Dear Board of Directors/Community Advisory Board:

I’m writing to bring you into a process of change that we are undergoing in the news department in terms of how we are covering the communities we serve.

In the past, journalism has been practiced from the top down: news editors and content managers help determine the stories worthy of coverage, and we then assign reporters to go out and find sources, talk to the relevant experts, and then come back and put a story together for broadcast and publication.

We’re starting to do things differently and I want to explain how and why. 

We are shifting our focus to a community engaged journalism model. Community engagement journalism is a strategy to connect people with the information that is relevant to them on the platforms that makes sense to them. 

While we will continue to serve our audience through our traditional broadcast platforms, we will also be reaching our audience through social media, on-demand content, live and virtual events. Rather than focusing our journalism to be about communities, we want our journalism to be for those communities -- to identify needs, and produce journalism that serves those needs. 

We will be doing that in the coming months and years by employing a whole host of tools to enable us to listen first to what people in our communities are telling us, and then reporting those stories out.

Our nation’s demographics are shifting and we in public media have frankly not done well in expanding our audience. For us to survive and thrive, we must continue to grow our audience by finding new ways of connecting to them. Community engagement will also help us develop more trust in public media. That is the heart and soul of why we are changing.

As we undergo this process, I will share with you what we are learning and how it is impacting the journalism we produce. I trust there will be a learning curve, but I also believe you will hear and applaud the new voices, new issues and new communities we bring to our journalism.