Elevate Engagement Session Notes

Here is the visual report from the trust breakout.

There were 3 of us: Myself, Tuva Averbuch. and Courtney Breese.

The two major take aways were:

1. Perhaps community engagement is challenging for people in the media because of deadline time pressures. So, having sustained, nuanced dialogues feels too time consuming given the immediate deadlines? A question to sit with.

2. How can community engagement professionals assist in drawing community members out that journalists can then report on? How can we (community engagement practitioners who might have an organizational development background or a facilitator background) partner with professionals in the media to get them to do real community development? It would appear that Journalism is beginning to see themselves increasingly as being helping in community development. But, there are people like organizational development practitioners who do this sort of thing all the time and could be of assistance.

A partnership between the two career fields seems obvious!!

Linda Ellinor

Dialogue Unites Action New

Hosted by Ben DeJarnette and Yve Susskind (notes by Yve and Joy Mayer)
Samantha McCann
Joy Mayer
Ben DeJarnette
Simon Nyi
Jake Batsell
Andrew DeVigal
Yve Susskind
Linda Shaw
David Zeman
Justin Yuen
Prism Pantaz
Subramaniam Vincent

Questions:
• How to integrate the technology to support the COP: How to make it a useful tool and source of what people want but not just make it another tab people have to have open in their browser, just another internet based technology that makes more work.
• Best practices around creating a rhythm e.g., for lightning chats? Does someone need to push it and run it?
• How do we get it to the point that it can run itself?

Things that drive people to the COP (and/or to Gather, or any other COP-supporting technology)
• community of practice can create identity. i’m a designer
• When there’s a connection to members of the tribe. What we do here is all so different there’s so many ways to define what we do, so it’s hard to identify the people who are part of it. How can we identify the other members of our tribe? By the shared set of values and understanding of what we mean when we talk about engagement. shared understanding of vocabulary.

What we’ve learned:
• Maintain a set of shared value while at the same respecting where people are coming from
• People don’t come to an impersonal thing.
• Be OK with whoever and however many show up and starting from that core. Knowing how to use the smaller number of valuable contributions. Quality rather than quantity.
• Go where people are. integrate it into peoples’ information flows. go where people are. newsletters. facebook.
• Helps when there is urgency (need this now, life and death)
• A person whose job it is to be excited when someone joins.
• People get different things they need out of tech and out of face to face.

Ways to make Gather the place where people feel they must go, where they want to have the conversation. Where they feel they need to be:
• Not be too monomaniacal
• Have events not be about just the work and the topic
• But about relationship building and connection (Heart)
• What are things people have had victories with? What can I steal? where’s the next story idea coming from?
• Stories – and push the stories out there rather than leave them there for people ot find.
• Ways that people can submit their questions –starting point for lightning chats
• They have to feel that they can’t miss it.
• That they feel they get to be who they want to be when they are there.

How can Gather give you what do you need?
• An example: help two people connect who have jobs as social media managers but they feel alone and that they are just being adjuncts when what they feel is that they need to help all the reporters in their newsroom do engagement. (to generalize, buy-in in a newsroom. how do you make engagement the job of everyone? sharing social media duties so there’s more time for engagement work? how do you expand what engagement means in your newsroom?
• Create a COP for geographically focused group of public media organizations . Get the organizations working together rather than competing.
• Keep it open and welcoming. Fun.
• A sense of connection.
• what do you want to know how to do? maybe we already have case studies that answer that. maybe we need to find some.maybe we do a lightning chat about it. Push new ones out to Facebook or newsletter.
• concrete payoffs and problems solved. job listings

Why have you on the Gather steering com continued to come to the meetings – what have you gotten out of it?

• Jake: have felt alone as an educator, but felt invigorated being involved in the excitement of a startup. Part of a team that’s actually building something. Staying more involved in this community, fresh ideas that inform my next research project. But also I hope this extends to the Gather product – you (Ben, Joy, Andrew, Justin) have done great job of eliminating the friction to stay involved: going through twitter to sign in that I can dial in to the twitter call; the email digest instead of for every message; user focused design to even the design phase.

