Q&A: Ashley Alvarado on why community collaboration is ‘must-do’ journalism

Ashley Alvarado is the vice president of community engagement and strategic initiatives at Southern California Public Radio, which includes KPCC and LAist.

Alvarado is one of the leaders in the field of engaged journalism, where community collaboration and participation are core components. Over the past decade, Alvarado has seen this practice grow into a movement, even transforming into a reliable revenue strategy for many newsrooms.

We caught up with Alvarado to discuss the value of engagement and collaboration — and why these aspects are vital to a sustainable journalistic future.

WF: What led you to become interested in engaged journalism?

AA: Growing up, I always loved journalism. When I was at USC, I had a sort of a realization around the voices and experiences that were centered in journalism and the ones that were left out. Even from that time, I was thinking about the opportunities there.

Then, when I was at the Center for Investigative Reporting, they approached me and said they’re doing this engagement thing. It was totally new, and I was initially hesitant. But when I heard the approach — taking the incredible journalism we’re doing and make it more accessible and welcoming to others— I saw that it was an opportunity to close that gap. My work there and since then at KPCC has been about that: How do we make journalism more welcoming, reflective, and useful in folks’ lives?

There are a lot of things that go into that—vocabulary, methodology, tools, and so on. But the central questions and opportunities for me have really stayed the same. When we talk about collaborative or participatory journalism, I think a lot of that has been baked into the opportunities. The only way journalism can get more reflective and inviting is if it is more participatory.

WF: How do you think about collaborating with your audience?

AA: Collaborating with community members is an act of power sharing. I say community members instead of audience because audience engagement is primarily serving your existing audience — maybe it’s deepening that relationship, but not necessarily broadening the pool of folks who are turning to you or that you’re serving.

With community engagement and collaborations, we’re able to say, “how do we identify the information needs and habits of an audience that’s especially affected by an issue, and how do we build toward that?” One of the first examples was the call-out — we ask you for information and we share it back. But some examples that go even further than that, and which really excite me, are work that our early childhood team has done: Parenting, Unfiltered and Child Care, Unfiltered.

If we’re talking about collaboration, we want to make sure we’re centering equity and accessibility in the work we’re doing. That requires undoing a lot of set policies and practices within journalism — is this person a source, or are they a collaborator? We need to make sure we’re compensating them. Are we doing work that requires somebody who doesn’t have easy access to transportation to get around? We need to talk about transportation, or child care, we need to think about language accessibility. I’m proud of the work we’ve done there to lessen the obstacles for participation.

WF: Why is this approach valuable? Why is it important to have collaborators instead of sources and invest in that relationship with the community?

AA: If you asked me to go back to a time where I didn’t feel heard, I can think of that, and it’s traumatizing. But if you ask someone when they did feel heard, that’s really special. How do we unlock that and support those opportunities more regularly?

You can also talk about the funnel with subscription or membership models. People get invested when they feel invested in, or when there’s a sense of co-ownership. Collaboration is one way toward that. How are we designing this together? There’s an opportunity to fundamentally change the relationship with audiences if you’re willing to lean into that kind of collaboration.

It’s going from thinking of engagement as feel-good journalism to must-do journalism. Recognizing that this isn’t an add-on, it isn’t something extra that you’re being asked to do. It’s really an engine for our financial and journalistic future.

WF: KPCC recently announced the launch of a new collaborative program for engagement journalism as a revenue strategy. How does connecting public radio stations across the country — WBUR in Boston, WBEZ in Chicago, and MPR in Minneapolis — help advance your work?

AA: We’re about 11 or 12 years into engaged journalism as a movement. But if folks aren’t seeing the effects on the bottom line, you risk people walking away from something that has value in a lot of different ways. If we can do that, then we can share-out some of the resources we’ve put together that work for us.

How do we take four newsrooms that have all said we care about this, and make sure we’re equipped to do the work? Engagement is an orientation, not a prescriptive process. There will still be different expressions of it. We know that in order for us to do our job well, we need to support the community of practice. We get to spend time learning from everyone else doing this work, and we also get to benefit from it.

WF: Overall, what have you learned from your time working in engagement and collaborative journalism?

AA: It’s the stuff that I was most insecure about — the things that made me feel different at USC, or growing up in Oregon — that actually in a lot of ways ended up being my superpowers. It oriented me toward empathy, and trying to find ways to bring folks and organizations together.

And when it comes to collaborations, never discount the amount of HR, legal, and administrative work that needs to go into it. But also, you have to have folks dedicated to collaborations. Relationships are hard enough to maintain when somebody can be there all the time, and when you’re doing it in stops and starts, or with hand-offs, it can be near impossible. It’s imperative to have a dedicated team member or teams to handle that work.

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Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine, and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.

About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.