the-scenes work or record narration in the field as the role of an observer.
• Highlight tape that complicates existing narratives. Unearth underlying values, especially of extreme viewpoints.

Audio Diaries:

• Let people tell their own story. Rather than interviewing a source, let them record on their own, like a diary entry. Post a detailed how-to on your site about how people can send in recordings of themselves.
• Launch a series. Is there a topic or collective experience in the community that you could gather diaries around? Many stations did this around the pandemic with plans to continue.

Two-ways:

• Prioritize tape in two-ways. Introduce us to community members.
• Do a two-way with a community member. Have a talk show host interviewing both you and the community member. 
• Flip the script and invite a community member to interview you in a two-way. They could ask you about your process as a journalist, or to share your goals for engaging with their community, etc. 

Digital stories:

• Consider FAQs. An FAQ provides a service and is the easiest way to turn engagement into a story.
• Try infographics. If statistics are integral to your story, produce graphics to enhance your points.
• Translate the story. If there is a large community in your area for whom English is not the dominant language, offer a translation.

Most importantly: Think outside the box. Be bold.

• Can you find a way to partner with a community member or group to co-create something together?
• Is audio the best medium for the story you’ve uncovered? Consider community art installations, digital photo stories, or even a live storytelling event!