Advancing Community-Centered Journalism: 5 core challenges and how to overcome them

How to shift mindsets and structures to prioritize community engagement

Damian Radcliffe
Commonplace Forum

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Photo by Desola Lanre-Ologun on Unsplash

This is an extract from my September 2024 report on Advancing Community-Centered Journalism. Read Chapter 1 on the five key principles that underpin this practice here.

Community-Centered Journalism offers significant benefits for both communities and newsrooms, but its implementation is not without challenges. This chapter explores five common obstacles and suggests ways to tackle them. We’ll also discuss broader strategies for expanding the practice of Community-Centered Journalism in Chapter 3.

In our interviews, we asked experts about the biggest opportunities and challenges facing Community-Centered Journalism. Building on this, we dive into the key impediments that practitioners often face, and offer recommendations to help address them.

Challenge 1: Organizational Culture

One of the most significant obstacles to implementing Community-Centered Journalism can be the existing culture within news organizations. As Candice Fortman, Executive Director of Outlier Media, observes, many newsrooms express a desire to focus on community, but it’s not necessarily prioritized.

“There are a lot of reporters who go into this work wanting to be of service,” she said, “but often [they] cannot do that work, because the goal of their newsroom is first, to capture revenue, or to capture awards, or to capture power, as opposed to being of service.”

To address this imbalance, Fortman advocates for a triangulation between the business model, newsroom goals and work being produced, as well as the community’s information needs. All these aspects must be in lockstep to successfully implement Community-Centered Journalism.

Ensuring that all parts of an operation are pulling in the same direction is not always easy. And, of course, aspirations can often be challenged by financial and other operational realities, especially at start-ups and smaller outlets.

“When you have an audience team, or product team, it’s very easy to make best practices and things like that,” Lisa Heyamoto says. “But when it’s one or two people who are doing absolutely everything… all of a sudden, those barriers start to stack up. And it becomes very difficult to imagine how to actually make this work.”

Fortunately, imagining how to make this work is potentially made easier due to the growing number of resources — including case studies, templates and models — that smaller newsrooms can learn from and adapt.

Michelle Ferrier points to Journalism That Matters’ work on civic communications as one such example, and its emphasis on creating mechanisms for sustained feedback loops.

Ferrier also advocates for “making sure that the community is part and parcel of the development process, as well as [the] finish[ed product].” For this to happen, “some attitude and behavioral change on the part of owners is going to be required,” she suggests. This includes hiring more diverse reporters, where possible, as well as bringing diverse stories to the forefront of an outlet’s work.

Image: Civic Communications Framework by Journalism That Matters, via Medium

To help overcome internal resistance to adopting Community-Centered Journalism practices, having a “champion” in the newsroom is crucial, says Andrea Wenzel.

Ideally, this person will already have a foundation in this type of work, so this role isn’t a huge leap for them Wenzel suggests, adding that it’s also important to ensure that this work doesn’t get siloed.

“If the only people doing the work have ‘engagement’ in their title, it’s not enough,” she says, “and it’s usually going to end up not working very well.”

Photo by Vonecia Carswell on Unsplash

Challenge 2: Time to implement (and who does it)

Resource constraints are a major consideration for most newsrooms, and those interested in Community-Centered Journalism must contend with the fact that this work requires time and effort.

Engagement, collaboration, and partnerships lie at the heart of community-centered work. However, these efforts can be underappreciated in newsrooms because they lack the visibility of traditional journalistic output, and aren’t the kind of work (e.g. pageviews, likes, time on site, etc.) that typically “counts” in mainstream newsrooms.

This is “not necessarily the flashiest thing,” observes Carrie Brown, then the Director of Engagement Journalism and an Associate Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and now Associate Professor of Journalism, Montclair State University. “A lot of this kind of stuff is being in the trenches, and having people have time to learn to build relationships.”

For local outlets, many of whom are facing ongoing financial pressures and often doing more with less, engaging in community-centered work can be particularly challenging.

Madeleine Bair spent nearly a year engaging with the community before launching El Tímpano. “When I did that, other journalists and newsrooms kind of looked at me like I was crazy,” she told us.

“They could never imagine their newsroom investing that time in just listening and just building relationships, and not trying to produce reporting out of that time.”

Fortunately, the landscape is changing. There are now training programs and grants available to encourage community listening and engagement, while a growing number of journalism schools are incorporating these practices into their curricula.

