After years of making predictions about what I hoped would happen in journalism, I think I can finally offer a positive prediction that engaged journalism really is on the rise in U.S. newsrooms, and that it will continue to grow in 2020.
I hesitated to write this because I feared it might sound self-serving, given that I direct a master’s program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY that’s focused on engaged journalism. We call it “social journalism,” but it’s the same thing: doing journalism with and not for communities. But here’s the thing: I’ve been laser-focused on engagement since I took this job five years ago, and after a long slog of explaining over and over again to skeptics what it is we actually do, I’m starting to see the tide turning.
More job descriptions are popping up that require engagement skills — and by that I don’t mean just growing audience, although that can be part of it. I mean listening to and understanding people’s needs and working with the community to produce impactful journalism. And these job openings are showing up not just in the major nonprofit newsrooms like ProPublica or The Texas Tribune, but in local outlets as well. The Charleston Gazette-Mail is hiring an engagement reporter as part of its Report for America corps; the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle is hiring a “community impact” reporter.
I’ve been contacted several times this month alone to help craft job descriptions for other news employers interested in finding people with engagement skills; the Gather community of practice for engaged journalists has a bustling Slack team with multiple channels talking over all of the various challenges and lessons learned; the Online Journalism Awards had a category for engaged journalism for the first time this year (disclosure: as a member of the Gather steering committee, I helped develop the initial proposal for this award).
And my students give my colleague Jeff Jarvis and me tremendous hope through the creative and inclusive ways they create new forms of journalism during their time with the program. We believe they show the value of this approach better than any number of definitions or manifestos ever could. They’re joined by students at the University of Oregon, the University of Missouri, the University of Wisconsin, and others that also offer coursework in this area.
Look, I’m not naive. Journalists and academics have been talking seriously about people-powered journalism since at least the 1990s; that’s what I wrote my master’s thesis on almost 20 years ago (eek), and at the time, it had largely failed to take hold in most newsrooms. We’ve faced plenty of disdain and even outright hostility, and that won’t go away completely any time soon. But as news organizations become increasingly dependent on subscriptions or memberships and the kinds of trusting relationships those require, engaged journalism becomes more and more of an economic imperative as well as a moral one.
Jay Rosen, one of the early proponents of public journalism, which eventually led to where we are now, put it this way on Twitter in November: “Engagement journalism, solutions journalism, less extractive journalism, a more agile, iterative newsroom. Nothing I have seen while watching these emerge suggests they are going away soon. The shocks to the system have been so many that the culture of the press is evolving.”
Carrie Brown is the social journalism director at the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY.
After years of making predictions about what I hoped would happen in journalism, I think I can finally offer a positive prediction that engaged journalism really is on the rise in U.S. newsrooms, and that it will continue to grow in 2020.
I hesitated to write this because I feared it might sound self-serving, given that I direct a master’s program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY that’s focused on engaged journalism. We call it “social journalism,” but it’s the same thing: doing journalism with and not for communities. But here’s the thing: I’ve been laser-focused on engagement since I took this job five years ago, and after a long slog of explaining over and over again to skeptics what it is we actually do, I’m starting to see the tide turning.
More job descriptions are popping up that require engagement skills — and by that I don’t mean just growing audience, although that can be part of it. I mean listening to and understanding people’s needs and working with the community to produce impactful journalism. And these job openings are showing up not just in the major nonprofit newsrooms like ProPublica or The Texas Tribune, but in local outlets as well. The Charleston Gazette-Mail is hiring an engagement reporter as part of its Report for America corps; the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle is hiring a “community impact” reporter.
I’ve been contacted several times this month alone to help craft job descriptions for other news employers interested in finding people with engagement skills; the Gather community of practice for engaged journalists has a bustling Slack team with multiple channels talking over all of the various challenges and lessons learned; the Online Journalism Awards had a category for engaged journalism for the first time this year (disclosure: as a member of the Gather steering committee, I helped develop the initial proposal for this award).
And my students give my colleague Jeff Jarvis and me tremendous hope through the creative and inclusive ways they create new forms of journalism during their time with the program. We believe they show the value of this approach better than any number of definitions or manifestos ever could. They’re joined by students at the University of Oregon, the University of Missouri, the University of Wisconsin, and others that also offer coursework in this area.
Look, I’m not naive. Journalists and academics have been talking seriously about people-powered journalism since at least the 1990s; that’s what I wrote my master’s thesis on almost 20 years ago (eek), and at the time, it had largely failed to take hold in most newsrooms. We’ve faced plenty of disdain and even outright hostility, and that won’t go away completely any time soon. But as news organizations become increasingly dependent on subscriptions or memberships and the kinds of trusting relationships those require, engaged journalism becomes more and more of an economic imperative as well as a moral one.
Jay Rosen, one of the early proponents of public journalism, which eventually led to where we are now, put it this way on Twitter in November: “Engagement journalism, solutions journalism, less extractive journalism, a more agile, iterative newsroom. Nothing I have seen while watching these emerge suggests they are going away soon. The shocks to the system have been so many that the culture of the press is evolving.”
Carrie Brown is the social journalism director at the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY.
Jim Brady We’ll complain about other people living in bubbles while ignoring our own
Jonas Kaiser Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists
Heidi Tworek The year of positive pushback
Zizi Papacharissi A president leads, the press follows, reality fades
Geneva Overholser Death to bothsidesism
Nushin Rashidian Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?