• Simon Nyi – what I get out of it in my own work in community building pushing the work more into the mainstream, getting all the people in the newsrooms to feel less alone, getting the community more integrated, less siloed – I am interested in doing that myself. You’ve been able to commit to and focus on this for a long term, it’s as good or as dead as the amount of effort that’s put into it. Wanting to make sure the good energy doesn’t die on the vine.

• Subbu: multiple motives. Have done successful engagement in other countries and that experience of engagement is empowering. But wanted to learn about the American experience of engagement. Also, the way something gets legitimized is you create a space for it. So I feel it’s the right thing to do. The skepticism is that universities are not usually the place where ongoing innovative software is invented. Maybe that’s also changing.

• Justin Yuen – focused on the deliverable in the steering com, so trying to understand how the COP also can feel like a team. Learned that an initiative that has working groups that is trying to achieve something collectively.

END OF DAY REFLECTIONS
CONTEMPORANEOUS NOTES

How do we elevate engagemement for communities to thrive?
An end of day exercise. People speak a comment on that question and folks in the circle either sit down or stay standing.    

Journalists need to be relationship not transactional with the communities they serve.

Journalists need to approach journalism as members of communities

What would it mean if we stepped outside our different engagement silos as organizers, facilitators, artists, journalist and whatever else and actually engaged aross those silos to make a bigger difference?

Engagemement can start by seeking out the curiosities of your audiences and the information gaps they have and starting your reporting there.

Journalsits need to open space for midwifing the communities’ stories.

Journalists should go beyond highlighting the divisions.

Accept that a lot of people don’t trust us enough to engage with us.

By fostering partnerships between those of us engaged in public engagement work as facilitiators with journalists, that will move us forward in a juicy way.

We need to figure out how to work together because we have to, in a way that sustains everyone involved in that partnership

To elevate engagement we have to figure out how to get people to pay for engagement and create the mechanisms for that.

Codify and standardize this kind of process in newsrooms across the country every month.

Reporters have to get out and cover the damn grass roots movements in the communities – I apologize for cursing.

We need to stop looking at faith communities as problems or as problems we need to fix and stop practicing missionary journalism and do what we think the communities are interested in in.

Change the status quo.

Some project missions seem similar so to elevate engagement some of us have to work together and merge projects.

It’s important to develop a common vocabulary for developing clarity and understanding.

NEXT, general reflections at the end of Day 2

It is great to start a aconversation, go into that conversation, listen and learn from you without having any fear. Jerome.

I wanted to thank all the nonjournalists who I’ve met here and who have spoken up. We do a good job of talking to each other — but not listening. Thanks. Alicia Montgomery.

Thank Monsoor for the session on voices of kids with mental-health issues not being captured and how to get them to write, even for themselves. Saboobin.

Mike Fancher: It’s occurring to me that a lot of this I have been involved in this for awhile. It is far more important than I ever knew, when I think about the state of our country and our democracy, we have to succeed, we have to find this path and stay on it.

King Clemnschower – One of the most refreshing things of being here — Every is working toward the same goal but approaching it from different angles. Everyone here is trying to figure out the same thing I am; any conversation, something useful will come of it. All of the disagreement has been respectful and confortable. There is no fear about voicing dissent, even if you are in the minority someone is going to talk to you about it.

Peggy Holman: Picking up on these last two themes. Regarding Mike’s comment about urgency: A scholar has sayd that cultures die within a generation when they cease to have a positive vision about their own future. Think of the role of journalists as storytellers – it’s chilling. Jervis Bush said where generative images emerge – something like sustainable development – someone coined the term, it generated incredible creativitiy. Generative images, where they emerge help us to imagine a future. Journalists have a role to play in that. Add too the observation —  are being kind to each other? The form of discourse that’s the norm in our culture is debate – the Latin meaning is to beat down – and it is what we have been culturally doing with each other. What we are doing here is being seeded by another form of discourse called dialogue – “meaning flowing through” – curiosity and inquiry and making connections and discovering differences are a source of innovation and creativity. I would never have been able to do that on our own. We need those conversations. Imagine a journalism that is guided by dialogue, that comes from a dialogic point of view.

