Elevate Engagement Session Notes

(Notes by Amy Wang; any errors/omissions are hers)
(Ivan: I apologize, but I did not have time to summarize and organize these notes. Will do so after the conference as warranted.)
Ivan Roman poses this question as as a journalist who has been in newsrooms and involved in pro-media diversity efforts since 1983 and, like so many others, have been frustrated by the lack of real change in news media. On the contrary, one could argue that in legacy media and in some other sectors in news media, we’re going in the wrong direction.
Paul Waters poses a similar question in an effort to find out what community engagement methods are out there that can be successful and truly have an impact on diversity in media.
NAHJ’s Parity Project, where community and newsroom editors and TV producers to convene to discuss stories and create advisory council. Success depended on editor commitment at each media outlet. Looking for more sustainable engagement regardless of commitment. Free Press: They actually convene and organize community and then organize newsroom and then bring them together. Then both sides getting buy-in? Organized community to think about what they wanted to see in media, educate them about value of participating/engaging with media.
NAHJ project: For a long time, civil rights leaders and others had focused on economy, jobs, housing, voting rights but didn’t initially see importance of media and community representation there. How you’re represented in media determines power/influence you have. In parity project, you need community to actually have voice and work toward it. In Corpus Christi, TX, : already longstanding Latino community with leadership infrastructure, but Naples, FL, doesn’t have that – not organized.
Perception from nonjournalist who’s watched journalists try to engage more diversity without much success: Why would they? If I’m a member of a community of color or low-income community that doesn’t trust media, why would I trust people seeking engagement? What we started doing is looking for intermediaries – who already has trust – then create partnerships, so the engagement is actually with other media. Chicago “On the Table” event: 15 community media outlets that work with different ethnic communities within Chicago to talk with each other about what they have in common and what they need. Also brought in national outlets to join conversation. The national outlets then had facilitated access. Could also be done with community partners like social services organizations. If direct access is a problem, go to people who are already there.
Woman who works with a lot of young journalists and runs a nonprofit: Some view engagement as marketing in search of profit. Not seen as authentic but as window dressing. How can engagement be done authentically and who is doing it?
Ivan: A lot of engagement in past was done through marketing and advertising, not through editorial. When I go back to engagement, I think about old shoe-leather reporting, like when he was an on-the-ground city reporter. Part of my job there was also educating the community on importance of engaging with journalists – taking the initiative to advocate for themselves. Is the barrier the fact that we don’t really cover them, which turns them off engagement? Do we need to be more proactive in terms of cultivating the community?
Comment: This is happening because outlets don’t have beat reporters or their beats have been enlarged – example of a reporter who can’t even drive his beat every day but has to parachute in, take story without getting to know community, then move on. That’s why people don’t want to participate, and why should they?
How do we fix that?
Comment: Communities react to not being covered. I’m a first-generation immigrant whose father was deported by ICE. They did that less than a month before I graduated from a world-class university. They covered the people who destroyed my family with more care than they covered the families who were destroyed. We in some ways are trying to be very cordial about how angry and upset communities are. We end up having to create media to fill in that gap. Do we also consider things about safety, do we consider things about access, what happens when the parachuting creates long-held grudges?
We commonly start from this idea that the data begins when the computers/archives begin or another arbitrary point – instead of the kind of data trail that you have to make as you apply for citizenship, for instance, or for public assistance. If I give you this data, what’s going to happen? Lives 30-minute drive from NYT, which cut its Metro coverage and has not covered raids in her community. Engaging and involving diversity is something we should do, but people because of historical power struggles who share those stories are putting themselves in danger.
Comment: On coverage of deportations, how do you know they’re real? Data/evidence on who’s here not requested because that could endanger people and give ICE a reason to act. Limited options in engaging people around deportation. Have to trust information and get it as spelled out, or don’t get it at all. A lot of media outlets run by white people who can’t do certain kinds of engagement because they don’t understand issues, don’t have the trust, don’t have the connections.
Ivan: We have to address the anger and the resentment and in some cases safety and protection issues to gain trust so they’ll engage.