Yet, despite these positive developments, there are still significant barriers to overcome in funding this type of work and having the runway to execute it. As a result, communicating the dividends of Community-Centered Journalism is crucial to fostering culture change among funders and newsrooms alike.

Lisa Heyamoto points out that members of LION (Local Independent Online News Publishers) are often “small, scrappy, and time-strapped.” However, she emphasizes that understanding what the community actually wants allows newsrooms to more effectively prioritize.

“When you know what people want, you can focus your time and energy on meeting their needs, rather than wasting a bunch of time doing things that you think are what they need, but aren’t,” she says.

Alongside this, in newsrooms that tend to still be driven by clicks and other traditional metrics, the question of sustainable funding for community-centered work is also critical.

As Antoine Haywood and others reminded us, securing funding can be challenging because Community-Centered Journalism takes time and doesn’t always yield immediate results. This can make it difficult to secure long-term commitments from newsroom leaders and funders.

Moreover, because success is not guaranteed, newsrooms need to be given a license to experiment by media leaders and funders. “You might try three different things, and three of them might fail,” Sue Robinson says. “But in the course of doing this, you will learn and this next time you do an experiment, it may work.”

Having sufficient time to carry out all aspects of community-centered work, from listening to implementation, is essential. It’s a factor that both newsroom leaders and funders must fully support if we want these efforts to succeed.

As Madeleine Bair reflects, “All of our strategies have really been shaped out of that process of listening.” “We didn’t make our own assumptions, and then test them and then have to go to the drawing board,” she told us. “Our editorial process, [and] editorial priorities [right] down to our distribution and engagement tactics, it has all been shaped directly from and informed by our process of listening to hundreds of community members. And they’ve been very effective strategies because of that.”

Photo by “My Life Through A Lens” on Unsplash

Challenge 3: Showing return on investment and measuring impact

Some funders and traditional media outlets may be skeptical of the value of Community-Centered Journalism, especially if the concept is new to them. This lack of familiarity can make it difficult to get buy-in and support for a community-centered approach, especially given the resource and cultural constraints outlined above.

“And honestly, many [outlets] don’t have the systems and structures in place to even know when they’re seeing that return.” Lisa Heyamoto contends. “So, this is intertwined with measuring impact, which is something that a lot of organizations struggle with, especially the small independent ones that I work with.”

Moreover, Community-Centered Journalism also challenges many traditional conceptions of “success.” Many traditional media outlets are understandably focused on core elements related to their bottom line. That means generating clicks, serving ads, and gaining subscribers. However, these types of metrics don’t necessarily lend themselves to the slower, more relational work of Community-Centered Journalism.

This mismatch can be a real issue, especially in the current fiscal climate.

“At a moment when there’s so much uncertainty and instability on the revenue side of things, there’s not a lot of patience to test when it comes to this kind of stuff,” Jacob Nelson says.

“It’s so hard to capture causal relationships in journalism,” he adds. “I think that that doesn’t diminish the need for it, but I think that it makes it a tougher sell.”

Addressing this measurement challenge is crucial if funders, advertisers, subscribers, and policymakers are to more fully support Community-Centered Journalism. In turn, newsrooms must be able to provide these stakeholders with measurable, quantifiable, outcomes.

Rather than simply focusing on clicks or ad impressions, the impact of Community-Centered Journalism can be measured through deeper community engagement, increased trust, and tangible improvements in the lives of those served by the journalism.

These ideas were explored in a previous Agora report which examined how to support the practice of relational journalism. In the study, the authors presented a Reflective Practice Guide (RPG) designed to help journalists and their organizations document and reflect on their community engagement efforts. The RPG offers a framework for evaluating impact so that journalists can better articulate the significance and value of their engagement work. “In short,” the study notes, “the RPG provides a way to measure work that is often novel to news organizations and difficult to quantify.”

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Our interviewees also highlighted other areas that practitioners of Community-Centered Journalism can learn from.

Jonathan Kealing at INN pointed to the long-standing contributions of community and ethnic media, a view shared by Steven Wang. Wang, an Assistant Professor at Lawrence Technological University, but at the time a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Kansas, noted via email that “non-mainstream community journalism by ethnic media, queer media, and feminist media… have long been holding community engagement close to their core.”

Meanwhile, Carrie Brown cites a decision by The Markup to make its impact-tracking process freely available as another resource practitioners can learn from.

The site, a nonprofit newsroom focused on data-driven tech investigations, identified four audiences for their stories, underpinned by a desire to equip these groups “with the tools, knowledge, and agency to create change.”

