Engagement in the time of COVID-19
What: A pop-up conversation
When: April 8th, 9am PST/12noon ET
Face-to-face connection has been at the heart of engaged journalism in recent years. Across the U.S. and internationally, journalists have found innovative ways to gather residents, chart their community’s information needs, engage in dialogue on critical community issues, and to facilitate access to local resources. Many of these projects have centered on including community members who may have less access to digital resources and who rely more on word of mouth communication than mainstream media outlets.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has seriously disrupted these efforts. During this pandemic, organizers of such projects are now urgently seeking to pivot — to find pathways to adhering to their mission of serving communities, but now from a social distance. In this moment, we’d like to do our small part to connect some of these practitioners to exchange strategies and lessons learned, and to connect them with researchers who may be interested in collaborating on projects as they shift and take shape.
On April 8th at 12 noon EST, we will host an hour-long Zoom workshop to facilitate these connections. We’ll start with brief introductions from participants sharing what they are working on or what research questions they have. We will then hear from journalists at KPCC and Free Press News Voices about their efforts to engage communities. We’ll also hear about best practices learned in the international humanitarian information sector, including representatives from Internews, which has a long history of relaying targeted health information.
We look forward to swapping experiences with researchers and participants from a range of initiatives grappling with this moment — including the Listening Post Collective, Resolve Philadelphia, the Germantown Info Hub, Kensington Voice, and others. We hope what grows out of this pop-up workshop will inform our upcoming AEJMC preconference — and we plan to follow up on any possible collaborations that grow out of this.