My open space sessions were essentially one on one. One was: “Can I practice listening to you?” It was just Michelle and me. But that was quality time of becoming vulnerable to someone in the room. And I went from Michelle on to Mike Fancher. Something about today — when you kept speaking about running into people at the right time. Let the time happen and flow, I just kept that in mind all day. I won’t run from a conversation. For my session I thought no one was coming. When Mike showed up, he said he was looking for the session called by the person who called themself a recent college grad. We took our session outside and walked along the water. Today has been awesome.

Jason Preston: I’m not a journalist and just showed up, but adding things to the pool that can be thought about over the remainder of this event. I do help create and support a community of people who want to put a dent in the universe. We do that through shared experiences and getting people together in person. The experiences I’m are related – they are the building blocks of community engagement and empowerment. Think about how those building blocks can be brought into the journalism that you do and the people around you.

Taylen: Many people I’ve met today work for nonprofit newsrooms, few work for for-profit newsrooms like me. What is the future of journalism and engagement when we’re money and profit focused? How can journalism sustain itself when even if you are a non-profit you have to listen to people who are paying your bills and writing your paycheck?

David, from a nonprofit online magazine that writes about issues important to the people of Michigan. We are trying to expand our audience and have people more involved about the issues important to people in our state. What I’d like to see before I go, is more concrete ideas, something I can take back to other folks that are the kinds of things that work, that you can quantify. There has been lots of interesting talk and smart people, but also a lot of stuff that sounds like academic nonsense – I don’t mean to be negative but I don’t know what some of this stuff means. I want something that we can use, even with your NGOs, they want to see growth, the foundations, and more time on page. To talk about things that make us feel good but also expand our message.

I want to second what David just started. Not to be answered right now. I dare ask the question: If the gathering were to end now, sleep on this question: What can you take from this day and a half that you can employ tomorrow in your business or profession? See if it fits to a newsroom, and business, your big family.

I’m thinking about the difference between being beaten up and beaten down. A point Peggy has made. It seems like both are going on. Where is engagement headed? The other thing: I’m not a touchy feely person — don’t let my sweater deceive you. I recognize some of what the person previously said about academic language that maybe doesn’t feel quite as tangible as it should be. But I also don’t think we are engaging in touchy feely and that makes me glad I’m here. I’d like to put my time and energy into things that are more concrete and maybe trickle in over time.

Mike Green: I want to say thanks to that. I was in her session and it was very impactful because we did talk about the emotional aspect, the fluffy, the thing that when people read what you write and consume what you produce they don’t consume it in a vacume, they bring their prejudices. People understood that. We had three minutes to solve the world’s problems. In that three minutes something I didn’t know about myself I discovered. What would you do if you had to adopt your own child? And there were all these various ramifications depending on your lifestyle you lead. In a group of three there were two of us who actually had to adopt our own child. We decided to make a game, pick your life, navigate through the issues; imagine writing an op-ed about your decisions, find a couple and walk them through that process of adopting your own child. It is a multimedia package we produced inside of four minutes.

I learned I could collect three business cards, two of which are going to my alt weekly and one is going to a major funder to see if we can replicate it in our state. I also referred someone here to a big nonprofit institution in our community. It would be interesting to find out how many business cards were swapped and who was swapping them.

I’m Tom, age 57, and I’ve been doing journalism since I was 15. Kids this is the shittiest time we have every been in. We have government and journalism kicking each other. Those who want to still do this work, God bless them!

