Community Engagement for Journalists: A Crash Course in Listening, Empathizing, and Learning from Communities We Report On
Takeaways, struggles, and approaches to listening for journalists who want to find new ways to serve communities.
Community Engagement has done many things to expand my ideas on how journalists engage and serve communities. First and foremost, I learned what it means to be in a community, and how they are defined. I learned that identifying communities is more complex than just merely categorizing people into like groups. I know now that some communities are self-defined, and some are not, some are public about their goals and some are still struggling to find safe places to congregate, and that some communities overlap with others. I learned how to interact with communities I am not apart of, and that many of the most vulnerable communities struggle to trust outsiders — and journalists — for good reason.
Here are a few key takeaways from some of the course readings and their application to my own community work:
From Allen Arthur’s The Transformative Possibilities of Community in Journalism,
“I, as a journalist, can offer you facts, but truth comes from the community.”
I highlighted this quote a while back, but now more than ever it reigns true. I read a lot of journalism that covers on the topic of education, and most of it focuses on the policy aspect — those that are being implemented, those that are being challenged. There is nothing wrong these pieces — in fact they are extremely important for the public to know about — however, I’ve noticed that there is room for the voices of students and parents who are being affected by the policies being reported on. And one more from the same author (Allen Arthur):
“What else can journalists offer? But that’s the thing about listening: if you do it long enough, someone will tell you the answer.”
This is something that I worry about — will I still be listening months after I’ve begun doing the work? What about years? Consistency is important to building trust within a community. I don’t want to get locked in on an idea for servicing a community, and then stop listening once the project begins.
From Laurenellen McCann’s The Problem With Inclusion,
“Working on exclusion means starting at the beginning, not the end. It means examining the practices we have in place (the ones we take for granted as normal) and changing them so that we don’t just value diversity but require it to thrive.”
This piece was so important to me, as it is applicable to so many systems in our country. Specifically, the one I am working in — journalism — and the one I am trying to serve — education. I wrote a whole Medium post about how this connects to the city’s current diversity plans in public schools, but I’m struggling to think of realistic ways to use this concept of problematic inclusion to affect change. Once we change the way we as journalists think about inclusion, how can we help others identify the problems in their own thinking? Especially when those problems feed into a gigantic system riddled with exclusivity?
One idea I have involves doing a profile of a county in Florida that got school integration wrong by forcing it upon two neighborhoods that needed more than just the action of putting bodies in a room with other bodies to succeed. From what my source told me, the low-income minority community that was being bussed to the majority white affluent high school was not consulted or asked about this new plan, and as a result, all hell broke loose. Her son was directly impacted in a life derailing way, and the mother thinks that this way due to poor planning on the city’s part. But, I suppose this a story for another time.
From Jennifer Brandel’s Want to be good for democracy? Be better at democracy:
“Same holds true for the public — if you aren’t at the editorial table (or have the ear or interest of someone at the table), you have no shot at having your voice heard.”
This idea plays into a Social Journalism aspect that we’ve talked about numerous times throughout the course: newsrooms need to value their audiences more by asking them what they’re curious about, and listening to them when they try and help us understand their experiences.
From Heather Chaplin’s The Crisis in Journalism Is a Wicked Problem
“The trick is to not be depressed by the lack of a solution, but inspired by it.”
This article taught me to think about the problems in journalism as a garden that needs to be cultivated instead of intimidating roadblocks to stress out over. This idea also correlates with what Jeff Jarvis told us in class one day which was to think of problems as opportunities. In my own community there are large problems that I will definitely not solve on my own, and smaller, more manageable problems — like information gaps between parents and educational opportunities for their children — that might be worth investigating.
From Leila Day’s Don’t ‘radiosplain’ and other ways to report on communities that aren’t your own:
“Identify your own preconceived notions about people or places. Everyone has them. We simply need to recognize them.”
This was tip number two in her article, and the only reason I picked it out over the others was because it is most applicable to me. It’s really hard to identify our own biases — especially well-intentioned people who don’t want to believe that they have them. This connects to my community because I am trying to serve people who are affected by systemic inequities that really have not affected me. Therefore, I cannot use my experience as a bridge in understanding, but instead have to tread the line carefully as I attempt to “serve” these people. After interviewing Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, for a story I was working on about how racial disparities in student discipline relate to a teacher’s implicit biases, I was humbled by my own lack of understand of the topic, and had to step back and rethink the whole story and the language I use to discuss the issues at hand.
