Build reader engagement with current resources -- RJI

 Reynolds Journalism Institute has a "how we do it" piece from fellow Kate Abbey-Lambetz detailing how Detour Detroit gets reader engagement.

"[W]e also have focused on engagement as an ongoing, mission-driven practice that touches all parts of our newsroom and drives our journalism." ...

"Cultivating a meaningful engagement practice (including, but beyond, social media) can feel like a tall order for a small outlet stretched for resources and time. But it can pay its own dividends, helping you better understand and meet readers’ needs; produce more impactful journalism; grow your audience, and increase reader loyalty and support. With a small team and no dedicated engagement staffer, no paid tools and an online-only presence, here’s how we do it."

https://rjionline.org/news/small-publishers-can-build-meaningful-engagement-practices-without-more-time-or-resources/

Intern and weekly editor show how to deal with, and engage with, critics

Josh Qualls was having difficulty finding a source to help him explain how the House health-insurance bill might affect seniors on Medicaid in Lincoln County, Kentucky, where he just completed a summer internship with The Interior Journal in Stanford. So he went to the Boone Newspapers weekly's Facebook page.

"The very first response echoed some of the most disheartening, gut-wrenching rhetoric we’ve seen directed toward journalists in recent months. Its author offered a scathing indictment of the news media and accused us of being liberally biased," Qualls wrote in his intern report to the Kentucky Press Association, relying on memory because the poster had deleted the post. "She talked about how much 'Obamacare' didn’t help her health-hindered family, so I saw a way to connect with her."

Josh Qualls

Qualls wrote, “We appreciate your feedback … and we’re sorry to learn about your health problems and your family’s health-care situation. Our hearts go out to you.” He said no one at the newspaper "was happy with the Affordable Care Act allowing premiums to increase at an alarming rate," but said journalists must "seek the truth and report it," as the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics says.

“The truth, based on what we know about the American Health Care Act so far, is that these proposals may have long-term effects that are even more damaging than Obamacare,” Qualls posted. “The Congressional Budget Office reported last Wednesday that while premiums would likely decrease for younger Americans, older Americans would likely see a substantial increase and lose many of their benefits.”

Then he wrote this, which KPA highlighted in its report to members: “In this newsroom, we all have different political beliefs but respect each other. What we all have in common is that we’re biased against the things that harm the community we serve, and by community we mean people like you.” Those are lines to remember.

"The author quickly wrote back," Qualls reported to KPA. "She said that she never really thought about it that way and would consider what we wrote, that she appreciated our effort to connect with her and to explain what we were trying to accomplish." He and Editor Abigail Whitehouse, who had approved his message, "were ecstatic," yelling "We got through to someone!"

Though the reader soon deleted her post and the comments, Qualls said the episode showed the value of engaging with readers through social media: "People may think now that they have carte blanche to denigrate journalists, but Abigail taught me that we don’t have to cower in fear of what they might say or do — we must respectfully stand our ground. It simply comes down to this: People hate what they don’t understand, and some people unfortunately don’t understand journalists."

Qualls is a May graduate of the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media.

DEADLINE EXTENDED to Oct. 12 for abstracts of papers responding to initiative on journalism, citizenship and democracy

Abstracts are due Oct. 12Sept. 19 in response to AEJMC's call for papers exploring "relationships between journalism education and practice with citizenship, communities and democracy in the digital age." The headline of the call is "Revitalizing the Bonds of Journalism, Citizenship and Democracy."

The call says the reviewers, led by COMJIG member Jack Rosenberry, will be "particularly interested in papers that develop and test a new curriculum, or experiment with a practice innovation in the newsroom or in other media."

The call is a result of an initiative by the Kettering Foundation that convened a select group of journalism educators to discuss how service to democracy can play a larger role in journalism education.

As Jack said in a Sept. 9 message to COMJIG members, the call is "focused on journalism that helps communities to recognize their shared problems and act on them. Our goal is to develop innovative ideas for meaningful changes in journalism education."

Interested scholars are invited to submit, by Sept. 19, abstracts of no more than 1,500 words that clearly state: (1) The objective of the work and its relevance to the topic of how journalism can address problems of democracy by helping foster the process of citizens working together to solve shared public problems; (2) The methods that will be used to examine the question or topic; (3) What the project is expected to discover; and (4) What will be the expected significance of the work.

