Advancing Community-Centered Journalism: Five Essential Practices
Key tips and practices for journalists looking to implement a more ground-up approach to their work
At the end of September, I published a new report for the Agora Journalism Center on Advancing Community-Centered Journalism. TLDR? Never fear, this week, I will publish the report chapters as separate posts here on Medium.
Below I outline more about the principles underpinning this work. You can also read about the challenges — and how to overcome them — related to this practice, as well as thoughts on how to embed community-led approaches more fully in newsrooms and journalism education.
Although not without its challenges, there are many opportunities for Community-Centered Journalism to thrive and be successful. This chapter explores some of the key ingredients needed to deliver on this promise.
The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated a demand for accurate and relevant news that met clear information needs. That requirement is most apparent in times of emergencies. Yet, in an increasingly polarized political and media landscape, good journalism is needed more than ever. Many communities already suffer from major information deficits, aggravated by a lack of original reporting, a tsunami of online misinformation, and content that too often fails to reflect everyday lives and needs. At a local level, this situation is only predicted to get worse.
A community-centered approach should be at the core of moves to address these systemic issues. In practice, that will mean that newsrooms must work more closely with communities to identify — and tackle — the issues that matter most important to the public.
While efforts to encourage these types of collaboration are far from new, many of the principles of Community-Centered Journalism remain an anathema in a number of newsrooms.
Irene Costera Meijer, professor of journalism studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, argued over a decade ago that local news outlets “will have to learn to address seriously the public’s desires and sensibilities and to make effective use of their knowledge, experience and expertise.”
To achieve this, however, Meijier recognized that “representing the public more comprehensively requires, in short, a change of culture.” This echoed earlier sentiments shared by NYU professor Jay Rosen who observed resistance to public journalism practices “in the name of traditional values — especially the imperative of distance and detachment.”
Too often the barriers that Rosen and Meijir described remain in place. It’s time for that to change.
Without a reinvention and reinvigoration, journalism will continue to fail in its efforts to meet the needs of many diverse communities, particularly in an era marked by widespread misinformation and declining trust in the media.
By embracing Community-Centered Journalism, newsrooms can better serve their audiences, enhance the relevance and accuracy of their reporting, and build stronger relationships with the communities they cover. This shift is crucial to address the existing gaps and challenges in the media landscape.
Below we outline five fundamental steps to help newsrooms transition from a traditional top-down approach to one that is more community-centered.
1. Ensuring content is grounded in information needs
At the heart of Community-Centered Journalism is a belief that journalists are not, and should not be, the sole guardians of the news agenda. In many cases, community information needs might not be the same as those that newsrooms would first identify or prioritize.
As noted in a previous Agora report exploring Local Journalism in the Pacific Northwest, asking questions — and ceding occasional control over editorial commissioning — is an easy way to start to put these principles into action. This, in turn, can help to identify topics and community information needs that can take journalists by surprise.
By way of an example, back in 2014, Seattle-based KUOW Public Radio asked its audience to propose questions they wanted reporters to answer. They then used votes on social media to determine which stories to explore. The winning question led them to the bottom of Lake Washington and its findings went viral. It wasn’t a story the newsroom typically would have covered, which made its impact all the more significant.
This type of approach can be part of a range of tactics being used by newsrooms to reassert their relevance to potential audiences. Reflecting on this business and philosophical imperative, Jennifer Brandel, the Co-founder and CEO of Hearken, and the journalist Mónica Guzmán contend that:
“In the future, we’ll be in constant conversation with the public to learn what information they need… success will depend on becoming essential to those we aim to serve. We’ll know it if the public feels invested in our work by contributing their insights, questions and ideas.”
To help do this, there are a wide range of tools, reports and other resources that newsrooms can draw on. This includes the approaches pioneered by Hearken, The Listening Post Collective and Groundsource, as well as information needs reports produced (and shared) by other news outlets. Jersey Shore Hurricane News has shared an Information Needs Assessment which helpfully walks through their goals, methods, findings and recommendations. An Information Needs Assessment from Internews covering a refugee crisis in Bangladesh offers further pointers. Both of these reports can easily be adapted and remixed by newsrooms.