Comment: Would love to reimagine the process – safety, transparency, data, what we’re trying to build, who are the stakeholders. There’s something only journalists can do about putting together real documentation that is forceful and can be shared, but how do we make sure we can do that respectfully while keeping people safe?
Comment: Brought community members together to explore heroin/opioid crisis in Ohio. At one event, reporters, editors from TV/radio/print came together with community (recovering addicts, community health nurse, law enforcement) to talk about past coverage. Journalists learned to see themselves as not just gathering data but actually causing damage in people’s lives. Several community members asked where was the coverage 25 years ago when black residents were coping with cocaine and its impact, and why is it different? How do partners tell the story and explain why this response is different? Hope is to learn how coverage can happen in a way that acknowledges the human element.
Comment: Last night the word “empathy” was used a lot. There’s an empathy relationship between journalist and subject. But maybe empathy is not enough – need solidarity, too. You’re telling someone’s story in the context of the systematic forces that have shaped that story.
Comment: Have to challenge the idea that people who have the same values want the same thing.
Comment: Journalist who didn’t get respect from a colleague over concern about diverse representation at a discussion of media coverage. There’s not a recognition of an asymmetrical relationship. When someone reports on immigrants on a meatpacking plant, that relationship is not symmetrical – the reporter gets to go home. If journalists can’t even talk to each other with respect, how can we even expect to do the job?
Conversation with mentor: Journalist of color started prefacing her comments because she felt she wasn’t being believed even by her colleagues.
Ivan: We were told traditionally not to have solidarity with communities – that made us suspect in covering our communities. Maybe what we need to do is to state that it’s OK for journalism to have solidarity with that they’re covering, not just observing.
Comment: There was always solidarity, an implicit solidarity of holding the middle class and social order intact. It was just, whose solidarity for what end? Important to recognize it was always there as we move from no solidarity to having solidarity. Now we have to use solidarity in a different way.
Comment: Solidarity comes down to where you live as a journalist – are you in the community you cover, do you allow yourself to be part of it, or are you separated? When we institutionalized the profession, we separated ourselves from the people we were covering. Tough to put the genie back into the bottle.
Comment: We still do that in so many ways we don’t recognize. When we frame the question, how do we use engagement – the “we” is journalists, when the “we” should be the community. Community should be at center with journalism as an important convening element. If we talk about building trust, we tend to be thinking about how do we get them to trust journalists instead of how do we build trust? It’s a huge paradigm shift.
Comment: What sort of tools or practices have you seen in the field that seem to be working? One way: broaden out who you’re talking with, how to better involve ethnic media. Another way: convenings. The Coral Project: mobilizing comments sections.
Ivan: The next step to that is, does that type of engagement lead to diversity? How do we use engagement to make journalism look and be different? Some communities seem more willing to engage with journalists now and others, we have a lot of work to do to gain trust. We’re dealing with different communities that are at different stages of trusting journalists and have to work differently with each one.
Comment: It’s not so much about tools as it is about attitude and posture. What’s the step beyond intermediaries? Intermediaries and partners are not enough. What would a posture look like when we cared about something for more than 25 minutes? How about picking a topic and working on it for 6 months – that’s where relationships are created and a story is developed. If we’re not willing to make that commitment and step out of ourselves, we’re not going to change anything. Are we actually interested in change? What role does journalism play in allowing a community to reimagine itself and tell a different story?
Comment: Hearing a sense of an extremely daunting task in conducting engagement. You don’t have to do this completely alone. Partners are available who do community engagement work with journalists, such as National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. There are people who want to help with engagement and know how to do it and can train journalists.
Comment: There’s been so much emphasis on tools that we’ve forgotten how to just be a person and have a conversation. We’re used to being savior/gatekeeper; we need to be the concierge, connecting the dots.
Comment: Also need to bring in artists, educators – we’re all in this together.
Comment: Seattle panels co-sponsored by local media and community nonprofit: “Journalism So White.” Let’s talk about this. Frank discussions with journalists and anyone who wanted to show up – how can we change profession and how can we better cover communities.
Comment: Engagement may not be at all what is useful to the community you’re trying to engage. Do we need some sort of truth and reconciliation commission for communities that have been damaged by media coverage?
Comment: How do you take these well thought out steps for creating productive dialogue and distill them into something that works for journalists? Especially for journalists who have short attention spans.
