Engaging Communities Is Hard, But Newsrooms Need to Try Harder
How The Coral Project took the comment section away from trolls, and gave it back to the public. How I’m using their philosophies to build a community from the ground up.
Throughout this whole semester I’ve been investigating the public school system in New York City in hopes that I would stumble on a smaller community of people that I could serve. The goal was to find a self-identified community that falls under the umbrella of “people who are impacted by public education” and use journalism to create a tangible impact on over the course of the year. I bounced around from borough to borough, spoke with parents, teachers, and students, and asked people what they were concerned about in terms of education in their neighborhood. As I was in search of a new community, I ignored a community that was right under my nose.
I have been tutoring a student for over a year at his school in Manhattan, which serves adults who are trying to obtain a High School Equivalency Diploma. I have been preparing my 22-year old student for his Test Assessing Secondary Completion (TASC) exam so that he can obtain a diploma, and move on to college or wherever the next step for him is. (In New York, the Test Assessing Secondary Completion (TASC), has replaced the General Educational Development (GED) exam — so if you’re thinking of people who are trying to get a GED, it’s basically the same thing, different name). It had not dawned on me, until I had an in-depth discussion with a professor, that my student could be a window into a larger community of adults who hold extensive knowledge about their own struggles and experiences with the City’s education system.
So, my new community will allow me to serve young adults who are enrolled in an adult education program. This includes adults who have not completed a high school education, adults who are attending high school equivalency classes, or adults who are receiving career or technical education. This does not include adults who have completed high school and are now seeking higher education such as college. I’m interested in serving this group because I believe they are a vulnerable community that intersect with a lot of the communities I am interested in serving — people with disabilities, people who have had unequal opportunity for quality education, people who speak English as their second language, and so on.
Choosing a new community to serve means entering into a new relationship in which I will have to figure out the best way to engage the people I am trying to serve. For strategies on how to engage audiences in an authentic way, I am turning to the team at The Coral Project for help. The Coral Project is a collaboration between The New York Times, Washington Post, and Mozilla Firefox with a simple mission “to bring journalists closer to the communities they serve.” Luckily, Andrew Losowsky and Sydette Harry came and spoke with our class this week about how The Coral Project came to be, and how their software — informed by years of research — tries to address the problem people are being mean in the comments section.
Their tool “TALK”allows newsrooms to use the comments section for a productive dialogue between journalists and readers. They have essentially redesigned the comments section so that journalists can moderate comments and better engage audiences by bringing in their expertise on a story that affects them. We know that a reader’s insight can be particularly valuable when a story lacks diverse voices or opinions, but a reader isn’t going to share information on a platform that is unsafe or ignored. Comments sections are also supposed to help newsrooms see who their stories are reaching, and how people are reacting to them. Some newsrooms don’t even use comments sections anymore because of the hatred being spewed out left and right. But, The Coral Project believes that this is not a public problem, or even a technology problem, but instead a problem that newsrooms have brought upon themselves by not paying attention to their audience in a meaningful way. Or, rather than treating them like humans with opinions, treating them like robots that who valuable information to be extracted.
Similarly, their tool “ASK” allows newsrooms to crowdsource for stories using a “Smart Form” tool to collect information from readers in a way that opens the dialogue up to a real ongoing conversation.
In 45 newsrooms in 11 countries across the globe, journalists are using the tools “TALK” and “ASK” to conduct better, more diverse, conversations online, which will in time re-build trust between journalists and the public.
So what better way to re-define my chosen community than through answering questions created by the team at The Coral Project? These questions are from their workbook “How to Create your Community,” which newsrooms are encouraged to complete prior to diving into any sort of engagement projects. The purpose of the workbook, as I understand it, is to force newsrooms to think about engagement as an ongoing conversation with their communities, instead of a mere box on a page that they never need to look at. Doing this work up front helps newsrooms (and students journalists) think more deeply about how to authentically create an ongoing community around a specific topic. The questions are based on years of research done by The Coral Project, and well, it just seemed like a good place to start:
- What is the mission of your newsroom? What makes it different from everyone else’s?
(Here, I am taking newsroom to mean my one-woman newsroom) My mission is to understand the systemic inequalities in our education system through the eyes of someone who has experienced the inequalities firsthand. This is different from how other newsrooms are reporting on education because I am starting with the individual to understand the personal experiences, and then moving to experts to understand the policies. However, once I gain an understanding of the problems and needs of my community, then I can work on figuring out the best way to serve them. Meaning that my mission might shift after I assess the needs of the people I am serving.
2. Whom do you serve with that mission? Where do they live, how old are they, what do you bring to their lives?
Young adults between the ages of 18–25 who are enrolled or planning on enrolling in an adult education program. They live in New York City (any of the boroughs), but may attend classes outside of where they live, depending on where the center is. Aside from genuine curiosity and interest, I don’t bring too much to their lives — yet. I am bringing the perspective of a former high school teacher whose job included a lot of college preparation. However, after my students left my classroom, they were sent out into the world to fend for themselves, without much follow up. So, this is where the curiosity comes into play. What about the students who dropped out early, didn’t finish, or became too old to attend high school? What happens to the students who want to finish, but for one reason or another, did not get to? Most of all, I’m bringing a pen and paper, and opening up myself to understanding their needs.
3. How do the people you serve help you fulfill you mission?
The young adults I am serving will help me better understand where the problems lie in our system, and will hopefully give me valuable insight into understanding what needs to happen in order for students to get the most out of their school experience.
4. What are the biggest obstacles you face in completing your mission?
Getting these people to open up about their experience will be a challenge since they have no reason to trust me. Making them feel like humans and not test subjects in a graduate student’s research project will also be a challenge. Some other, more general obstacles will be finding common threads in their experiences that speak to larger problems in education. Everyone has a different experience, so it’s up to me to make sense of all of the stories I will be gathering and fitting them into a larger narrative.
5. How could the people you serve help you overcome these obstacles?
If they are open and honest and willing to talk to me, then the rest is really up to me.
There are more questions in the workbook than I can answer at the moment, but this is an ongoing project, and it will take time to build trust within my community. This is more important to me right now than producing stories. After all:
“Trust is a resource” -Sydette Harry.
She said that it’s the belief that you’ll try your best to do the thing you said you were going to do. And, we all know too well how quickly trust can be demolished. For as valuable a resource as trust is, I cannot afford to take any shortcuts in trying to cultivate it.