Alongside this, news outlets can also harness materials from other sectors. For example, The Community Tool Box from the Center for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas offers templates and case studies that are highly relevant to journalists. This content is available in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Farsi.
Similarly, in 2018, the journalist Amanda Ripley published an influential essay, Complicating the Narratives, exploring what journalists could learn from mediators, lawyers, rabbis, and others “who know how to disrupt toxic narratives and get people to reveal deeper truths.” It’s a topic she explored in more depth as part of Listeners Podcast produced by the Agora Journalism Center.
Understanding community needs requires deep listening, building trust and collaboration. And it’s not just established outlets that can adopt these types of engagement practices to help determine, or reimagine, their editorial priorities. Start-ups can bake this into their approach from the outset.
Whatever method(s) you choose to help determine community information needs, the key is to be intentional with the findings.
Insights must be documented and analyzed, Lisa Heyamoto, formerly the Director of Programming, Member Education, LION (Local Independent Online News Publishers) and now Vice President of Portfolio Learning at the American Journalism Project, reminds us, “so that they truly do become useful data that the organizations can use to say, with confidence, ‘we understand that this is what the community needs.’”
Heyamoto points to the work of Megan Raposa at Sioux Falls Simplified (South Dakota) as an example showing this principle in practice.
Launched in early 2021, Raposa publishes a weekly email newsletter that provides a “bullet-pointed, bite-sized version of the local news.” Inspired by the model of reporting pioneered by Axios, the newsletter — and her other reporting — uses punchy headlines and bullet points to distill stories down to their key points. Each weekly round-up takes 5–7 mins to read.
Prior to this, Raposa had spent five and a half years in the city as a reporter for the Gannett-owned Argus Leader. As a result of this experience, “she had a lot of ideas about what she thought the community wanted,” Heyamoto recounts.
Nevertheless, before launching Sioux Falls Simplified, Raposa undertook some basic audience research. “It was transformative,” Heyamoto says, noting that Raposo “reshaped the focus of her organization before she launched, based off of what people actually wanted.”
Through 1–1 interviews with prospective readers, Raposa identified how her potential audience was more interested in K-12 reporting than early childhood news, that they wanted to see coverage of city government and community trends, and to learn about non-profits in the area.
“I didn’t expect to hear that, but I was like, ‘OK, cool, people like knowing what these groups are doing in the community,” Raposa told LION. “I can do more of that.”
2. Understanding community information flow
In addition to identifying community needs, newsrooms should also seek to understand how communities find, share and discuss information. After all, journalists aren’t the only information providers in communities. Citizens find out about their community via local libraries, organizations, agencies, forums, newsletters, friends and family, as well as other sources.
Subsequently, Andrea Wenzel, an Assistant Professor at Temple University (Wenzel has since been promoted to Associate Professor), recommends newsrooms determine the “layout” of a community by engaging in asset mapping, an exercise which involves identifying “places where people connect and share stories and information.”
Recognizing that each community is different, the distinct layout of each community is crucial for tailoring how — and where — newsrooms should focus their energies.
Alongside this, Michelle Ferrier, the Principal Investigator and Project Creator of The Media Deserts Project, emphasizes looking at who else produces content that informs a community’s information ecosystem. Understanding this, including non-journalistic channels that create and distribute content, is crucial because it can help newsrooms identify potential partnerships and distribution strategies. That matters, because local journalists can often be more effective when they work in partnership rather than in isolation.
Moreover, this type of mapping can also help newsrooms realize they don’t have to do everything. Ferrier described to us the role of “journalists as community weavers,” whereby news outlets do more than just highlight their own work. They can also act as a conduit for communities, helping them to navigate other communication sources (e.g. government, other citizens, etc.).
Up the Block — a product of The Trace that we highlighted in our first report of this series — shows this principle in action. The nonprofit, which is dedicated to covering gun violence in America, launched a list of “resources for healing and rebuilding after shootings” in June 2021, based on feedback from the residents of Philadelphia who indicated this was something they needed.