Abstracts will undergo peer review and up to 20 proposals will be selected for researchers to turn into full papers by April 2016. Top papers as selected by further peer review will be presented at the 2016 AEJMC conference in Minneapolis and also appear in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. The very top papers will earn cash awards.

Full details of the research call, including the process for submitting the abstracts, can be found at http://www.aejmc.org/home/2015/07/citizenship-democracy/.

AEJMC Preview: Street newspapers as outlets for new narratives on what it means to be 'poor'

It isn’t too early to start talking about AEJMC programming, is it?

With the national conference a short summer away, I thought I’d offer a bit of information on one of the panels the Community Journalism Interest Group is bringing to San Francisco.

COMJ is co-sponsoring a PF&R panel entitled “Resistance Journalism: Expression, Self-Empowerment, and the Creation of Counternarratives on Poverty Through Community Media.”

Here’s the formal panel description: 

Millions of people in the U.S. struggle with financial need and homelessness. However, news and entertainment media often ignore the lived experiences of those living in extreme poverty or cast them in condescending stereotypes that reinforce dominant ideologies about what it means to be poor, in the process reinforcing and worsening social stratification.

During this panel, scholars and activists will discuss the ways “street newspapers” and similar publications produced by the poor, who are often ignored or marginalized by mainstream media, empower writers to create their own counternarratives about poverty and advocate for change. Street newspapers, also sometimes called homeless newspapers, are urban newspapers generally written and distributed by current or former homeless individuals. 

Panelists include:

• Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the San Francisco Coalitionon Homelessness. The coalition publishes Street Sheet, the oldest continuously published street newspaper in the U.S.

• Lisa "Tiny" Gray-Garcia, founder of POOR Magazine, a poor people/indigenous people-led grassroots organization developed to provide media access to and advocate for people in poverty.
   
• Bob Offer-Westort, editor of Street Sheet.
   
• Paula Lomazzi, CEO of the Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee. The committee publishes a street newspaper called the Homeward Street Journal.
   
• Dr. Cindy Vincent, assistant professor at Salem State University. Dr. Vincent’s research focuses on representations of class in the media and the role of participatory media in civic engagement and social justice.

Your humble blog post author will be the panel moderator.

I hope you will be able to join us for this interesting and important panel discussion, which is co-sponsored by COMJ and the Cultural/Critical Studies Division.

Panel Date: Sunday, Aug. 9

Panel Time:  11 a.m.

Community papers' coverage of drug violations discourages abuse, study finds

Areas with a community newspaper typically have fewer drug-related arrests, according to a study published in the winter issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

"Community newspapers function to foster a perception of close-knit cohesive communities," and the greater their penetration into a market, the more civic engagement a community has, the researchers write. Civic engagement leads to a sense of belonging, which results in fewer drug-related arrests, they found.

"Community newspapers promote civic engagement by highlighting the characters and activities of local residents and institutions, fostering affective attachment to community, presenting information that helps participate in community events and activities, and cultivating common values in pursuit of social goods," the researchers write. "Communities with such information resources tend to develop voluntary participation."

The study examined a nationally representative sample of 389 counties in 24 states, chosen at random to represent the nation's four main regions. It used information from the federal Uniform Crime Reporting Program and defined "community newspaper" as one with a circulation of less than 50,000. The authors are Masahiro Yamamoto of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Weina Ran of Washington State University. To read their full report, click here. A subscription may be required.

Knight Chair Starts Community Journalism Blog

Knight Chair Pam Fine at University of Kansas has started a blog called JLocal to look at how to teach students to cover communities. One thing I like about it is that she looks at community journalism extending from a Philadelphia-area public affairs news audit to a hyperlocal food news site being created by a group of students at CUNY.

Community Journalism and Engagement

Steve Buttry, director of community engagement for Allbritton Communications says the key for the news business in the 21st century is figuring out ways to get members of the community directly involved in their news. He writes:

I’m not looking for someone who can cover sports, though Editor Erik Wemple will be hiring a few people to do that. I am looking for someone who can recruit fans to liveblog high school games.

I am not looking for someone who can cover entertainment (though again, Erik will be hiring people to do that). I’ll be looking for someone who can promote use of a Twitter hashtag by people attending a concert and pull together a crowd review from tweets.

I have some ideas and I will be looking for people who can help me execute those. But mostly I’m looking for people who have better ideas than I do about how to engage our community.

Steve's blog is worth a look if you want to see some innovative thinking about combining traditional community journalism with social media.