Comment: We’ve been doing issue specific guides for journalists. Came from recognition of acknowledgement that journalists had contributed to the way people talk about drug overdoses. How do they re-focus their coverage? Desire to support more constructive dialogue in communities while having a way to cover it at the same time. Can journalists be quasi-facilitative while maintaining a journalistic approach?
Comment: Let’s not pretend we’re starting with a clean slate. All journalists responsible for coverage. Read Peter Block’s book, which includes question, How am I contributing to this problem that I’m complaining about? We’re all complicit in some way.
Comment: Best engagement examples involve reconciliation and deep dialogue. I feel like there is a whole skill set that journalists need to be trained. If that’s the way forward on engagement, how do national news organizations use that? Also: Who’s paying for all that? This approach takes a lot of resources and time.
Comment: Some of the issues here require a media outlet to do a mea culpa or a massive shift – a huge ask, to think something like that will happen anytime soon. Could newsrooms start engagement projects around specific reporting projects to open the door to engagement, to start building it slowly? It just feels more practical.
Comment: Journalists say, I can’t imagine how this would work and be journalism; others say, you’re still stuck. Need examples to learn from.
Comment: We are in such a pregnant moment. People are so ready to step into hospitable space and talk about what’s true and important.
Comment: You don’t have to be distant when you’re writing stories or doing projects; you can build relationships and follow up after a story and say that you care. Before he learned about community engagement, he was doing a project on covering people who are homeless – after finishing project, went back and volunteered because it was an issue he cared about as a citizen.
Comment: Government agencies trying to figure out community engagement, too – for example, realization that materials for the public are only in English. Realization that communities are contacted only when something is needed. Could journalists and agencies work together on some of the engagement parts?
Comment: Think about it in small chunks as well as big picture. Agent Orange for ProPublica: some pieces written just to keep the community involved; we’ve heard what you said, we are writing something just so you know we are using your information. Affirming; drives content/readership; kept people connected for larger asks. If we are open in the beginning about what we’re building up to, people will give us the faith and space.
Ivan: We have to use different methods when engaging with different communities based on where they are and how they view the media.
Comment: Irony of all this is it doesn’t take much because our expectations are so low. It can be little steps like setting up conversation between people who wouldn’t naturally cross paths.
Comment: Simple thing any newsroom can do: Before pursuing a story, get out of the institutional construct of the story, of “what is it,” and ask “who is living this story and what do they call it?” Minneapolis Star Tribune decision to do a story about local Somali American youth being recruited for jihad. Paper called it “Fighting Terrorism.” Community called it “Saving Our Children,” which completely changes the story.
Ivan: We need to assess where a community is in relationship to the media when deciding to do community engagement – need to strategize correct method of engagement. Tools/methods: Start with reporting project to get support of leadership, flip it from an institutional to a community perspective, use network of people already in place who know how to do public engagement.
Comment: If you’ve got the right question, the answers will come. Focus less on answers than on questions.
Comment: If I cover the refineries in New Orleans, do you want me to be in solidarity with them? How do you pick and choose who gets solidarity and who doesn’t?
Comment: It’s a paradox: The original purpose of independent journalism was to avoid coercive influences other than the public interest. How do you maintain the appropriate independence to not be influenced negatively and yet have solidarity/empathy with communities?
Comment: Maybe the bottom line is “give a shit.”
Comment: Keep hearing that people get into journalism because they care, but they aren’t taught how to act on that. How do I finesse this so that people will listen and provide support?
Comment: How do I build alliances and advocate for engagement approaches in the newsroom?
Comment: How do we learn to live with urgency and patience? Need to increase our own capacity to be present in ourselves and in our communities if anything is going to shift?
Comment: When do we lead and when do we follow?
Comment: Quality of the intervention depends on the interior quality of the intervener (quote).
Ivan: What does “engagement on whose terms” mean? Sometimes people go into a community without consulting the community that they’re trying to engage.
Comment: Need to consider authenticity and reciprocity.
Comment: Need to ask people, what does this look like in your life? And then, what are the questions that need to be asked to address those experiences?
Comment: What’s the physical space? Where are we doing this engagement, in the newsroom or in someone’s living room?
Comment: Wish more colleagues were here – hearts are in the right place, but they need to hear what’s being said here.

