Ways to engage with Gather
Gather is a project + platform to support community-minded journalists and other engagement professionals. The Gather website launched in public beta in October 2017. Its mission:
Make journalism more responsive to the public’s needs and more inclusive of the public’s voices and diversity, by helping journalists, educators, and students who share these values find each other, find resources and best practices, and find support and mentorship.
We work to make this vision a reality in a variety of ways, and you’re invited to jump in through any path that works for you. Here are six ways to get involved with Gather’s community and resources.
Gather itself: a curated visual database
This is our visual database of people, case studies, resources, job listings, lightning chats, introductions, etc. This website is our commitment to thoughtfully curated resources, and we hope people turn to it for help and knowledge. If you’d like a quick tour, check out our screencast videos that walk you through some basics of the platform.
If you’re already a member, log in here. And if you’re not, learn about us here.
To manage notifications: Go under your name in the top right corner to “My Alerts.” You can choose individual, daily or weekly alerts, with multiple options for time of day and day of the week.
To suggest a case study (your own work or someone else’s) or volunteer to report one, see this page on Gather or email us.
Gather on Slack: real-time connection
Our Slack channel, which launched in February 2018, is thriving. This is the real-time conversation arm of Gather, with daily activity. Join our Slack here. You’ll find channels for brainstorming, jobs, events, membership, social media, tools, audience development, etc. Anyone’s welcome to make announcements, seek advice and start a conversation. (Please avoid notifying a whole channel, though — we do that sparingly.)
To manage notifications: In the top left, select Preferences. Under notifications, you’ll notice many ways to customize your alerts. You can get an email or alert only when you’re mentioned, only for certain channels, only when certain keywords appear, etc. Here’s more on Slack notifications.
The Gather community newsletter
This newsletter comes out on Wednesdays and is a rundown of what’s new on Gather and what people are talking about. It includes a hot new job opening and a featured member each week. You can see the archive and subscribe here.
Gather Reads
This is our community’s Nuzzel newsletter, sent out on Fridays. Subscribe here. It aggregates the most tweeted links from a Twitter list of Gatherers. (We update that from time to time. If you’re not there and would like to be added, let us know.)
This Gather Medium publication
Some people follow the project through our Medium publication, and we have aspirations of updating it more frequently.
Other social media
We sometimes use #LetsGather on Twitter, though it’s mostly active when events are happening. We’re also unofficially affiliated with the Engaged Journalism Facebook group, which existed long before Gather (originally started by Josh Stearns ) and has been a useful way for us to share Gather content and host conversations.
What else do you want to know?
Get in touch anytime. Feel free to comment here, post on Slack, reply to a newsletter or email info@letsgather.in. We’re glad you’re here, and we’re happy to answer questions.