Michelle Ferrier: We’re talking about elevating engagement for communities to thrive. There are some communities we don’t have trust in. One Tweet is a woman from Ferguson who’s brother had been killed the day before. She said I’m going to tell you about it before the word gets out. How do we arive at a point of engagement when communities are afraid to engage? We haven’t shown our ability to listen or connect. The work we have to do as journalists will take time to do, especially in underserved and underrepresented communities.

Ann Stadler: OTIS — The elevator principle. OTIS – only the important stuff. I want to recommend the OTIS principle that we are acting upon.

Engagement is part of funding
*Money is not enough to pay for engagement itself
*3-legged stool in paying for journalism: Donors are not always enough
*Engagement is resource-intensive

How do we pay for great engagement?
*Access to private money? Orgs with sustainable donor-fund: PRI, CIR, ProPublica
*If your engagement requires donor funding, it’s not fully sustainable
*There needs to be a firewall b/w engagement and fundraising

What does great engagement look like?
*Start with a method of having 1-on-1 with readers?
*Putting storytelling in the hands of the people
*Changing the culture of people working
*Livestreaming live events
*Digital invitations the produce massive amounts of data
*Don’t mistake engagement for distribution

How to make a living doing professional engagement w/o getting coopted by marketing?
*Fear of selling out in order to get a paycheck
*Donors get to express what they really care about

How does this work for for-profit newsrooms?
*Multiple revenue streams that aren’t hyper-dependent on advertising
*The new editorial-meets-business model creates disconnect
*Have in mind a goal that’s worth fighting for and fight for it
*The convergence of business and editorial

We’re hearing our readers —> better engagement —> long-term revenue
Experience + Elevate + Embed? Engagement (Everything has to about engagement)

—
Taylyn Washington-Harmon
Social Media Editor
O: 617-929-2816
M: 708-368-6051
@TaylynHarmon

Session Host: Taylyn Washington-Harmon
Session Reporter: Jackie Hai
Participants: Lillian Mongeau, Dahlia Bazzaz, Ariel Zirulnick, Andrew Rockway, Courtney Breese, Michelle Garcia, Amy Wang

Issue: it can be difficult for editors and reporters to listen to larger communities because they tend to make assumptions that we know best. There’s been a major disconnect between the audience and what the newsroom is reporting on.

• e.g. “How can we make this story go viral in a particular community? Why aren’t people paying attention to this story?” is not going about it in a community-driven way. Outside looking in.
• STAT is still defining who the audience is, free vs paywalled content

Ariel, The New Tropic, runs into problems reaching out to immigrant communities in Miami (e.g. Haitian, Dominican)

• Got translators to host watch parties at community centers
• Found translators in immigration court system
• Where does your community already gather?
• Start with the community and how the community accesses information
• Digital barrier, internet penetration still a problem with underserved communities

What about mobile?

• Learn about how different communities use internet to navigate their daily life

STAT published a video about tilapia skin being used to treat burns, audio in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles, went viral and did significantly better than later translation of English article or other content about Zika virus. Why?

• Different interest across genders?
• Theory: Compassion fatigue w/ stories that highlight problems instead of solutions
• Tilapia story is not just a solution, but a quick fix

Doing a good job listening to people we’re reporting on, but not listening to our readers. How to learn who your audience is and continuing the conversation?

• Callouts – thank you, glad you read it, what else would you like to read?

STAT wasn’t covering social disparities in health. Tried to start conversation online, but no one was talking. Didn’t build up trust and history of coverage before asking people to share intimate experiences about themselves.

• Have to send the message that we’re here to help, not just here to create tragedy porn
• If you don’t have the representation in the newsroom staff, how is anyone going to trust you?
• Do more positive profile stories to gain trust

How to make more authentic callouts

• Reach out to one or two people already in a relationship with and have them part of the conversation, have them start it in their own networks
• Nobody wants to be the first person

How can newsrooms, starting from reporters and editors, not just push all the work onto one person (engagement editor) to push content to this or that group?

