This page was updated to reflect the winners of the Gather awards.

The Agora Journalism Center and Gather are, once again, honored to sponsor this year’s Gather Award in Engaged Journalism with the winners of two categories, each receiving $2,500 prize money. Similar to last year, we are recognizing projects for overall excellence. But instead of a portfolio category, we’ve chosen to amplify projects from newsrooms with comparatively limited resources, which often lead to some of the most creative engagement strategies.

Whether you’re in an engagement team of one or have established a collaborative desk within the newsroom, these finalists…

Earlier this year, we were set to launch a series of Lightning Chats to talk about how our engagement work presents unique ethical challenges for us working with communities. This work stems from a gathering we hosted back in 2019 as well as this post from Mike Fancher who invited journalists to embrace the paradox of traditional and transformational forms of journalism. Unfortunately, the global pandemic forced us to pause on those Lightning Chats back then.

But there’s always a silver lining. Pausing helped us reflect and reconsider how to frame our next step to allow people to participate at…

When we published Gather’s new website in April, we eluded to the membership feature that will deepen connections for this community. We heard from our 2019 Gather Survey that you wanted help connecting with people and keeping up with the resources on the website. We’re thrilled to announce our new Gather Membership program that, as a Gather member, you can:

• Connect with an international group of community-minded journalists
• View the membership directory by region, job roles, and topics of interest
• Access to members-only content including Lightning Chats from the past three years
• Save favorite resources and create your collection in…

When we started Gather Slack in early 2018, the idea was that it would be a place for our community of practice, to, well, gather and engage with one another. At that point, Gather as a site was just a few months old, but we were seeing less one-on-one interaction on the platform than we’d hoped when we launched in October 2017. The steering committee thought: Why don’t we put the practices we recommend into action, and meet our community where they already are?

By the summer of 2019, a lack of interaction was not our biggest problem: Our Slack…

Nearly three years after launching and with over 2500 registered members worldwide, the Gather website is getting a new look. You’ll still get access to the community conversations on our Slack workgroup and expect to get our newsletter every week. We’re making it easier to find them along with the resources, case studies, and featured projects we’ve been curating and creating with you. And we’re excited to share our plans to continue to support our community of practice of engaged journalists who are making journalism more responsive to the public’s needs. …

We all handle staying at home during a global pandemic differently. For those who can, making bread has become a pastime, while others find comfort connecting with friends in Animal Crossing. For me, organizing is a way to cope with chaos. Not in that Marie Kondo tidy-up way but rather as a means to make sense of the complexities of our world.

As life shifted for nearly all of us in early March to remote work, homeschooling, or being on the frontlines of this crisis, many of us got busy in doing what we can, where we can. Many people…

Engagement presents unique ethical challenges for journalists. Join the Gather community for a series of chats that dig into three areas of engagement — and recommend people to help lead each chat.

When I was first approached about assisting the Gather community with creating ethical guidelines for engagement journalism, I thought, the ethical standards of journalism — no matter the medium — should be the same. Basically, the same ethical standards that apply to your front-page story or the lead story of your newscast should also apply to any tweet you are sending, Facebook post or Instagram story.

After thinking…

“Long live true journalism!”

That’s how my daughter, Beth, ended a note congratulating me on retirement as executive editor of The Seattle Times. That was in 2008. In the years since I’ve spent much of my time exploring “What is True Journalism?” Or, more precisely, “What is the true nature, the highest and best expression of journalism for the 21st century?”

Working with Journalism That Matters and the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, I’ve come to believe journalism needs a new philosophy and ethical framework based on the idea of public trust through public engagement. …