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7

The year of the local engagement reporter

“I’ve lost count of all the new ways of asking people to share stories that I’ve seen this year.”

2019 marked a great year for the state of local engagement reporting, which is a term my ProPublica colleagues and I use to mean giving affected communities avenues to participate in the reporting we do. Lots of times, this looks like crowdsourcing and asking people to help us with our reporting through questionnaires, letters, emails, records requests, flyers, postcards, community meetups — the list goes on.

I’m predicting more of this is coming to local journalism in 2020. I think I have reason to be optimistic.

This year, The Fresno Bee hired an engagement reporter, Isabel Sophia Dieppa, as part of its Education Lab team. It added in a November post that its plans include community meetings and listening sessions.

The Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia announced it’s hiring a Report For America corps member who will find stories through social media and community engagement. The job posting says that the reporter will pinpoint “communities interested in and affected by our journalism, enlisting their participation in our storytelling process and reporting stories in service of these communities.”

As an engagement reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, our initiative to support local investigative reporting, I’m thrilled that more journalists are joining these ranks. These are just two newsroom positions and by no means the extent of the work happening. (To that end, if your newsroom has hired a position focused on reaching affected communities for journalism, I’d love to hear about it!) I’ve lost count of all the new ways of asking people to share stories that I’ve seen this year. I believed that engagement reporting could be a game-changer for local newsrooms and their communities when I applied for this job, and nearly two years into the role, I believe that even harder.

I can’t know all that went into the genesis of these newsroom positions. I’m thankful for my colleagues, editors and mentors, who’ve for years been blazing a path forward for engagement, shouting these mantras from rooftops and showing that the community makes our work stronger. They’ve no doubt made the road to getting the green light for crowdsourcing or a community meetup much easier for journalists in 2019 than it was in 2017. And I hope that newsrooms around the country are starting to see what I’ve seen in my time at ProPublica:

  • It means something to people when you, a journalist, can hold a listening session and tell people who’ve perhaps never talked to a journalist that you care about what they have to say.
  • It means something when you can show people data or a piece of reporting and explain why you think it matters to them, and then watch them take in the journalism.
  • It means something when you stop labeling communities as “hard to reach” and instead try harder to reach them — and actually succeed in doing that.

In a year when local newsrooms will think hard about venturing out of their daily coverage areas to report on the presidential election and aim to build trust while doing it, I hope more of them choose engagement strategies. I’m hopeful that they will.

Beena Raghavendran is an engagement reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

2019 marked a great year for the state of local engagement reporting, which is a term my ProPublica colleagues and I use to mean giving affected communities avenues to participate in the reporting we do. Lots of times, this looks like crowdsourcing and asking people to help us with our reporting through questionnaires, letters, emails, records requests, flyers, postcards, community meetups — the list goes on.

I’m predicting more of this is coming to local journalism in 2020. I think I have reason to be optimistic.

This year, The Fresno Bee hired an engagement reporter, Isabel Sophia Dieppa, as part of its Education Lab team. It added in a November post that its plans include community meetings and listening sessions.

The Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia announced it’s hiring a Report For America corps member who will find stories through social media and community engagement. The job posting says that the reporter will pinpoint “communities interested in and affected by our journalism, enlisting their participation in our storytelling process and reporting stories in service of these communities.”

As an engagement reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, our initiative to support local investigative reporting, I’m thrilled that more journalists are joining these ranks. These are just two newsroom positions and by no means the extent of the work happening. (To that end, if your newsroom has hired a position focused on reaching affected communities for journalism, I’d love to hear about it!) I’ve lost count of all the new ways of asking people to share stories that I’ve seen this year. I believed that engagement reporting could be a game-changer for local newsrooms and their communities when I applied for this job, and nearly two years into the role, I believe that even harder.

