Re:Engage: A new project to bring newsrooms and communities together, during and after COVID-19
By Nation Hahn of Reach & Andrew Haeg of GroundSource
Talk of engaged journalism once met with blank stares. Now we have entire conferences, communities, and toolsets to support the effort. This is great! And we’re excited about it.
But it is important to remember for many publishers, pre-COVID-19 engagement was tilted heavily towards in-person outreach and events. Now that we need to keep our distance, we can’t lean on tried-and-true tactics to inspire our journalism and generate needed revenue. So where do we turn now?
Meanwhile, our communities have questions, and they need simple, clear, and up-to-date answers. They need to feel connected while they are isolated. They need to tell their story, and hear their neighbors’ stories. They need to be reached, as well as given opportunities to reach out.
In other words, they need to engage.
But most newsrooms aren’t set up to engage. The tools and workflows to engage communities, at scale, are fledgling and fractious, while the tools and workflows designed for distribution at scale and optimizing for clicks are thoroughly entrenched.
Shifting from distribution to engagement requires a coordinated and holistic approach. It requires buy-in at all levels. And it needs to be supported and served by technologists and practitioners who understand the work required to transform our relationships with audiences from a one-way broadcast or publication into a two-way exchange.
To help newsrooms make this shift, pioneering engagement services Reach and GroundSource are partnering to create Re:Engage, which seeks to serve newsrooms at a moment of great need — and to help evolve their work to put relationships at the heart of journalism well after this crisis has passed.
Reach is a platform created by Public Input, a leading provider of community engagement software for government, initially for the use of EdNC.org. Reach developed techniques and technologies to engage a broad base of North Carolinians in conversations about issues of education equity and access. In time, media organizations from across the country began to reach out to EdNC.org and Public Input to power their engagement efforts. The resulting product is an expansive platform to power engagement and listening for media organizations.
EdNC uses Reach to drive engagement throughout North Carolina, including student town halls. Reach is also being used outside of North Carolina by several media organizations, such as Resolve Philly and Outlier Media, to assess community information needs, collect questions, and gather community input. Reach is also partnering with the American Press Institute to power the information needfinding work of its listening fellows.
GroundSource enables news organizations to develop and scale two-way SMS and voice-based engagement, generating a feed of on-the-ground sources and perspectives, and sustaining relationships over the long term. GroundSource is shaped by more than 17 years of work pioneering engagement in journalism and has worked with more than 100 news organizations, across broadcast, legacy print, radio, podcasts, and digital news startups.
GroundSource is currently in use at 40+ news and social sector organizations. Mississippi Today, Detroit’s WDIV-TV, KPCC in Los Angeles and several other news organizations are using GroundSource to engage audiences around COVID-19 — sending out daily or weekly text alerts, and gathering questions and first-hand perspectives. GroundSource has also helped create the Community Listening and Engagement Fund, which is helping newsrooms with the costs of engaging audiences during COVID-19.
These platforms and services, together, will help local media organizations expand their reach online and via SMS, generating opportunities to build new, loyal audiences. These efforts will allow newsrooms to develop a rich on-the-ground network of contacts that can shape and inform their journalism and product development alike. We view this as an opportunity for you all to both engage and Re:Engage your community.
Re:Engage proceeds from the premise that journalism, at its best, should be focused on listening to the community, serving their needs, amplifying their stories, and ultimately holding those in power accountable to their community too. Reach and Groundsource are designed to focus on building a relationship with your community through conversation and active listening.
Re:Engage treats questions as the core currency of any effort. We believe our communities hold the knowledge they need to thrive within them — solutions, challenges, and even ambitious dreams. And we believe journalism should amplify their knowledge, not just focus on those in positions of power.
Specifically, Re:Engage will help newsrooms address three key challenges they’re facing during COVID-19:
- Helping news organizations move in-person sourcing, events and outreach work online
- Supporting media initiatives in to better serve your audience, but also reach additional under-served communities and news deserts
- Power relationships that will one day lead to direct financial support from audiences amid a collapse in advertising and underwriting revenues
When all of this is over, and newsrooms can provide in-person engagement again, we hope people will continue to think about their entire toolbox. Using tools such as Reach and GroundSource allow news organizations to build and maintain a relationship with your audience beyond events — and, most importantly, beyond platforms where our relationships are monetized for their commercial gain.
If you think your organization could benefit from working with Re:Engage, get in touch by emailing us at reengagejournalism@gmail.com.