To produce resources like this requires journalists to familiarize themselves with sources and community assets, so that they can signpost communities to them. This may include physical and digital spaces (such as libraries and barbershops), as well as key influencers and community leaders.
However, Andrea Wenzel told us that newsrooms and journalists seldom take the time to truly understand community assets. Yet, she suggests, doing so is crucial for the success of community-centered journalism.
Perhaps one reason for this is that many newsrooms don’t know where to start, or they struggle to understand these concepts. If so, then it’s worth highlighting the work of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at DePaul University, which offers a number of Asset Mapping and Facilitating Tools that journalists can use to help undertake this work.
Mapping how communities communicate may feel like a lot of work for busy overstretched newsrooms. But, a key benefit is that it enables newsrooms to see their place in a local information ecosystem. “Understanding how these sources operate can inform your listening,” the American Press Institute notes. Moreover, “by examining the information assets within a community, newsrooms can see where they have strong relationships and where they are lacking.”
These insights can therefore be used to inform efforts by newsrooms to meet community information needs, as well as increase the likelihood of success by helping journalists to identify — and build relationships with — the key organizations, institutions and influencers in their community. Without this, it can be difficult to undertake impactful community-centered work and its full potential may go unrealized.
3. Meeting your communities where they are
In Community-Centered Journalism, it’s not just your content that should be shaped by community needs. Its distribution must also align with a community’s information habits, assets, and preferences.
That means serving communities by delivering useful information in familiar places and accessible formats, without necessarily relying on high-tech solutions. Collectively, this approach ensures that both the final product and the story-gathering process are reshaped to make journalism more inclusive, accessible, and effective.
As Candice Fortman, then the Executive Director of Outlier Media, and now a JSK Journalism Fellow, Stanford University, explains it:
“If you’re putting good information in people’s hands, and you just printed [it] on an 8x10 piece of paper and [are] passing it out at the library, and it’s actually helping your community in some way, that’s valuable enough. It doesn’t have to glitter. It doesn’t have to shine, it doesn’t need diamonds, it just needs to exist and be useful.”
KPCC-LAist’s work at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic exemplified this approach by asking their audience what they wanted (and needed) to know. Addressing over 4,000 questions led to the discovery of new sources and stories, at the same time as delivering a valuable community service.
“I’ve learned, journalism can be — and sometimes needs to be — the simple, straightforward answering of somebody’s question,” noted intern (and now Assistant Producer, Engagement) Caitlin Hernández. “It’s not just 3,000-word narratives or a sound-rich audio feature. It’s meeting information needs — in whatever form that needs to take.”
A 2020 report by the Center for Community Media provides further examples of how media organizations can serve audiences in fresh ways.
In many cases these efforts are digital-first, harnessing platforms — like WeChat and JadooTV digital television boxes — which are seldom used in the USA outside of migrant communities.
The study, Digital First Responders: How Innovative News Outlets are Meeting the Needs of Immigrant Communities, profiled 50 outlets (17 of them in-depth) and the public service role they play. In each instance, the content these outlets produce meets clear audience needs, covering stories and angles that are often overlooked — or seen as too niche — by mainstream media.
Stepping away from traditional media platforms to deliver impactful work can be further seen in the SMS services provided by El Tímpano in Oakland and Outlier Media in Detroit, as well as on WhatsApp by Documented in New York. These outlets support the information needs of their communities by delivering valuable information in the digital spaces that their community frequents. Doing this effectively is only possible if you understand the media habits, as well as information needs, flows and assets within that community.
Physical visibility can be another aspect of meeting audiences where they are. Alana Rocha at INN shares the example of Honolulu Civil Beat’s “pop up newsrooms” to demonstrate how journalists — especially those covering large geographic beats — can do this. Working with the Hawaii State Public Library System, Honolulu Civil Beat’s editorial team committed to working out of a public library somewhere in Hawaii, at least one day a week. In doing this, they sought to raise awareness “about how we work and why we make the news decisions we do,” as well as seeking to “find out more about issues that are important to specific communities.”
For geographically diverse communities like those in Hawaii, this approach also recognizes — as the Civil Beat team put it — that many people “just don’t have the time or the capacity to come to us.” “So,” they added, “we are coming to you.”