Greg Emerson News apps fall further behind
Brian Moritz The end of “stick to sports”
Moreno Cruz Osório In Brazil, collaboration in a time of state attacks
Mira Lowe The year of student-powered journalism
M. Scott Havens First-party data becomes media’s most important currency
Francesco Zaffarano TikTok without generational prejudice
Margarita Noriega The platforms try to figure out what to do with single-subject newsrooms
Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper Power to the people (on your audience team)
Tom Glaisyer Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful
A.J. Bauer A fork in the road for conservative media
Catalina Albeanu Rebuilding journalism, together
Dannagal G. Young Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart
Nico Gendron Make better products if you want to reach Gen Z
J. Siguru Wahutu Western journalists, learn from your African peers
Linda Solomon Wood Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal
Simon Galperin Journalism becomes more democratic
Jakob Moll A slow-moving tech backlash among young people
Joni Deutsch Podcasting unsilences the silent
Mariana Moura Santos The future of journalism is collaborative
Doris Truong The year of radical salary transparency
Heather Bryant Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving
Rick Berke Incoming fire from both left and right
Hossein Derakhshan AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris
Candis Callison Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change
Bill Adair A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song
Rachel Schallom The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates
Richard Tofel A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges
Barbara Gray Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement
Felix Salmon Spotify launches a news channel
Logan Jaffe You don’t need fancy tools to listen
Julia B. Chan We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏
Matthew Pressman News consumers divide into haves and have-nots
Fiona Spruill The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves
Peter Bale Lies get further normalized
John Garrett It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization
Cristina Kim Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”
Kristen Muller The year we operationalize community engagement
Kevin D. Grant The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth
Craig Newmark Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation
Meg Marco Everything happens somewhere
Colleen Shalby Journalists become media literacy teachers
Kourtney Bitterly Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation
Joanne McNeil A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)
Kathleen Searles Pay more attention to attention
Eric Nuzum Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show
Laura E. Davis Know the context your journalism is operating within
AX Mina The Forum we wanted, the forum we got
Meredith Artley Stronger solidarity among news organizations
Ernie Smith The death of the industry fad
Ståle Grut OSINT journalism goes mainstream
Bill Grueskin Our ethics codes get an overhaul
Helen Havlak Platforms shine a light on original reporting
Masuma Ahuja Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful
Sonali Prasad Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional
Gordon Crovitz Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms
Seth C. Lewis 20 questions for 2020
Pablo Boczkowski The day after November 4
Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech
Joshua P. Darr All that campaign cash will make the media’s problems worse
Josh Schwartz Publishers move beyond the metered paywall
Dan Shanoff Sports media enters the Bronny era
Victor Pickard We reclaim a public good
Ben Werdmuller Use the tools of journalism to save it
Jeremy Olshan All journalism should be service journalism
Michael W. Wagner Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative
Steve Henn The dawning audio web
Alana Levinson Brand-backed media gets another look
S. Mitra Kalita The race to 2021
Lucas Graves A smarter conversation about how (and why) fact-checking matters
Lauren Duca The rise of the journalistic influencer
Carrie Brown-Smith Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening
Rachel Glickhouse Journalists get left behind in the industry’s decline
Jasmine McNealy A call for context
Jennifer Brandel A love letter from the year 2073
Sarah Stonbely More people start caring about news inequality
Christa Scharfenberg It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women
Kerri Hoffman Opening closed systems
Alice Antheaume Trade “politics” for “power”
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The business we want, not the business we had
Anthony Nadler Clash of Clans: Election Edition
Tanya Cordrey Saying no to more good ideas
Don Day Respect the non-paying audience
Irving Washington Leadership isn’t something you learn on the job
Knight Foundation Five generations of journalists, learning from each other
Jake Shapiro Podcasting gets listener relationship management
Emily Withrow The year we kill the news article
Errin Haines Race and gender aren’t a 2020 story — they’re the story
Sarah Marshall The year to learn about news moments
Sara K. Baranowski A big year for little newspapers
Sarah Schmalbach Journalist, quantify thyself
Sue Robinson Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments
Sarah Alvarez I’m ready for post-news
Monique Judge The year to organize, unionize, and fight
Brenda P. Salinas Treating MP3 files like text
Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young The promise of nonprofit journalism
Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb Local news initiatives run into a capital shortage
Beena Raghavendran The year of the local engagement reporter
Matt DeRienzo Local broadcasters begin to fill the gaps left by newspapers
Raney Aronson-Rath News deserts will proliferate — but so will new solutions
Alexandra Borchardt Get out of the office and talk to people
Nicholas Jackson What’s left of local gets comfortable with reader support
Monica Drake A renewed focus on misinformation
Mario García Think small (screen)
Madelyn Sanfilippo and Yafit Lev-Aretz News coverage gets geo-fragmented
Tonya Mosley The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends
Juleyka Lantigua A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions
Imaeyen Ibanga Let’s take it slow
Annie Rudd The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph
Jeff Kofman Speed through technology
Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor Think twice before turning to Twitter
Tamar Charney From broadcast to bespoke
Elizabeth Dunbar Frank talk, and then action
Stefanie Murray Charitable giving goes collaborative
Cory Haik We’re already consuming the future of news — now we have to produce it
Talia Stroud The work of reconnecting starts November 4
Joe Amditis Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table
John Keefe Journalism gets hacked
Whitney Phillips A time to question core beliefs
Mike Caulfield Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd
Carl Bialik Journalists will try running the whole shop
Nathalie Malinarich Betting on loyalty
Cindy Royal Prepare media students for skills, not job titles
Rachel Davis Mersey The business of local TV news will enter its downward slide