Engagement Journalism Guides
Resources to help you make your work more participatory, equitable and inclusive
As engagement journalism has grown and more journalists seek to listen to and work collaboratively with communities to meet their information needs, so has the number of practical, free online guides! Here are some that I find useful. Remind me of ones I missed.
Listening Post Collective Playbook This has always been one of my favorite engagement journalism resources. It will walk you through the process of doing a community-led information ecosystem assessment. It has practical resources that will help you find data about your community, create surveys, and much more. Trust me, it’s worth taking the time to create an account.
Trusting News This site has SO MANY practical, research-backed strategies for trust building. It offers many examples from newsrooms and offers guidance around best practices for transparency, which is one of the most important ways journalists can build trust and relationships with the communities they serve.
JMR’s Participatory Journalism Playbook Use this guide “to help equip your newsroom to involve communities and create more nuanced and relevant reporting. It uses, as an example, one long-form reporting project and its impact on broader editorial processes.” It is based on jesikah maria ross’s extensive experience at CapRadio. I find the Story Circles approach particularly compelling, which involves organizing intimate events in which audiences, reporters, and people heavily impacted like a particular issue like the housing crisis come together to share personal stories and build trust.
Membership Puzzle Project This immensely practical and detailed guide will help you set up a membership program for your newsroom. Because successful membership programs require deep engagement with your community, a lot of the resources here are also applicable to any effort to better listen to or serve an audience.
Systems Thinking for Journalists Systems thinking can help journalists “be better equipped to explain the forces driving society’s most pressing challenges.” It is a complex world out there with a lot of wicked problems, and this site will walk you through how to think about it more clearly, and includes a variety of exercises to help you get started.
Why Should I Tell You?: A Guide to Less-Extractive Reporting Vulnerable communities can stand to lose a lot by talking to a reporter, and this resource will help you reduce the risks they face. It “aims to help journalists navigate the ethical dilemmas they encounter as they interview people who have experienced harm… and explores the deeper ethical questions of what conditions, if any, make such journalism morally justifiable and not purely extractive or voyeuristic.”
News & Brews Event Guide This is a tremendously practical guide to planning a journalism-focused event. It outlines the processes that made this event series, which features a panel discussion and community conversation based on long-form reporting, a success for the Illinois Newsroom, a regional journalism collaborative in Illinois made up of six public media partner stations. Even if you change the specific details of any given event around a lot, students have told me they found this helpful in planning.
Community Listening Ambassadors Guide Community Ambassadors “help local newsrooms — and their philanthropic partners — to create two-way conversations with communities yet unreached by traditional engagement methods.” The guide will take you through the steps needed to have folks who may have no journalism background take part in assessing and serving local information needs. They help journalists “hear from people we otherwise might not, including people whose perspectives have historically been underrepresented in local news narratives.”
Taking Care: A Guide for Participatory and Trauma-Informed Journalism. This is brand new so I haven’t dug into it yet, but it “describes specific care practices and gives examples of where and how to use them in the reporting workflow.”
Gather Gather is a community of practice for engaged journalists, and its website has a ton of great case studies of successful engaged journalism projects so you can see what worked or didn’t work for others. It also has a Slack group and hosts regular virtual events.
Citizen’s Agenda Looking to get away from horse race coverage of elections and make your journalism more useful for voters? This guide will help you to reframe your plan for asking questions of candidates and more. It has been tried and tested successfully over time in many different locations.
What Journalists Can Learn from Organizers: A Guide Community organizers have a wealth of knowledge about building trust, listening to people and working collaboratively to make change happen. This guide brings those lessons to journalism.
Dart Center Style Guide for Trauma-Informed Journalism This guide offers “fresh approaches to interviewing and source development, investigative method, storytelling, ethics and the news agenda itself.” It includes “brief evidence-informed guidance on news choices, language usage and ethics in reporting on the impact of trauma on individuals, families and communities; recommendations for appropriate use of relevant psychological and scientific terminology; and special considerations when reporting on consequential trauma-laden issues such as racism and sexual violence.”
Anti-Racist Table Stakes Helps journalists learn how to “fully embody an anti-racist approach to serving communities with high quality, credible, inclusive, accessible news and information.” Click through for a practical, very specific behavioral scorecard matrix to assess how your newsroom is doing in creating more equitable work and much more.
Why we need a rubric for assessing local news coverage of traditionally marginalized communities This rubric “offers a simpler way to highlight problematic practices within newsrooms. Journalists, newsroom leaders, and researchers will be able to evaluate the exact factors that need to be addressed. The rubric will also provide some idea as to what standards need to be met to improve workplaces and the industry at-large.”
Community Guides for Journalism — A host of resources for successfully managing online communities, including tips on moderation, creating codes of conduct, modeling threats, and much more.
Online Harassment Field Manual Unfortunately, interacting online comes with risks. This guide helps with managing privacy online and tightening digital security, which is especially important for journalists who cover divisive issues.
Journalists can change the way they build stories to create organic news fluency This resource address how journalists can help their audiences distinguish good reporting from bad and better understand the process of producing news. It offers a series of checklists for all different kinds of news stories that can help journalists think about what kinds of questions their audiences may have.
Center for Media Engagement at UT Austin Quick, research based tips for journalists to build trust and engage with their audiences. It even has a quiz creator you can use to easily build quizzes, which have been shown to increase civic engagement, help people learn and spend more time on a webpage.
Complicating the Narrative Toolkit You will want to read this essay first on how journalists can cover controversial issues differently, in ways that help people find their way through conflict. It draws on experts in conflict mediation to help journalists “tell richer and fuller stories about divisive issues.”
Solutions Journalism Basic Toolkit Solutions journalism is “rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.” At a time of rising news avoidance, helping audiences to not only identify problems but see ways in which they could be solved is particularly vital. Start with the toolkit and then dig into their searchable database of solutions stories from a variety of different news organizations and other resources.
How-to: Flyer for Community Engagement by my former student Mekdela Maskal. Simple, practical advice for doing engagement for event participation.
The Moment is Magic: 7 Tips for Journalists from Restorative-Justice Practitioners Find “actionable, impactful steps journalists can take when having difficult conversations,” co-authored by my former student Allen Arthur! It will help journalists build “healthier, less transactional and potentially even healing relationships with people.”
Community Engagement Playbook from America Amplified. Lots of practical tips from public media’s community engagement efforts, customized by role.