ELEVATE ENGAGEMENT
Short-form one-line aspirations mid-day on Saturday

1. I contain multitudes
2. Writing
3. If journalism was like gardening how would we change the world?
4. Stay in the new
5. Motivated
6. Deeply touched
7. Harmony
8. Community first
9. You are not alone in this endeavor
10. Hunger
11. Empathy
12. I feel driven
13. Learn from the past
14. Spreading this to my colleagues
15. Value relationships
16. Each of us, all of us
17. Have a little faith
18. Gratitude
19. Present and moving
20. Always learning
21. Purpose
22. Advocating and incorporating
23. This is how we do it
24. Part of a community
25. Keep the faith
26. Let’s get down
27. Circle not line
28. Stay nimble
29. Radical disrupt-ivation
30. Embrace courage as learning
31. Much is possible
32. Enlightened
33. Let’s all do something together or party together
34. Totally inspired
35. Compost
36. Solidarity
37. Include more youth
38. Radically hopeful
39. Growling – that’s my stomach I didn’t have breakfast – better future
40. So much potential
41. Encouraging
42. Find direction and take the next elegant minimum step
43. Collaboration
44. Collective mindfulness
45. Ready to move forward
46. Give a shit
47. Hopeful and unquiet
48. Educating my educators
49. Ditto all of the above
50. Opportunities for unexpected collaboration
51. Plant, nurture, harvest hope
52. Rekindling trust and commitment with compassion
53. People don’t care what you know until they know that you care
54. Follow your smile and share your gifts
55. Just thinking where our connections can all take us
56. We’ve created a community of smiling eyes – now what will we do with it?
57. All the things
58. Make the transition
59. A good society is a society of happy losers
60. Collaborating to tell good stories
61. No one answer
62. Burn it down
63. We’re shiny-eyed doers and we’re in it together
64. Don’t ask for permission to start change just start it
65. W are all valuable and show up as a person first
66. Two-way trust
67. Passion fuels truth
68. Implement
69. Connectivity
70. I’m sorry, I’m feeling overwhelmed and really burdened by all the things that need still to be done
71. Grading pleasure, purpose and courage
72. Re-energized, reinvigorated and ready to make change
73. Connecting institutions with each other in the service of learning from each other
74. Stay curious
75. There’s going to be kereoke tonight at the Elgar
76. I’m hear kind by accident I have to admit but maybe it wasn’t an accident
77. Engage, be vulnerable and connect for its own sake with no means to an end
78. Come together (singing)
79. Terrifying responsibility
80. Tired and inspired
81. Applause from a gesture
82. After that?
83. Tired but knowing that we can, we must do better day by day
84. Learning to ask the right questions
85. Addictive engagement and contagious opportunities
86. Balancing our thinking centers of logic, creativity and unity
87. Truly human
88. In a spirit of inquiry, who am I, and who am I with you?
89. When I think of wealth I think of this
90. Dive in head first
91. Finding new ways
92. Just do it

Dear Friends,

Nine of us attending Elevate Engagement happily took on the task of paying close attention to what was said and documenting the emerging themes. We were participant observers, meaning that we were not on the outside looking in, but on the inside, reflecting back to the whole group what we all were learning. Of course, what seemed important was influenced by our own values/life experiences, by listening carefully for the deeply-felt truths of the speakers, by sensing the energy of the room, and also by our recent deep dive into the JTM report on the principles of civic communications.