• Boston Institute for Non-Profit Journalism started doing pop-up journalism, set up shop on the street to talk with people
• Capacity, sometimes reporters go to events they’re not going to cover (e.g. every school board meeting), getting harder as newsrooms shrink
• Fewer reporters trying to cover the same amount of content. One solution: crowdsourcing news budget. Here are the six high school football games coming up, you as the reader tell us which ones to cover, more engagement because readers got to choose

How many readers are actually active on Facebook, Twitter? Are we talking with them or at them, or just talking to ourselves?

• Reporters afraid to engage online, fear of not seeming unbiased
• Hope to push editors and reporters to break out of echo chamber online
• Professional/personal facebook accounts for reporters to interact with readers?
• Guest essays: ask commenters who are vocal, well-spoken to submit essays
• Publish round-up of comments for further discussion

Strategies for reporters to share content to their social networks

• Twitter vs Facebook divide, less willing to share own and colleagues’ stories on Facebook because it’s seen as a more personal platform for friends and family
• Personalize the reporting, share behind-the-scenes info on how the story was created
• Journalists are not as much figures in their community as they think they are
• Seeing social media not just as a sharing platform, but a place to talk

Finding the line between personal and professional

• Making a conscious decision about objectivity by making values explicit, statement of values with audience input

Publishing opposing viewpoints

• Hard to find the line between destructive vs uncomfortable viewpoints

Experiences using callouts to source stories

• STAT collaborated with ProPublica to gather letters sent to public officials and responses surrounding AHCA
• EducationLab did an interesting questions shoutout every few months, pick a topic e.g. school finance, Works better in public radio than print.

Newsletters

• Idea: ask newsletter writers to share most interesting response from a reader
• For beat reporters: Here’s the things I’m working on, I’ll be working on them for a while, people can engage at different points

Here are notes of many of the breakout sessions called this morning to Elevate Engagement participants. Most of them will post notes in coming days. Watch for them.

Annie Anderson – How do we define community

Keegan – How do we help communities become active participants?

Why is, why come, why note – using questions to create reflect etc. sedette

Jessie Arbin – How do you qnatify inmpact of an engagement project?

Why stop at listening, how do you meet people where they are and cover their uses – Lisa

How can our apparent differences be fuel for right action, … reaching out and doing something. Bob

How can we document effectivelyhow engagement matters – documenting impact – Regina

May I practice listening by listening to you?

Taylin – How do we get reporters and editors to actively learn from our readers?

How do we engage immigrant communities across language and culture – Daniel

How do we gage ethinc media in building communities and trust? Anthony

Adin – How can journalism foster truly wise community participatory decision making?

Eleanor – How can the media model sustain nuanced breakthrough conversations over time on breakthrough issues

Lauren How do newsrooms measure loyalty

Pamela – What are some of the tools that can utilize or tore trust and transporacy on public interest news.

Gracie: How do youconinve decision makers that this engagement work is worth the investment.

Segu Winston: I changed question as I was standing in line. How does newsroom has an ongoing conversation with people independent of whether they are doing projects or not

Katherine: Seeking authenticate ways to connect both inter and intra in rural comuhities around the world

How can engagement benefit from international cooperator

Jake: As educators how do we empower students with hands on engagement experience? A lot of students don’t have an inherent audience.

Ben and Eve: Part of Gather platform. What are the lesons we’ve all learned about supporting a community of practie through high or low tech

Claudia, graduated from college a week ago tomorrow – As a recent college grad and understanding your role. How?

Prism: What would journalis look like in a new socialeconomic system that puts people before profit

Alicia; What are activites or ways to spark new civic media endeavor or a cultural co-creation space especially in nonmetro areas and especially centering on unheard communities.

Cirstine: What might happen if journalists and public utiltieis co-convened conversations on economic deelopment and sustainablility.

What does journalism do? How do we study its impact on social change so we can seve those needs?

Lillian: Engaging reader wallets – how can we learn their trust to the point they will pay for journalism.

