Culture and Strategy

To be most effective, community engagement should be thought of as an integral part of your newsroom and journalism culture, not as an add-on to the newsroom process. 

First, identify where YOU are coming from.

Reporters and news managers alike need to identify their own biases. A community engagement approach to journalism requires that managers also take a critical dive into your newsrooms’ current work, your personal biases and coverage decisions. We all have biases and we need these category of knowledge to help us interpret and understand the world faster. Without these schemas used to simplify and organize knowledge we couldn’t function. The problem with these schemas is that they are shortcuts that could lead to wrong assumptions, says Sue Ellen Christian, author of the book “Overcoming Bias. A Journalist’s Guide to Culture and Context.” So, don’t feel uncomfortable about having biases. It’s completely normal, but be aware of them to avoid distorting news accounts.

Set specific goals for diversity in your coverage.

Make sure diversity — race, class, gender, sexual orientation, education, etc. —  is prioritized in all coverage, not just in stories about issues related to that group. Compare the diversity in your coverage with the demographic makeup of your coverage area. You can use a source matrix during the production process to ensure your stories include sources from all backgrounds.

Source diversity tracker

Tracking the diversity of your sources is one step toward being a news organization that reflects the community you serve. In the short term, you will want to conduct an audit of your current content to identify who you are already talking to. In the long term, your newsroom should implement a diversity tracking tool to use on an ongoing basis. This will help you assess whether you are meeting your goals.

Ultimately, tracking diversity helps newsrooms to produce content that is more reflective and inclusive of all community perspectives. 

There are platforms out there you can pay for to track source diversity, but we’ve created a template that uses a Google Form and Google Data Studio to track diversity. You can learn how to set that up with our free templates here.

Assess and enable staff resources

Work with your station management team to establish a vision for community engagement. Check out the station manager section to learn more about visions and missions.

A culture of community engagement requires help and support from the station leadership — it signals the importance of making this shift. 

Work with other departments — membership, marketing, development — to establish some key metrics to track engagement. These are often more ambiguous than Google Analytics, for example, and can be difficult metrics to pin down, but success in this area will win supporters across the organization. See below for more on tracking impact.

Assess the resources you have in terms of staffing and time to give this effort a fair shot of success.

Here are some tips:

• Decide what you are willing to have your newsroom do less of to free up time for this effort. What AREN’T you going to do.
• Be cautious about adding on engagement to a reporter or producer’s already busy workload. Instead, take something off that person’s plate – a weekly newspot? A scheduled hosting slot? Pledge break? – so that they will have some time to devote to engagement.
• Bring in station leadership from different departments, such as marketing and development, to get buy-in, share resources, and break down silos.
• Be clear in explaining how the staff’s help from across departments is key to the effort’s success.
• Be clear in explaining how engagement will be valuable to other staff’s goals and priorities. 
• Be patient. Build in time for the engagement to yield insight.
• Honor the quality of listening over the quantity of stories produced. 
• Decide if you will need to hire freelance help to take on tasks to free up a producer or reporter to carry out some of this engagement work.
• Consider hiring a bilingual freelancer to reach communities where English is not the dominant language.

Choose your engagement tools.

Working with your staff, select at least one tool from the resources in Tools for Engagement, linked below, for your initial engagement strategy. These include embedding reporters, launching texting clubs, digital call-outs, Hearken or Google Form surveys, direct mail or flyers and listening sessions (virtual or in-person).

Remember: There is no silver bullet when it comes to engagement. Try new things and see how they meet your metrics of success.

Encourage your staff to continuously innovate as they try to engage, build trust, and meet information needs.

Measure and celebrate successes.

There are numerous metrics you can use to measure success:

• Story ideas coming to you from the community.
• More diverse voices on the air, articles and content.
• Partnerships brokered with community groups and/or other media.
• Attendance at listening events (diversity of people present at such events).
• Types of enterprise stories produced.
• Number of new sources/contacts established.
• Staff acquiring new skills (live video streaming on Facebook; organizing and tracking a texting club).
• An increase in station membership as a result of community engagement.
• Digital audience growth as a result of engagement.
• Policy changes – locally and statewide – as a result of the stories that have emerged from engagement.
• Positive feedback by the community.

Engagement will not work well every time. Revisit your metrics and recognize successes large and small. As the newsroom leadership, you should:

• Create a Slack channel, Teams Thread, etc, to collect impact anecdotes and wins OR create a spreadsheet to gather the same.
• Encourage other stakeholders in this engagement work to contribute to the Slack channel/spreadsheet.
• Send email or Slack messages to the newsroom celebrating an accomplishment.
• Regularly share with the newsroom the results of an engagement effort.
• Bring in ice cream/cookies/cupcakes on a Friday afternoon to note progress.
• Publish stories to show engagement results with the community. It will encourage them to interact more with your newsroom.

Share back with the community.

Make community feedback loops part of your newsroom’s engagement culture.

• Set mechanisms in place for reporters and producers to share content with the community they have engaged, and mechanisms to stay in regular contact.
• If your reporters are using a texting service, make sure they send a link to the story produced back to the people who texted.
• If your newsroom is soliciting questions on a given topic don’t just post the answers online, also email the answers back to the questioner. 
• Solicit feedback on coverage through surveys or through community convenings.
• Follow up with a thank you and an email summarizing what you’ve learned!
• Thank your community publicly. You can use your newsletter or a message on air to show gratitude.

You’ve found new audiences, now get to know them. 

• Work with your membership department to identify new audience members and find ways to encourage them to subscribe or become members.
• Consider a survey of new audience members – where do they get most of their news? via Facebook? Or X? Or WhatsApp? Reach them where they are.

Set up a committee of community connectors from outside your organization.

• This committee can be 2 or 3 people, or a dozen — think coalition of the willing.
• Ask them to provide you with perspectives on how their communities are being covered and to serve as influencers and resources.
• Form new partnerships with other local media in your region to share resources, find new audiences, and provide feedback.

Look to your Community Advisory Board or council as a resource.

• Do they have contacts, story ideas and connections to communities you aren’t currently covering or serving?
• Ask them to give you feedback about your content.
• If you don’t have one, consider starting one!

Hire a Community Ombudsman to protect your community needs.

• Announce the hire to your audience and explain their role and who to communicate with them, including:
• Respond to audience complaints and concerns about news coverage.
• Evaluate journalistic practices to ensure fairness, accuracy, and ethical standards.
• Communicate newsroom decisions and corrections clearly to the public.
• Listen to them and their feedback and implement any changes needed.