As the conference proceeded, we documented the nuggets of insight that we heard in a shared document, clustering them as we went. It was interesting (and informed our sense of the themes) to see how often we captured the same “chunks,” which we also saw pop up on the Twitter feed. The shared document that contains the clustered chunks is over 20 pages long, so what I have produced here is a summary in outline form (https://tinyurl.com/lrhetb8), with several illustrative quotes sprinkled throughout. If you’d like to see the full document, which also contains photos of some of August’s playdoh creations, go here: https://tinyurl.com/kxtdolk

I’m sure that there are still some great nuggets in that longer doc that I didn’t do justice to in this summary, so if you see some ideas that aren’t represented, we should add them. Let me know.

This outline (https://tinyurl.com/kxtdolk) is not the final analysis, by any means. Some “data” still hasn’t been integrated, such as the full list of open space sessions topics, observations from any OS sessions that did not have one of our team present (especially on Sunday), the Pro Action Café, the postcards, and probably some other items I can’t think of right now. (We were able, however, to fold in the harvest that Nitya did in her amazing graphic recording posters). It would also be great to take a closer look at what showed up most loudly in Twitter.

At this moment, I don’t know exactly what the next steps – if any – will be to do a “checks and balances” process that would incorporate more of that data, to get validation of the themes and identify what else is missing. The hosting and developmental evaluation team will be discussing that over the next few weeks, I’m sure. Be in touch if you want an update.

That said, my understanding of what is going to happen on Sunday morning is that you all will be looking at conference artifacts, including these notes, but also the other material that was generated and do a collective theming process. While I am so sorry to miss that (being now in Phoenix for my niece’s wedding), I am very excited that it’s going to happen. It will be a great way to do some of that checks and balances I just mentioned (“triangulation” in eval speak). I am so eager to see how your themes compare to/inform/deepen/shift what we have in these notes.

If you’d like to learn more about the process that our group of nine used, there are documents describing our method and the developmental eval. approach, in the Resources section of Gather. Also, feel free to contact me if you have questions or would like to talk more about developmental evaluation, or other ways to infuse the asking of critical questions into our work.

I know I said it so many times over the last couple of days, but I just need to put it in writing here, too: Thank you deeply to the U of O Journalism students and their incredible mentor Lori for joining me on this adventure: Alex Powers, August Frank, Emily Olson, Mark Kellman, Matt Gatie, Payton Bruni, Sydney Padgett, and Lori Shontz.

With love and appreciation,

Yve,
Developmental Evaluator with Journalism That Matters
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yve Susskind, Ph.D.
Praxis Associates, LLC.
Planning, Facilitation, Research and Evaluation
for Education, Governmental and Non-Profit Organizations

10515 SW 110th St.
Vashon, WA 98070
(206) 304-0015

Yve@PraxisAssociates.com
www.PraxisAssociates.com
www.linkedin.com/in/YveSusskind

Please go here for the actual Themes document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_Vc_-Zt5p6vnu5eh4tcIazpo4mpNFbVKbu4SUhhX1vY/edit?usp=sharing

Session Host: Christine Whitney Sanchez

Participant List:
• Alex Power
• Lina Davis
• Linda Ellinor
• Tom Bray
• Sarah Alvarez
• Amber Rivera

Session Notes

What drew you to this conversation?
• Alternative funding revenues
• Rate cases – discouraged
• Hoping to hear success stories
• Juxtaposition of sustainability and public utilities
• Journalists co-convening
• Public utilities fund journalism to increase their own accountability and improve both the info gap and resource gap

Incentives for Utilities to co-convene
• Dams are failing – hot issues
• Precedent from SoCal – facilitation groups got together with federal results
• East Oregon – water rights – government doesn’t facilitate measurable results. It was collaboration that got the dam removed.
• Great PR for the utilities
• Circumvent the government
• Low hanging fruit on sticky issues
• Engineers are good at complex issues – bring them into the conversation to seed future technology
• Journalists create a platform for energy efficiencies
• Build relationships with stakeholders