Rodney: How do we move online video from one way broadcast to two way engagement

March: How can we finalize and expand the role of community reader in illuminating community social challenges and being a force for collaborative solutions?

How can one make a living as an engagement professional without being co=opted by marketing?

JoEllen: How do newsrooms pay for the hard work of engagement

Tom: I’m going to all the money sessions. How do legacy media apply open engagement to tell more poignant stories

Simon: How to build bridges between people in this room and local newsrooms tht aren’t here who have been doing engagement for a long time but don’t’ call it that.

Linda == APM How can we change workplace newsroom culture to embrace and model inclusions

Jessica Maria Ross: How might we structure live community story sharing events for live large groups that move … solutions forward?

Here are Bill Densmore’s rapid notes of tonight’s “Harvest Session” at Elevate Engagement in Portland.  These notes will be updated later this evening from listening to audio of the session.

LISTEN TO AUDIO OF THIS SESSION:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B87Bd6VlF6wbWEF4TW9JanUtSXM

Collaborative not competitive on funding and other things.

Hechinger Report: Not my idea, but find a way to convinced Craig of Craig’s List to create an endowment for journalism. That would blow my mind.

Simon Gelpern from NJ: What would blow my mind is a buyin on a project I’m working on called Community Information Districts. Fund schools, fire departments, for journalism. To enable this project to live in communities. Infodistricts.org

Phil Eisenbach: Community activist in Eugene Oregon. Ask every journalist to think about how you could reduce the level of homelessness in your community.

Jessica Maria Ross: IF at somepoint in this event we engaged all by dancing.

Mike Fancher: My mind has already been blown and my heart has been opened. I wanted to hear from young people who want to be inspired to be journalists as I have through my career, and I sit down with two such paper and OK then.

Andrew: A lot of expertise already in the room. 30 minutes to catalyze more conversation. Six individuals focusing on six projects.

Michelle Holmes, VP content Alabama Media

Outlier Media: Journalism for low income.
Therere are huge information gaps in many of the palces that we live and work. Look up James Hamilton’s work. AN information gap is where accountability goes to die and as journalists we can’t stand by and watch that happen, but we are. We are missing people.

She used to work in public radio. Journalism is edited for the middle class – “Mary” is the euphemism. Her mother has more information than she news what to do with. At the same time there are Mary’s drowing in news, they are low income Americans.

We won’t talk about whether these people can and will pay for information. But they can and they will. Let’s figure out what they are interested in and care about. Information gap is around rentals. Tenants don’t have a good way to quality check on landlords. It’s about accountability.

Focus on engagement, not sales. She buy lists of cell phone numbers for Detroit and texts them to see if they want to get involved. You can feed all parts of the news beast with this model.

Feedback: 25% want more information; more than half said it was helpful to them. What do the other 24% want?

Adriana Galardo, ProPublica. She is from Chicago.

Engagement is Journalism. Engagement there are three tables:

n who are the people at the center of this investigation
n what do they care about
n how have they been harmed

They did a piece on maternal help.

Looked quickly for names, causes and places. NO place to go to see what these people care about. Even big mommie blogs weren’t talking about maternal death. They found that GoFundMe was a source – people were asking for help.

Have collected 450 names from 2011; 120 from 2016. Trying to figure out as many names as possible from 2016.

What happen to you or someone you know as a result of childbirth.

maternal@propublica.org — in a call out heard from 2,500 cases in the first week. Now 3,100. Falling short on reaching women of color. Not doing a good job reaching women of color, but black women are 3-4x more like to die than white women.

Brings together reporting, community, video.

Talk to me about embedding the form, it is super easy to embed.
(Find out more about the mother who died 20 hours after the video was shot)

Shannon McGregor, Engaging News Project. At UT.

How can news organizations use comments to build and foster relationships tht goes behyond being transactional. She is PhD candidate in school of journalism. Seeking researched based technics for engaging digital audiences.