Greater Govanhill, a multilingual community magazine in Glasgow (Scotland), has taken this concept a stage further by opening a community newsroom in the heart of one of Scotland’s most diverse and densely populated neighborhoods.
Sharing a space with The Ferret, an award-winning investigative journalism cooperative, the newsroom is designed to be used as a space for workshops, talks, discussions and other community building events. They also want community members to drop in and connect with the team. A hand painted sign above their front door reads: “Everybody has a story… what’s yours?”
“Already we’ve had so many interesting people stop by to say hello and share the issues that matter to them,“ Rhiannon J Davies, founder and editor of Greater Govanhill community magazine, says. “We are trying to make journalism accessible again by not being behind closed doors but having somewhere for people to come in and have a chat,” she told the UK-based newspaper.
4. Address issues of inequity and rebuilding trust
Many of our discussions about Community-Centered Journalism focused on how it can help address long-term inequities within journalism. It does this, in part, by intentionally serving more diverse audiences, experiences and information needs. However, making Community-Centered Journalism more equitable requires several practical considerations.
Some of the key themes to emerge from our conversations included: opening up the process of how journalism is created and who creates it, as well as the importance of partnerships, fresh formats and increased visibility on the ground.
For those wanting to embrace these thematic areas, a good starting point is to consider whose stories get told. As Sarah Stonbely, formerly research director at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, and now Research Fellow, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, reminds us, a greater focus is required to support communities that have been overlooked, and underserved, by mainstream media.
“The communities that have been centered in the legacy era were the people in power: white, wealthy, right?,” Stonbely says. “Urban… East Coast-West Coast, those communities have been centered for a long time. So, a community-centered movement largely means… let’s look at communities that have not been centered before.’”
In doing this, we need to do more than just shift our gaze. Production and story-gathering processes also need to be changed. The principle of “nothing about us without us” advocated by Journalism That Matters, underscores the importance of involving community members in the storytelling process.
As Jacob Nelson, at the time an Assistant Professor at University of Utah (subsequently promoted to Associate Professor), explains, communities must “have real agency in the storytelling that is about them.”
Advisory groups and community-led boards offer one way that some outlets have sought to ensure that communities have a say in the news that concerns them.
In 2021, McClatchy created 12 community advisory boards to help inform opinion writing across their properties, guided by the five principles including advocating for social justice, examining the rural-urban divide, and improving policing.
Kensington Voice, a community hub and newsroom in North Philadelphia, has taken this concept even further, Andrea Wenzel told us. “They have a community-led board,” she says. “They’re not their advisory board… the board has governing powers.” The board does more than just provide feedback on stories. “They have input on budgeting and leadership,” Wenzel notes, “and so they act as a check and balance to this news organization.”
These approaches are significant because for too long, many newsrooms have not looked like the communities they are covering.
“You know, I’ve lived in a few different cities,” Madeleine Bair, the Founding Director, El Tímpano told us. “And [I] have always been struck by the fact that the local media did not never really reflect the diversity of those places: racial diversity, socio-economic diversity, linguistic diversity.”
Some journalists at local newspapers and across the industry are beginning to acknowledge this, but a lot of work remains to be done.
There is a hope that by adopting the approaches inherent in Community-Centered Journalism it may help to rebuild trust in the media. Integral to this are ideas of moving away from journalism’s traditional top-down gatekeeping role, as well as practices of parachute and air-conditioned journalism (whereby journalists seldom get out of their offices and into the field). Listening, providing opportunities for input and feedback (seen in some of the examples above), and delivering on promises are all crucial components in rebuilding trust and addressing inequities.
The need to improve trust in journalism is well documented. According to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, nearly half of their respondents (46%) across 28 nations, saw the media as a divisive force. Meanwhile, the latest Digital News Report found “just 40% of our respondents across all 47 markets say they trust most news.” This score remains unchanged from 2023, with the 2024 report observing that “low trust scores in some other countries such as the US (32%), Argentina (30%), and France (31%) can be partly linked to high levels of polarization and divisive debates over politics and culture.”