I can’t know all that went into the genesis of these newsroom positions. I’m thankful for my colleagues, editors and mentors, who’ve for years been blazing a path forward for engagement, shouting these mantras from rooftops and showing that the community makes our work stronger. They’ve no doubt made the road to getting the green light for crowdsourcing or a community meetup much easier for journalists in 2019 than it was in 2017. And I hope that newsrooms around the country are starting to see what I’ve seen in my time at ProPublica:

  • It means something to people when you, a journalist, can hold a listening session and tell people who’ve perhaps never talked to a journalist that you care about what they have to say.
  • It means something when you can show people data or a piece of reporting and explain why you think it matters to them, and then watch them take in the journalism.
  • It means something when you stop labeling communities as “hard to reach” and instead try harder to reach them — and actually succeed in doing that.

In a year when local newsrooms will think hard about venturing out of their daily coverage areas to report on the presidential election and aim to build trust while doing it, I hope more of them choose engagement strategies. I’m hopeful that they will.

Beena Raghavendran is an engagement reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

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Carrie Brown-Smith   Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening

Barbara Gray   Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement

Joe Amditis   Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table

Fiona Spruill   The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves

Annie Rudd   The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph

Colleen Shalby   Journalists become media literacy teachers

Nushin Rashidian   Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?

Jeremy Olshan   All journalism should be service journalism

Don Day   Respect the non-paying audience

Jennifer Brandel   A love letter from the year 2073

Mira Lowe   The year of student-powered journalism

Ernie Smith   The death of the industry fad

Cristina Kim   Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”

J. Siguru Wahutu   Western journalists, learn from your African peers

Knight Foundation   Five generations of journalists, learning from each other

Millie Tran   Wicked

Ben Werdmuller   Use the tools of journalism to save it

Nicholas Jackson   What’s left of local gets comfortable with reader support

Sarah Marshall   The year to learn about news moments

Joni Deutsch   Podcasting unsilences the silent

Geneva Overholser   Death to bothsidesism

Alice Antheaume   Trade “politics” for “power”

Mario García   Think small (screen)

Sarah Alvarez   I’m ready for post-news

Mariana Moura Santos   The future of journalism is collaborative

Candis Callison   Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The business we want, not the business we had

Heidi Tworek   The year of positive pushback

Nikki Usher   All systems down

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Josh Schwartz   Publishers move beyond the metered paywall

Meredith Artley   Stronger solidarity among news organizations

Jeff Kofman   Speed through technology

Helen Havlak   Platforms shine a light on original reporting

Monica Drake   A renewed focus on misinformation

Beena Raghavendran   The year of the local engagement reporter

Kristen Muller   The year we operationalize community engagement

Nathalie Malinarich   Betting on loyalty

Meg Marco   Everything happens somewhere

Mike Caulfield   Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd

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Lauren Duca   The rise of the journalistic influencer

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Emily Withrow   The year we kill the news article

Kevin D. Grant   The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth

Adam Thomas   The silver bullet

Gordon Crovitz   Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms

Alana Levinson   Brand-backed media gets another look

Sonali Prasad   Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional

Heather Bryant   Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving

Zizi Papacharissi   A president leads, the press follows, reality fades

Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper   Power to the people (on your audience team)

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Michael W. Wagner   Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative

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Doris Truong   The year of radical salary transparency

Simon Galperin   Journalism becomes more democratic

Kerri Hoffman   Opening closed systems

Julia B. Chan   We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏

Laura E. Davis   Know the context your journalism is operating within

Elizabeth Dunbar   Frank talk, and then action

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Bill Grueskin   Our ethics codes get an overhaul

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Anthony Nadler   Clash of Clans: Election Edition

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Seth C. Lewis   20 questions for 2020

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Monique Judge   The year to organize, unionize, and fight

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John Garrett   It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization

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S. Mitra Kalita   The race to 2021

Sara K. Baranowski   A big year for little newspapers

Sue Robinson   Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments

Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker   A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech

Cindy Royal   Prepare media students for skills, not job titles

Tanya Cordrey   Saying no to more good ideas

Christa Scharfenberg   It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women

Linda Solomon Wood   Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal

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Steve Henn   The dawning audio web

Kathleen Searles   Pay more attention to attention

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Eric Nuzum   Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show

Rachel Schallom   The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates

Joanne McNeil   A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)

Brian Moritz   The end of “stick to sports”

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Jonas Kaiser   Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

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