Commenting is a process most people have engaged in. But of people who read news online, half of them aren’t commenting or paying attention to comments. Maybe they aren’t getting the kind of relationships they want when they go on.

They partnered with Corel and surveyed 10,000 of their readers. 70% or more of commentators wanted more relationship with journalists in the comments sections. Readers want to build relationships, but so do journalists. Dina Chen did the work, she is at UT. They found this made for better journalism. Readers and journalists want these relationships, how do we do this well. What are some ideas?

One idea tested with a local news station. Rsult: reduced incivility, increased provision of evidence. Most important, best practices, for when journalists reply and create relationships. Ask questions, provide more information, etc.

Cameron Whitten, Know your Ciy and Portland’s Resistance

Citizen journalism in Portland. Heart of trump resistance.

Data expensive – using 100gb a month. Raised $4,000 from crowdsourcing.

Streams of Resistence LLC he founded.

Focused on mobile form of engagement because that’s where people are.

Ashley Alvarado, Public Engagement Manager, KPCC
Southern California Public Radio
Unheard LA

Three live shows completely community driven.

I don’t know how many times you’re going to work and your crying with joy.
Listening as a superpower.

We have people to lunch and we find out there are unheard and untold stories.
Met more than 400 people inviting them to lunch.
Public Insight Network has relationship with thousands of people.

Were in Whitier, downtown LA and Hollywood.

We had people sign up to become PIN Pals.

Fiona Morgan of Free Press fights to preserve the open Internet and journalism.

TONIGHT’S CONVENING QUESTION:
What does it look like when communication supports communities to thrive?

She talks about the World Café process.

There will be three questions, 15 minutes to answer each question and we’ll give you a two minute warning.

1) What excites you about what you heard tonigh from our ligtening presenters.

HARVEST SESSION

I live the idea of reaching beyhond our borders to regular people: “We want to speak too.”

I was talking to Simon here. This guy is so smart and cool. If reporters comment on all their articles, there is not enough time to have conversations like that. Simon says he became aware of called Opinary. Throughout an article you are reading you can engage on an issue. After you answer it it will show whever everybody else lies and if you are in the median. How other people are feeling.

Linda Miller: What happens if the community needs something that isn’t a story, isn’t content. Maybe we aren’t in the media business if we are about meeting community needs.

Ivan Regovin: A comment thread at all three tables was asking the question: What does engagement mean to us? He examples seemed like a continuum of why we want to enage.

Michelle Ferrier: What exited me was moving generalists out of the center and thinking about how others in the community are engaging. That is important because it advances ournalism and democracy. The connection we are trying to create is not about collecting new quotes for a story that we didn’t talk to before, but hwo e can help a community develop a collective vision.

Anander: I was sparked by this: WE have assumptions about how communities exist and what they are. How can engagement create new thinking about what communities are and how they exist – particularly in low-income or rural areas – to build new communities.

Bob: I’m an outlier, not a journalist. From the nonjournalist caucus. I couldn’t use the word exciting but I would use the world thoutghful. Journalism is now about personal stepping in, showing up and about engaging. HE sued to do “facilitation” but stopped using that word 15 years. Facilitators tend to stand outside and not being involved. He now wants to step in, be personal, e present. Intresting to see the parallels.

Elaine: Thinking about not knowing what engagement is. It has to do with starting with ambiguity and moving to clarity. I’ll leave that there. And also how platform can be aplace where you start but you move somewhere different. Those are two things that were present in some other conversations.

Keegan: One thing that threaded through my three tables – you hear about journalism changing and is fundamentally different, but we don’t have to actually reinvent the wheel, we just have to remember where some of our foundations lie. We are not kins, we are public servants. That is our job, serving our communities . . . many things are changing but we are still about serving communities.

Peggy closes us out for the evening.

“Markdown lets you compose posts and comments with links, lists, and other styles using regular characters and punctuation marks.” Here are a few examples:

*Emphasize*
**Strong**
A [link](http://example.com “Title”).

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