Addressing this problem means prioritizing efforts that can help to rebuild trust. Potential remedies outlined in this report include commitments to transparency, visibility, relevance, and fairness — whereby communities feel their issues and lives are represented fairly.
The launch of El Tímpano in Oakland, California, in 2018, offers some further pointers. Over a nine-month period, they used multiple methods — including surveys, listening sessions, and conversations with community connectors — to deeply engage with the local community and understand their needs. And in line with our calls for transparency, the findings were published.
“One thing I’ve learned from this experience is just how foundational trust is as a value and an asset for any news organization,” Madeleine Bair, the site’s founder told us. “You can have all of the fact-checking that you want. [But] If community members don’t trust your organization, then there’s really no point in that, it doesn’t do any good. So, I would say that time spent in developing relationships and listening is time well spent.”
“Once you invest upfront in building relationships of trust, and in listening to the audience that you’re seeking to serve, it pays back in dividends,” Bair adds.
5. A commitment to telling stories differently
Our belief is that a community-centered approach to journalism can lead to richer, more impactful stories and better-informed citizens. However, central to this effort is a commitment to telling stories differently, ensuring diverse perspectives are reflected and fresh voices are heard.
Jennifer Brandel, Co-Founder and CEO at Hearken, notes that Community-Centered Journalism has the ability to broaden the “limited menu of news” that most people are exposed to. “The relational approach [of Community-Centered Journalism] enables more people to influence and shape what questions get answered, what direction reporting goes in, and what narratives are available to their communities,” she says.
To realize this potential, Eve Pearlman, the CEO and Co-Founder of Spaceship Media, says journalists must constantly ask themselves:
“Is what I am reporting on and learning about important to this community? Am I telling it in a way that respects/honors this community? And am I reporting it as deeply and with much complexity [and] understanding of the community needs as possible?”
Alongside this, Antoine Haywood, then a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and now an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, also advocates the notion of journalism “as an act of care.” It’s an idea Sue Robinson a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has also shared in her latest book which calls on journalists to prioritize listening and to move away from “tick-box-journalism.”
Other insights from our interviews highlighted the need for a shift in the tone of a lot of reporting.
Ideas to emerge from our conversations included journalism’s potential to foster a sense of pride in communities, being constructive and looking for solutions — rather than just focusing on their challenges and problems — as well as pushing back on common (often stereotyped) media narratives.
“There’s an opportunity for people to experience a sense of pride in their area, a sense of placeness [sic],” says Antoine Haywood. “And with that, there’s also an opportunity to build trust despite differences,” he says, “and that’s huge.”
One way to achieve this, as Sioux Falls Simplified’s Megan Raposa puts it, “is to make it easy for people to feel smart about where they live.”
Peggy Holman, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Journalism That Matters, and a proponent of constructive journalism, argues that “deeper listening tends to change the perspective of stories so that they are constructive.” Constructive stories, in turn, encourage dialogue, Holman says. This enables people who don’t usually interact with each other to have meaningful conversations that can lead to innovative collaborations and systemic change.
Through these different approaches, journalism can also be used to change the master narrative of a community. Stefanie Murray, Director of Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, points to Stories of Atlantic City as a collaborative project which has had just such an impact by showcasing “the resiliency, creativity and spirit of the people who live there.” The site used a restorative narrative lens, which Images & Voices of Hope (ivoh), a media-related nonprofit, explains centers “stories that show how people and communities are making [a] meaningful progression from despair to resilience.”
A commitment to telling stories differently also goes beyond tone to consider whose voices are heard and what stories are told. A community-centered approach addresses this by ensuring, as Jonathan Kealing at INN describes it, that journalism is no longer an “anthropological exploration” of a community but rather an effort to produce news and information for a community.
Subsequently, this produces stories that are more nuanced, leading to a richer appreciation of communities and issues. “By lifting up many voices, including those of ordinary people, we all become grounded in a more holistic understanding of what’s happening,” says Peggy Holman.
Moreover, as Jacob Nelson at the University of Utah explains:
“…If you are including voices that typically get left out, and those voices feel like they have enough agency and enough trust, that they can be honest, then those stories will be better.”
Amen to that.
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/