Engaged journalism scales

“Engaged journalism needs to be integral to how we report the news, not a side effort we roll out on occasion.”

We simply can’t set an editorial agenda without the input of the people we are trying to serve. We need to understand that producing a map of food pantries can be as impactful as an investigation. And we can’t assume the journalism we produce will find its way into the hands of the people most in need of the information.

In 2021, news organizations with public service missions must examine how many of their resources go towards serving “the public” and rapidly reallocate. I say that based on experience and evidence that engaging our audience directly is also a path to building more sustainable news operations.

At KPCC and LAist, we’ve answered more than 6,200 questions from readers since the pandemic began. At first, they asked how safe it was to travel and whether to postpone family events. Then someone asked us how to safely bury a loved one. Now we are being asked how to make ends meet; from accessing unemployment benefits and free food to avoiding eviction.

The questions mirror the progression of the virus and its effects on Angelenos. They have forced us to rethink what our public radio station’s value proposition is to our region.

Many public news media organizations have variations of engaged journalism projects. But this approach must be rapidly scaled across the country if we are to truly deliver on our mission. Engaged journalism needs to be integral to how we report the news, not a side effort we roll out on occasion.

Technology now allows us to speed up this process. By applying natural language processing (AI) to the thousands of questions we received we were able to detect patterns. The questions served as a road map for our reporting and a tool for residents trying to navigate a region that’s been ravaged by COVID 19.

This approach is also good for business. More than 50 percent of the people we’ve responded to have signed up for our daily newsletter, a direct funnel to membership.

As technology advances, and community level information needs soar, there is an opportunity for us to redefine public service journalism in the information age. We must seize it in 2021.

Kristen Muller is chief content officer of Southern California Public Radio.

We simply can’t set an editorial agenda without the input of the people we are trying to serve. We need to understand that producing a map of food pantries can be as impactful as an investigation. And we can’t assume the journalism we produce will find its way into the hands of the people most in need of the information.

In 2021, news organizations with public service missions must examine how many of their resources go towards serving “the public” and rapidly reallocate. I say that based on experience and evidence that engaging our audience directly is also a path to building more sustainable news operations.

At KPCC and LAist, we’ve answered more than 6,200 questions from readers since the pandemic began. At first, they asked how safe it was to travel and whether to postpone family events. Then someone asked us how to safely bury a loved one. Now we are being asked how to make ends meet; from accessing unemployment benefits and free food to avoiding eviction.

The questions mirror the progression of the virus and its effects on Angelenos. They have forced us to rethink what our public radio station’s value proposition is to our region.

Many public news media organizations have variations of engaged journalism projects. But this approach must be rapidly scaled across the country if we are to truly deliver on our mission. Engaged journalism needs to be integral to how we report the news, not a side effort we roll out on occasion.

Technology now allows us to speed up this process. By applying natural language processing (AI) to the thousands of questions we received we were able to detect patterns. The questions served as a road map for our reporting and a tool for residents trying to navigate a region that’s been ravaged by COVID 19.

This approach is also good for business. More than 50 percent of the people we’ve responded to have signed up for our daily newsletter, a direct funnel to membership.

As technology advances, and community level information needs soar, there is an opportunity for us to redefine public service journalism in the information age. We must seize it in 2021.

Kristen Muller is chief content officer of Southern California Public Radio.

Linda Solomon Wood   Canada steps up for journalism

Gordon Crovitz   Common law will finally apply to the Internet

José Zamora   Walking the talk on diversity

Anna Nirmala   Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots

Taylor Lorenz   Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy

Nik Usher   Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media

Chase Davis   The year we look beyond The Story

Sonali Prasad   Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise

Don Day   Business first, journalism second

Aaron Foley   Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news

Jacqué Palmer   The rise of the plain-text email newsletter

Cherian George   Enter the lamb warriors

Ben Werdmuller   The web blooms again

Tanya Cordrey   Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values

Natalie Meade   Journalism enters rehab

Matt DeRienzo   Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality

A.J. Bauer   The year of MAGAcal thinking

Parker Molloy   The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

Mike Caulfield   2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)

Christoph Mergerson   Black Americans will demand more from journalism

M. Scott Havens   Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption

Heidi Tworek   A year of news mocktails

Kawandeep Virdee   Goodbye, doomscroll

Tonya Mosley   True equity means ownership

Kevin D. Grant   Parachute journalism goes away for good

John Davidow   Reflect and repent

Nabiha Syed   Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships

Matt Skibinski   Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it

Gonzalo del Peon   Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

J. Siguru Wahutu   Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different

Mariano Blejman   It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism

Whitney Phillips   Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods

Jennifer Choi   What have we done for you lately?

