Engaging in the Community & Making Journalism
Reporters and Producers
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.
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Read more about how a reporter in Pittsburgh built trust with community members in the city’s Hill District.
Read about how North State Public Radio in Chico, CA, and Austin PBS assessed and addressed information needs in their local communities in this blog post.
Watch this webinar with Madeleine Baer of El Timpano to learn more about assessing and mapping a community’s information needs.
CASE STUDY: Austin PBS used community engagement strategies to find out what an unincorporated community outside city limits needed to know. They created this Del Valle Resource Guide in response.
CASE STUDY: North State Public Radio in Chico, California, wanted to learn more about what their communities knew about wildfire evacuation routes. They created a community survey and shared it widely, and then reported a series of stories about emergency preparedness.
Quick Tip: 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.
Seek out community assets and strengths, rather than the problems.
Be transparent about your newsroom, your journalists, and your reporting process when in conversation. Ask, “what else do you need to know about us and our process?”
Set up a process to come back to this same community for feedback on the stories you write and produce. Respond to that feedback with more stories.
Ask each community member you meet for recommendations of other people to talk to.
It’s time to report
Use throughline questions.
Having a set of questions that you want to ask different audiences can help you find a theme (or not) among the different people you’re meeting. As an example, America Amplified reporters asked versions of these questions in 2020: “What’s something you want people to know about your community?” and “Where do you get your news and information?” You can also use this as a way of bringing disparate communities together. Based on answers, you could bring sources or communities together for group discussions on or off air.
Be prepared for too much or too little information.
Some tips:
No common thread in responses from various sources? Pick two or three and follow up directly with the submitter(s) and ask more questions.
People aren’t responding to your prompts? Try a different platform. Ask community members for advice or help.
Too many story ideas? Focus on one that will have the most impact for this community. Commit to telling multiple stories.
Hold people accountable, including the community itself.
If you discover misinformation, do work that tells the story of how it came to be, and share the correct information. Push people in power/decision makers to address a specific, pressing issue. What’s taking so long? What’s standing in the way? Can your story be a catalyst to a community-based solution?
Be transparent about your engagement process.
Audiences don’t always understand what journalists do. In a community-engaged newsroom, take steps to explain who you are, how you are funded, why you did the story you did and who you talked to and why. A ‘Behind the Story’ section at the end of a post could explain why you chose to do this story, how you discovered it, etc.
Remember: These stories are not just for the community you’re engaging with.
You are serving the community you’ve engaged with by reporting and following up on the stories that are important to them. But you are also serving a broader listening area by bringing to your audience’s attention stories about a community they might not be familiar with.
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. Talk to your editor or news director about the necessity for being 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!
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Watch how, In 2020, WITF collaborated with a community group to co-create the “Toward Racial Justice” video series.
Watch how WFYI partnered with the Indianapolis Recorder, a local newspaper, to produce the “Where Do We Go From Here?” televised series.
Read about how WUSF’s Daylina Miller builds partnerships with local Black media groups to improve their station’s reach: From Community Partners to News Series: WUSF’s Latest Engagement Journalism Project Highlights Black Mental Health
Read how reporter Ed Mahon of WITF found the “human element” through engagement in reporting on COVID.
Watch our webinar on Translating Engagement Into Journalism.
Check out Trusting News for a wealth of tips on how to explain the journalistic process to your audience, including how to add transparency with a behind-the-story Q&A.
Check out some reporting tips here: How to record and send your own audio diaries and Using infographics to tell stories.
Ready to continue your journey?
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