Connecting Digital Networks with Community Engagement
Last week’s reflection about how ownership of the media influences the representation of the communities it serves only addresses half of the issue of covering poverty in a city like Philadelphia. The other half of the issue that needs to be addressed is what the source(s) of the stories are. Even in community-run media or socially responsible publications, inspiration and motivation for stories about such incredibly personal but systemic issues must be ethically and socially sourced. Solutions journalism should be inherently dependent on fixing what ills the community feels must be addressed, and not from a top-down, voyeuristic perspective.
In Jesse Hardman’s essay “Listening is a Revolutionary Act,” he tells a story about his work with Internews, where they were sent to Sri Lanka to recruit and train reporters. By focusing on a struggling community (internally displaced persons) and their needs (reliable flow of information), they were able to gather information from the audience about their needs and reflect it back to them. This circular flow of information creates a system of dialog both within the community and between the community and local media. This “two-way conversation,” as Hardman calls it, is necessary for any media organization to understand where they are succeeding and where they are failing, but even more so for community or solutions journalists.
The relationship between audience and media can be strained, and digital spaces see the majority of truthfulness in how people really feel about their representation. Using forums, comments sections or social media to track the conversation around how a publication is performing can be insightful; people are much more inclined to be truthful in a digital space. But do digital communities like neighborhood groups on Facebook or networks of mutual followers on Twitter have the same potential for this cycle of discussion and reporting? More importantly, how does a digital network’s sense of community (or lack thereof) create specific barriers to influencing the narrative around its issues, resolutions and representation?
Regrettably, these sorts of questions are in need of further research; we are still in the frontier of electronic communication. Until these questions can be answered, and even after they are, we must still focus on gaining the trust of the physical networks and communities of people that are struggling in order to transition to a duopolistic world where people exist both physically and digitally, simultaneously and independently. Hardman suggests the “basic level” of engagement with a community, exemplified by his experience with Internews: “We were listening to our audience, literally driving up to 12 hours to their communities to sit, record, and hear people tell their stories. And we repeated this every few weeks, so that we became familiar, trusted faces.” This is the role in community engagement where solutions journalism is designed to fit.
