Community Engagement: Necessary or Not?

Whether a journalist is reporting on a small town’s daily news, or the next planned political move by the President of the United States, community engagement is extremely important. In order to successfully produce a piece of journalism that will be beneficial for readers in specific communities, a journalist must first get to know the people within that community.

Think of it this way, how can a journalist write a piece about a small town’s beliefs on the current politics in 2016 without first traveling there and interviewing the residents of that town? More specifically, getting the residents talking with one another creates a sense of community amongst one another and can create a better flow of communication and conversation which can lead to much better reporting.

Let’s say a reporter comes to North Philadelphia hoping to research and report data about how the area is considered a food desert, and possible ways to fix this. Since this would be a solutions journalism piece, the journalist must first address the issue and ways to fix it. Discussing the absence of convenient healthy food with the residents of these food deserts areas can actually create new ideas about how to address the problem, because who knows a neighborhood better than the people living in it?

By engaging residents in a conversation like this, journalists challenge traditional reporting practices by taking into consideration everyone’s views and beliefs. Think of how many pieces of journalism were written about issues that the reporter never experienced directly. Probably too many. Although journalists must acknowledge that they are the reporter and the public is the audience, creating a working relationship can only be beneficial in the end.

Obviously this may not work in every case or area of study. Community engagement depends highly on the people of the community and also the focus area the journalist has. For example, in 2015, Jesse Hardman designed a “Listening Post” to create a safe place where New Orleans’s community residents could come and talk about poverty, food loss, and other serious issues in the area, especially after Hurricane Katrina. His work focuses entirely on listening and engaging. He explains how listening is the key to any solid journalism article when community engagement is involved and by doing so, a reporter could find out much more than they originally planned.