Engagement Journalism News 05–12–23

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Engagement Journalism

3 min readMay 15, 2023

Updates on the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY’s engagement journalism MA program and its students, faculty, and alumni, plus good reads, research and other news from the field. Bonus content (!) includes (what else?) Fred pics and a roundup of other tidbits of interest from program director Carrie Brown (views my own). Got some engagement journalism news or good reads? Let me know !

#EngagedJ at CUNY 🤩

HUGE NEWS, I TELL YA! HUGE! Lauren Costantino ’19 WON A PULITZER. Costantino, an audience engagement producer for the Miami Herald, was honored along with four of her colleagues for editorial writing. You can see how engagement informed her work here.
Joe Amditis, ’16, is quoted in this piece in Nieman Lab, Can AI help local newsrooms streamline their newsletters? ARLnow tests the waters. He believes “AI can save time, help small newsrooms scale up their operations, and even create personalized content for their readers and listeners.”
Erica Anderson, ’19, led a Gather chat on Local News: Helping Our Communities Think More Like Neighbors and Less like Political Adversaries on Thursday. Researchers discussed their findings on polarization in this country and local journalists explained how they were trying techniques like offering more context on stories their readers’ identified as controversial and creating a reader advisory board.

Good engagement journalism reads 📚

UW-Madison develops game to highlight trust in journalism. Aimed at middle school students, this game teaches principles of engagement journalism and the connection between community and journalism. UW-Madison Journalism School Professor Sue Robinson partnered on the game’s development.
#LevelUp: The Great Escape Digital Fluency Competition. Dr. Michelle Ferrier has created engaging, game-like “escape room” modules to help student innovators learn about digital culture, creation and innovation.
How Chalkbeat Took a Deep Dive Into COVID-19’s Impact on School Communities. New Gather case study! “Chalkbeat worked with community members to amplify the voices of families affected by the pandemic. By building complex relationships, reporters integrated themselves into the communities they covered — exposing failures and successes in the school system.”

FYI: Trusting News is hosting a series of *free* quick trainings focused on some of their most foundational trust-building principles.

Just Good Reads! 📑

How One Mother’s Love For Her Gay Son Started a Revolution By Kathryn Schulz. “What made Jeanne Manford different — and what made her actions so consequential — is that, until she started insisting otherwise, the kind of child she had was widely regarded as the kind that not even a mother could love.” (April)
Cuts to CUNY: An analysis of financial risks posed by cuts to the City University of New York in NYC’s FY 2024 Executive Plan Sounds dry, but this is an important and concise report that shows the incredible value of the CUNY system and how cuts “jeopardize CUNY’s ability to provide the academic and support services necessary to catapult low-income New Yorkers into the middle class.”
Jordan Neely Was Already Dead: New York reckons with a homeless epidemic and a killing. By my colleague Errol Lewis. “Across New York City, there’s a total of only 50 beds. That’s it, 50 beds. When you’re looking at a city of 8.8 million people, it’s not enough services, it’s not enough beds, it’s not enough spaces that are being provided for those that have severe mental illness”

Big L 😞

CNN for chiding Oliver Darcy for writing this correct take on the Trump town hall. Calling it like he sees it without fear or favor is his damn job.

Another Big Win 🎉

My colleague Yoruba Richen, who heads our documentary specialization, won a Peabody for her documentary on Rosa Parks.

Listening to 👂

Bone Valley podcast update. Was very disappointed to learn that Leo Schofield was again denied parole despite this excellent podcast that conclusively reveals his innocence.