“It’s not the neat, perfect kind of ‘here’s your direct ROI,’” Carrie Brown says, “but it does show some of the important impacts that they’re able to have. And I think that’s a little bit more persuasive than just sort of making big promises that we can’t back up.”

Screenshot via The Markup

At present, there’s no universal standard for measuring the impact of Community-Centered Journalism. And perhaps there never will be.

Andrea Wenzel reminds us that “as scholars, practitioners, and community members look to reimagine what trusted and relevant local journalism might look like for their communities… a community-centered process model is not one-size-fits-all.” Instead, organizations may need to define their own metrics for success. However, what’s crucial is that newsrooms actively consider and communicate these metrics, both internally and externally, so that the value of this work can be clearly recognized.

Image: Examples of questions from a practitioner survey in Agora’s Building Engagement report (p36).

Challenge 4: Having the right skills

Journalists practicing Community-Centered Journalism must possess a diverse range of skills. This includes strong listening and communication abilities, cultural competency and sensitivity, a deep understanding of the community or communities being covered, and relationship-building skills, all coupled with a journalist’s ability to tell compelling stories.

Some of these requirements might be unfamiliar, or entirely new, to many journalists. Nevertheless, although some of these elements may fall outside the traditional journalistic toolkit, they are critical for producing news that is both effective and empowering for the communities served.

Because Community-Centered Journalism is not a one-way street, newsrooms must learn how to give voice and agency to communities, making them active participants in the storytelling process. To deliver on this promise, journalists might be asked to facilitate conversations, map community assets and undertake surveys capturing information needs.

In order to succeed in this type of work, Michelle Ferrier says that journalists need a suite of abilities, including ideation, design, listening and delivery skills.

She further emphasizes the need for “power sharing” and advocates that efforts should be “collaborative in design, approach, and implementation.”

For many journalists, this may feel daunting, representing a significant departure from a lot of traditional reporting work, while others might view these skills as being in line with their expectations for a modern journalist.

Either way, it helps to consider Eve Pearlman’s advice that “Community-Centered Journalism has to do with mindset as much (or more) than structure; it’s the heart of the thing that matters not so much the thing itself.”

Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

Because of this emphasis on mindset, we may see more people entering newsrooms and media companies who don’t necessarily come from a traditional journalism background. This includes community organizers, business professionals, and those with expertise in membership engagement and other skills relevant to the delivery of Community-Centered Journalism.

For Pearlman, mentality and humility are perhaps as important, if not more important, than traditional reporting skills. “Humility [and] awareness goes a long way toward doing good work in Community-Centered Journalism,” she says. “Bring genuine curiosity about what you don’t know, don’t see etc. your way of seeing / your values, [your] ideas are not the only way, the right way, etc.” she advises.

Image via City Bureau

Challenge 5: Sustainability and expansion

Finally, one of the most significant challenges in delivering Community-Centered Journalism concerns resources and funding. Of course, this is widespread issue across the media landscape, but it can feel particularly acute for local media outlets, many of whom are the most likely to engage in the types of community-centered initiatives outlined in this report series.

As Jacob Nelson points out, there are “structural challenges journalists will face as they attempt to pursue Community-Centered Journalism projects.” Obstacles highlighted by Nelson include “limited funding, reluctant community members who are distrustful of or uninterested in local news (or both), a revenue model that is incompatible with this type of work.”

Expanding community-centered journalism initiatives also brings with it several key considerations. Delivering impact on a larger scale often requires significant resources, and there’s a risk that the relevance and impact of community-centered work may diminish when scaled up, losing the deep, personal 1–1 connection that smaller-scale efforts can often achieve.

That said, operating Community-Centered Journalism on a smaller scale (be that geographic, or in terms of smaller communities of interest) is not without its issues. These outlets are often serving lower-income communities with limited revenues and resources, notes Stefanie Murray.

Acquiring the resources to expand their operations is not easy. Looking at subscriptions and advertising, two of the biggest revenue sources for many outlets, these communities do not have the means to pay for a lot of media, and they may be less appealing to certain advertisers. Yet, these constituencies stand to benefit the most from Community-Centered Journalism, not least because these are communities that have typically been ignored, marginalized, or underrepresented by general interest media. Because of this, philanthropic and public funding, as we explore in the next chapter, may be key.

Photo by Adolfo Félix on Unsplash

Exploring one such community in an assessment of Newark’s Information Gaps & Needs by Outlier Media the authors found that: “there are often many information gaps in low-income communities like Newark, in part because of news organizations’ disproportionate interest in issues faced by more affluent communities.” This historic gap in interest and investment represents a hurdle for practitioners to overcome with both funders and communities alike.