Disincentives for Utilities to co-convene
• All they care about is the financial bottom line
• Disturbing monopolies
• Dark money

Brainstorm
• Look into Architecture 2030
• Klamath Electric Project – River restoration -> highly facilitated public project
• It takes a long time to bring the right stakeholders together and build trust – Garfield Foundation
• Old energy industries (oil, gas, coal) = personal identities
• Important to create the most potent frame for the sponsorship
• How do journalists take the next step to BE the facilitators
• What about a partnership between Community engagement facilitators and journalists
• Journalists have been facilitating – it’s not their role to take those results forward
• Utility -> community engagement facilitators -> journalists
• Journalists -> community engagement facilitators -> public communication
• Journalists convention because they are the only ones who can
• Media folks ARE community developers
• Journalists would benefit greatly from a more open process

Incentives for journalists
• Gather enough info to explain the situation cogently and more even-handedly
• Effect positive change
• Re-legitimize themselves
o In the 90’s PEW sponsored civic journalism through the Front Porch Forum
The 2016 election changed our job description
Include journalists, as citizens, to advocate for a healthy community

Actionable Suggestions
• Create partnerships between journalists and community engagement facilitators
• Consider how the blurring of roles between journalists and activists can inform engagement
• Citizen journalists model in-depth conversations

What tools can newsrooms utilize to increase transparency, foster engagement and ultimately work to restore trust in public interest news?

Hearken

Outlier Media (customized from Groundsource)

Spaceship Media

Groundsource

Census Reporter

Screen door

Google Suite

FB live / Periscope

Pocket

Social media in other languages to reach more communities

Bridge group of journalism tools

Mailchimp analytics

Salesforce Mailchimp integration

Ground Source, Hearken, Spaceship integration

Topic: How can Journalism Foster Truly Wise Community Participatory Decision Making

Session Holder: Adin Rogovin

Discussion started around what should the role of journalism be in community engagement.
Journalists help the community understand what and why issues and/or events are important.

Challenges: Reporters are beholden to editors/employers.
Media must satisfy financial needs.
It takes resources to convene community dialogue.

Partnering with a non-profit convener organization could make it work.

The Jefferson Center has worked with a group of legacy media partners in NE Ohio convening citizen dialogue events around the election issues.
The partnering model could work for other media/journalists to fully engage with their community.

Topic: Telling the Stories of Artists* of Color in Very White Portland
*defined as those creating theater/performance, original contemporary classical music, dance and visual arts
Hosted by Amy Wang
Attended by Adin Rogovin, Sydney Padgett, Laura Lo Forti, Karl Eysenbach, Emily Olson, Shawn Poynter, Jerome Vaughn, August Frank, Lillian Mongeau

What’s the quest: Identifying and gaining trust from those who could be suspicious of engagement efforts because of previous lack of coverage. Use convening to assess the status of the relationship, if any. Try partnering with other organizations that already may have access to artists of color, such as arts institutes, artists organizations, community media, Facebook groups. Reach out directly to artists of color I already know. Attend their events to open a conversation. Identify who is already doing a good job of covering artists of color and approach them for help/advice/suggestions. Beware of identifying artists of color as “unseen” or “unheard” – unseen/unheard by whom? We also discussed my personal bandwidth issues as an arts staff of one who is also tasked with additional responsibilities.

What else: Cultivate relationships with art “elites,” such as director at Portland Art Museum, art faculty at local colleges – “will you be talent scouts for me”? Need someone who is vitally interested in monitoring the arts scene. Look for common themes and areas of concern, especially at mid-level (neither elite nor grassroots), which could lead to stories. Listen: What are your stories, what are we not covering, help us tell your stories. Build an advisory group to use as a sounding board, maybe via a closed Facebook group. Figure out what institutions artists of color are using (galleries?).

Lessons/what’s next: Seek possible collaborations/partnerships with ethnic media – shared content? Look for opportunities to create evergreen content to address bandwidth problem. A Q&A series also requires minimal investment of time/resources. Could some of this work be funded by grants?