Last month, as part of the Innovating Local News summit hosted by the NJ News Commons and the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, I moderated a panel with Amanda Zamora of ProPublica, Jim Schachter of WNYC and Ken Freedman of WFMU, looking at how their organizations have sought to build community around the news.
The focus of the panel was on moving newsrooms beyond narrow definitions of both “community” and “engagement.” While social media is a core part of many outreach efforts, this panel focused on how we can move beyond Facebook and Twitter to engage people in deeper ways on and offline.
Here are some takeaways from the panel – with lots of links to tools and examples.
Why Invest in Community Engagement?
Community building is complex and resource intensive, so before newsrooms develop a project they should by clear about why they are engaging their community and what their goals are. The panelists described three overarching ways that community engagement can strengthen media and news organizations:
- Build capacity: Your community can help you do things you can’t do yourself. Amanda Zamora pointed to projects like ProPublica’s Free the Files project which helped journalists scour more than 17,000 campaign finance PDFs for critical data. Jim Schachter talked about the WNYC Cicada Project which taught people to build soil temperature sensors and track the spread of the 17-year cicada across the North East. At WFMU the audience can annotate live-playlists adding their own images, facts and links to each song, building a vast knowledge base around the music they play.
- Build trust: Community engagement can help make journalism more transparent and accessible to communities, creating new opportunities for feedback, listening and accountability. Amanda Zamora discussed how reporters at ProPublica used a Facebook group to cultivate trust with people who were sharing their stories of medical malpractice and patient safety. In a dramatic example, Ken Freedman told the group that when WFMU was knocked off the air by Hurricane Sandy thousands of people still turned to the station online to connect, share info and help each other. At WNYC, Brian Lehrer’s call-in show is a cross-roads for many of their engagement efforts and place where they open up their reporting to local community voices and feedback.
- Build value: By inviting people into your work, you also make your work more central to people’s lives. When people have invested in a story or project, it helps build “sweat equity” in the organization. WFMU actively asks their community to help them fundraise with embeddable fundraising widgets. WNYC is currently running a sleep project that is providing people a platform to track their sleep and advice on getting more rest. Finally, Zamora of ProPublica talked about the way people see their stories, values, contributions reflected in ProPublica’s reporting and how that helps build affinity.
In many cases, the goal of these engagement efforts was not to cultivate more donors or raise money, but in the end, building capacity, trust and value are all critical to developing sustainable newsrooms. No matter what your business model is, you need to cultivate a deep connection to your community if you are going to survive.Continue reading “From Troll Whispering to Community Building: Practical Lessons in Engagement from ProPublica, WNYC and WFMU”
Josh Stearns 