Dear Journalists: Stop Leaving Your Communities High and Dry

They deserve more than that.

Community Engagement: More Than Storytelling

This week, 16 other budding journalists and I journeyed on into the realm of community engagement. When I first heard the words “community engagement,” I was confused. We were journalists. We were telling stories about our communities. But that’s exactly the problem.

Community engagement is about shifting that perspective. It’s about continuously listening, interacting and serving a community. How did the work contribute to the community reaching its goals? Far too often, journalists are obsessed with telling the story. And the story is good. But the story. isn’t. enough. And that’s what the social journalism program is about.

We journalists have been creating work we think the public want, what we think is going to help them. And as soon as we get our page views, our likes, our shares and our pay raises, we leave the concerned communities high and dry. No more.

It’s kind of (very) sad how true this meme ^ is.

The Role of Design Thinking in Engaging with Communities

This week, our class focused in on design thinking and how this can help us achieve our social journalism goals. The process of design thinking is as follows: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. Ideally, this is how one would go about creating anything, right? But us journalists often skip the first two steps.

Empathizing with and defining a community’s problems and goals are crucial parts in any successful design endeavor. Before the NY Times developed its Spanish edition, it did intensive fieldwork in Mexico. It didn’t merely rely on data (which is also important). It talked to people. It asked them about their habits, their needs.

In the Guide to Journalism and Design, Heather Chapman cites several reasons for design thinking within the general context of journalism, but one particularly stood out to me:

“To facilitate civic journalism — drawing directly upon the experiences of news consumers as a primary source of stories — and solutions-focused journalism, exploring not only the problems of the communities served by news organizations, but also ways to address them.”

Reading this passage, I thought, “This is it! Solutions-focused journalism is what we need!”

We need to stop thinking of journalism as a journalist-centric process, but rather as a community-centric process. And I’m so excited to learn how to do that through this program.