Approaches to listening I found useful and my experience using them in my own community:
- Design Thinking Project: Since many news stories get written without involving the audience in some meaningful way, learning about the concept of design thinking was very helpful. Jennifer Brandel skillfully summarizes it as: “At its most basic, design thinking is an agile process for solving complex problems. It’s a way of understanding the needs of the people you’re building a solution for, and testing that solution with them before creating it.” This shift in thinking really helped shape my approach at every future assignment, and gave a concrete methodology to the Social Journalism program, which can sometimes be murky to define to others. But, the main takeaway I learned from attempting to use design thinking in the South Bronx was to not be afraid to just show up somewhere. Showing up and spending time in this area in person taught me more about the community’s needs than any amount of reading could have. I can definitely see how this model is successful over a longer period of time.

- Hearken method: No surprise here. I found this method of listening helpful in that it was the first assignment that forced me to think about the actual curiosities within my community, instead of just focusing on the problems and inequalities. Learning to investigate someone’s specific curiosity or question instead of an issue is already doing ten times more service to that person or group because you are providing them with information they are interested in. The model just made sense to me and was able to design a fairly comprehensive survey to send out in my community. I coupled it with a paragraph that explained the project using tips from the Hearken website, and gathered a lot of relevant feedback from parents, teachers, and students. I was not, however, able to do the second step in the above picture — define — which means I did not conduct a voting round on the questions that were submitted in the survey. I would be curious to see what the community would collectively decide upon if asked to vote.
- GroundSource tool: I really like the idea of using robots as a tool to engage with people. They are efficient, and can be in multiple places at once, which is helpful when you’re trying to cover significant ground as one person. I did have some trouble getting people to engage with my GroundSource bot. Some people just prefer to chat in person, which I think is fine too. But, creating the prompts for GroundSource was helpful in understanding what exactly I was looking to gain from the people who used it. Since the chatbot needs to be concise, designing the prompts forced me to include only the most pertinent questions and information.
Challenges that arose while listening to my community:
- I think one of the biggest challenges aside from explaining to people why you want to listen to them, is maintaining a longterm relationship with the people I am listening to. Two of my longest, most rewarding conversations were with parents who had a whole lot to say about their experience with the school system in New York City. However, I already feel them slipping from me if I don’t try and maintain an active relationship. I don’t want these people to feel like I am using them for a story, and them never speaking to them again. In a way, this type of community focused journalism is more exhausting, because it requires you to maintain multiple relationships with people similar to how regular human relationships function. This can feel overwhelming, but I am reminded of advice Sydette Harry from The Coral Project gave us during a visit to our class. She said to “Tell people what you’re capable of,” meaning that no one is going to benefit from making empty promises. I struggle with this because I want to please everyone all the time, and sometimes it’s hard for me to admit when I can’t deliver something.
- Another challenge within my community is that different groups have different concerns, depending on where they are situated within the system. Everyone wants to get the most out of public education, that much is clear, but not everyone is committed to making things equitable for all students. Why? Because that usually means sacrificing something for your own child and a lot of parents are just not going to do this. Similarly, teachers have concerns related to their jobs that sometimes clash with the concerns parents have. Without these concerns, teachers get taken advantage of, or drown underneath the impossible workload. To be clear, everyone’s concerns are legitimate, but they are sometimes in conflict with one another. I am reminded of an NPR story that followed a teacher from Tennessee who was one of many whose TEACH Grant Program money got converted to loans after some missed paperwork. The grant program was designed to entice teachers to teach for four years in a high-needs school by offering them money to earn their graduate degree. NPR followed this teacher and investigated this story for about a year and eventually affected change that caused the Department of Education to erase the unfair debts. The key to this reporting is consistency, and focusing in on a specific group of teacher who had a problem that no one really knew about.
Plans for the future:
Right now I am toggling back and forth between two communities: people who qualify for adult education, and parents of students in a public middle or high school in NYC. There’s more written about my adult education community idea here, but parents of public school students as a community is one I stumbled on while giving my final presentation. I think people were confused and thought that parents were my chosen community even though I was just listing them as a group of people who are affected by some of the issues I was discussing. So, they are now a possible community that I am going to continue listening to — this time with a keen focus on their needs and how journalism can address them. I would also be interested in narrowing this community and what this would look like. Perhaps it could be parents who work full time, parents who have been laid off, parents who are in favor of the diversity plan, parents whose child has been suspended at school, parents in District 15, etc. There’s a lot of room for discovery here, but I feel more equipped to listen now that I’ve tested out a few different methods. I suppose that was the point of this entire course — to use it as a place to start by inundating us with methods and tools. It’s now up to us to figure out how best to use them.
To follow this ongoing community project, visit my Medium publication.






