20 ways to change the way you work in 2019
The following is a republished edition of GroundSourced, a weekly newsletter from GroundSource on listening and community engagement. It features successful community engagement efforts, highlights missed opportunities for listening, and offers strategies that help you engage and listen to your community. You can subscribe to GroundSourced here.
New Year’s resolutions are easier said than done. It’s how you go about implementing your vision that’s the challenge and the fun.
Last year, the GroundSource team started using parts of a process called Traction to set long term vision and goals, develop quarterly objectives, and become more agile. This year, we’re using it to grow stronger roots to better serve our community.
We’ve written about the importance of process here before. We believe it’s one of our fundamental value propositions. The technology we provide is one useful thing. But what makes it exponentially more powerful is the process our customers undertake to understand their community and build news products that meet their needs.
This week, we’re sharing more about process. One feature is the News Impact Network’s wonderfully delightful cookbook for innovation in journalism. The second is a write up from my session at the SRCCON:POWER conference on ways to make your workplace more democratic. And as always, let us know how GroundSourced can be useful for you.
The News Impact Network cookbook
The News Impact Network’s cookbook is the result of nine months of exploration by 15 of Europe’s leading journalism professionals. As the journalism industry evolves, these folks are looking for new paths to sustainability, innovative ideas that advance us into future, and opportunities to work across organizations to build a collaborative ecosystem. This cookbook is the distillation of their work.
These recipes outline ways to innovate across your organization from events to encouraging autonomy to building teams that naturally center communities in their work.
Check out the News Impact Network’s cookbook here.
5 ways to make your workplace more democratic
In December 2018, I helped facilitate a conversation on democracy at SRCCON:POWER, a conference from OpenNews on the role power plays inside and outside of newsrooms.
In collaboration with Joe Amditis, associate director at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, we walked attendees through a collective process to define democracy and figure out how we can be more democratic in our every day lives.
Here are the five things attendees taught us:
- Conduct after action reviews
- Build bridges for communication
- Formalize equitable power relationships
- Practice the Socratic method
- Learn more about democratic process
Read more about each and find additional resources, including slides and suggested readings, here.
Our 2019 journalism predictions playlist
- More access, but not that kind, by Laura Davis for Nieman Lab
- The rise of the conveners, by Callie Schweitzer for Nieman Lab
- Community becomes a core newsroom value, by Lauren Katz for Nieman Lab
- There is no magic–you’ve got this, by Millie Tran for Nieman Lab