Madeleine Bair’s experience with El Tímpano further illustrates this often stark reality. “It’s very hard for me to say this, and to sleep at night knowing this,” she told us, “but it took a pandemic for El Tímpano to raise ongoing funding and to have any ongoing staff.”

COVID brought attention to the critical need for journalism created with, and for, immigrant communities, particularly during a period of widespread misinformation and the need for effective public health communication. For El Tímpano the pandemic served as an initial catalyst for growth and revenue diversification, and the team has subsequently managed to sustain this momentum.

“Overall, it is easier now, during a crisis, during a pandemic, that’s disproportionately impacting Latino immigrants… for funders to see the value of journalism created with and for immigrant communities,” Bair says. “Not that it’s necessarily easy, but it’s easier [now] that people are more aware of the importance of a trusted source of journalism, particularly during a public health crisis, when we’ve seen the impact of so much misinformation and disinformation affecting the communities that we’re serving,” she adds.

The type of work produced by the likes of Outlier Media and El Tímpano, thrives in small, close-knit communities. Scaling up to reach larger audiences may risk losing the “secret sauce” that makes these efforts successful.

As Jacob Nelson highlights, a lot of Community-Centered Journalism “lends itself to small communities, small newsrooms, structures where the distance between the person that you are trying to write the story with is not far from you.”

Research from the Reuters Institute would seem to support this. “Scale can break communities, especially when combined with various forms of ‘platform capture’, including the ‘weaponization’ of online communities, and frequent changes to platforms’ products and policies,” notes Posetti, Simon and Shabbir in a 2019 report.

Image via the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

“Once weaponised at-scale, audiences can’t be recalibrated through direct engagement at scale,” they caution. “Instead, deeper, narrower, and stronger is key: smaller audiences properly engaged can still play a significant role through collaboration, distribution, and impact.”

To overcome the challenges of sustainability and expansion in Community-Centered Journalism, we must rethink traditional models of success and the desire of media companies to grow.

Smaller, community-focused efforts are where this type of journalism typically thrives, but scaling up without losing the essence of these initiatives is a difficult balancing act.

However, given the impact that Community-Centered Journalism can potentially deliver, we do want more people to benefit from it. Cracking this nut is a question that policy makers, funders, scholars and practitioners should seek to resolve. As Sue Robinson asks, “How do we do this at scale, so we can start speeding up the practice rather than, newsroom by newsroom?”

Collaboration might offer a path forward Carrie Brown suggests. “I think it would make a meaningful difference,” she says, “and we can include a lot more communities that are being exposed to this kind of work.”

Alongside this, Andrea Wenzel recommends “more emphasis on thinking about infrastructure and institutions, as opposed to projects.” Building trust is a core outcome of Community-Centered Journalism, but trust is fragile and can be difficult to maintain as organizations grow, Wenzel warns.

To counter this, she encourages stakeholders to ensure that trust and engagement are sustained over time. “There’s this fragility, if it’s not built into the institutional fabric and approached at the level of infrastructure,” she adds.

About the Author

Damian Radcliffe is a journalist, researcher, and professor based at the University of Oregon. He holds the Chambers Chair in Journalism and is a Professor of Practice, an affiliate faculty member of the Department for Middle East and North Africa Studies (MENA) and the Agora Journalism Center, and a Research Associate of the Center for Science Communication Research (SCR).

He is an expert on digital trends, social media, technology, the business of media, the evolution of present-day journalistic practice and the role played by media and technology in the Middle East.

Damian is always a three-time Knight News Innovation Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, an Honorary Research Fellow at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture Studies (JOMEC), and a Life Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). In Spring and Summer 2023 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

With nearly 30 years of experience in the media industry, Damian has worked in editorial, strategic, research, policy and teaching roles in the USA, Middle East and UK. This includes roles in all media sectors (commercial, public, government, regulatory, academic, and nonprofit/civil society) and all platforms (print, digital, TV and radio).

He continues to be an active journalist, writing regular features for Digital Content Next, the International Journalists’ Network (IJNet), What’s New in Publishing, journalism.co.uk and other outlets. His work focuses on digital trends, social media, technology, the business of media, and the evolution — and practice — of journalism.

Read his full report on Advancing Community-Centered Journalism via the Agora Journalism Center website: https://agorajournalism.center/research/advancing-community-centered-journalism/

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