Doris Truong   Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage

Basile Simon   Graphics, unite

Astead W. Herndon   The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again

Burt Herman   Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes   A shift from conversation to action

Michael W. Wagner   Fractured democracy, fractured journalism

Bo Hee Kim   Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture

Nico Gendron   Ask your readers to help build your products

Sumi Aggarwal   News literacy programs aren’t child’s play

Robert Hernandez   Data and shame

Gabe Schneider   Another year of empty promises on diversity

Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui   Millennials are ready to run things

Rachel Schallom   The rise of nonprofit journalism continues

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, a push for pluralism

Zainab Khan   From understanding to feeling

Loretta Chao   Open up the profession

Amara Aguilar   Journalism schools emphasize listening

Cory Bergman   The year after a thousand earthquakes

Laura E. Davis   The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change

Steve Henn   Has independent podcasting peaked?

AX Mina   2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary

Kristen Muller   Engaged journalism scales

Sam Ford   We’ll find better ways to archive our work

Nonny de la Pena   News reaches the third dimension

Chicas Poderosas   More voices mean better information

Zizi Papacharissi   The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth

Ben Collins   We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists

Nicholas Jackson   Blogging is back, but better

Jim Friedlich   A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

Sara M. Watson   Return of the RSS reader

Logan Jaffe   History as a reporting tool

Sue Cross   A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save

Edward Roussel   Tech companies get aggressive in local

Francesca Tripodi   Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes

Julia Angwin   Show your (computational) work

Charo Henríquez   A new path to leadership

Tim Carmody   Spotify will make big waves in video

Catalina Albeanu   Publish less, listen more

Garance Franke-Ruta   Rebundling content, rebuilding connections

Rishad Patel   From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers

Ernie Smith   Entrepreneurship on rails

John Ketchum   More journalists of color become newsroom founders

Renée Kaplan   Falling in love with your subscription

Brian Moritz   The year sports journalism changes for good

Juleyka Lantigua   The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned

Bill Adair   The future of fact-checking is all about structured data

Marissa Evans   Putting community trauma into context

Joshua P. Darr   Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis

Ray Soto   The news gets spatial

Cindy Royal   J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability

Kate Myers   My son will join every Zoom call in our industry

Meredith D. Clark   The year journalism starts paying reparations

Patrick Butler   Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration

Hadjar Benmiloud   Get representative, or die trying

C.W. Anderson   Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?

Imaeyen Ibanga   Journalism gets unmasked

Sarah Stonbely   Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   Stop pretending publishers are a united front

Pia Frey   Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

Marcus Mabry   News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)

Ryan Kellett   The bundle gets bundled

Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund   The virus ups data journalism’s game

Mark Stenberg   The rise of the journalist-influencer

Richard Tofel   Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)

Annie Rudd   Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”

Masuma Ahuja   We’ll remember how interconnected our world is

Cory Haik   Be essential

David Chavern   Local video finally gets momentum

Rick Berke   Virtual events are here to stay

Jer Thorp   Fewer pixels, more cardboard

Brandy Zadrozny   Misinformation fatigue sets in

Jesse Holcomb   Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism

Talmon Joseph Smith   The media rejects deficit hawkery

Sarah Marshall   The year audiences need extra cheer

Jessica Clark   News becomes plural

Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula   Expect to see more translations and non-English content

Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli   Defund the crime beat

Nisha Chittal   The year we stop pivoting

Mark S. Luckie   Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

Joni Deutsch   Local arts and music make journalism more joyous

Jonas Kaiser   Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Benjamin Toff   Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse

Andrew Donohue   The rise of the democracy beat

Rodney Gibbs   Zooming beyond talking heads

Mike Ananny   Toward better tech journalism

Janet Haven and Sam Hinds   Is this an AI newsroom?

Jennifer Brandel   A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation

Colleen Shalby   The definition of good journalism shifts

Celeste Headlee   The rise of radical newsroom transparency

Jody Brannon   People won’t renew

Delia Cai   Subscriptions start working for the middle

Ståle Grut   Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox

Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman   Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation

Pablo Boczkowski   Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?

Alyssa Zeisler   Holistic medicine for journalism

Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin   Media reparations now

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves

Beena Raghavendran   Journalism gets fused with art

John Garrett   A surprisingly good year

Candis Callison   Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)

Megan McCarthy   Readers embrace a low-information diet

Anthony Nadler   Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy

Raney Aronson-Rath   To get past information divides, we need to understand them first

Joanne McNeil   Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism

Mandy Jenkins   You build trust by helping your readers

Jeremy Gilbert   Human-centered journalism

Errin Haines   Let’s normalize women’s leadership

Francesco Zaffarano   The year we ask the audience what it needs

Victor Pickard   The commercial era for local journalism is over

Ariane Bernard   Going solo is still only a path for the few

Tshepo Tshabalala   Go niche

Hossein Derakhshan   Mass personalization of truth

Danielle C. Belton   A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

Ashton Lattimore   Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry

Ariel Zirulnick   Local newsrooms question their paywalls

John Saroff   Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites

Samantha Ragland   The year of journalists taking initiative

Tamar Charney   Public radio has a midlife crisis

Andrew Ramsammy   Stop being polite and start getting real

Kerri Hoffman   Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem

David Skok   A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation

María Sánchez Díez   Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok

Marie Shanahan   Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo