Leadership buy-in to trust communities and connect engagement to newsrooms

Hosts: Chelsea Naughton & Sabrina Iglecias 

Participants: 

• Summer Moore
• Allison Shirk
• Megan Garvey
• Alex Keefe
• Amir Richardson
• Allie Vanyur
• Edward Wang
• Catalina Jaramillo
• Massarah Mikati
• Steven Aroyo
• Andre Nata
• Eric Marsh
• Elisa 
• Taylor Nazawa 

Notes, observations, and questions:

• How do we get higher-ups to care about engagement work? What’s working? 
• At LAist, engagement work wasn’t considered journalism. The newsroom hated the Hearken slide of the person speaking at the top of the mountain because they felt that meant they weren’t the experts. So, they had everyone create individual mission statements. This seemed to change the thinking. 
• Then they used human-centered design to create “modes.” Each mode needed to be met by 70% of a pitched story. They made it part of the assigning process.
• Then for reporting, they looked at how this process helped them raise money. Missions also need to be periodically updated.  
• At WBEZ, the problem isn’t aversion to change, but that they want to engage in every change so much that things get dropped/confused. 
• They want to be in communities that haven’t heard of them. How do you convince people that this isn’t a special project, but an integral part of their journalism? 
• When reporters/editors leave because they don’t consider this real journalism, let them go. 
• In Birmingham, the engaged approach meant that the microsite actually scooped the bigger media orgs because they had cultivated sources through pop-up engagement events. 
• Engagement is an investment in time. How long are you willing to wait? 
• There is real resistance within the journalism community to being a community member. 
• We have to play the long game. BUT the long game isn’t a selling point for people in newsrooms who aren’t going to be around for the long game. 
• When reporters ask how is this different? We can say that we are giving them time to source. 
• When reporters have a moment with a community member, that’s when they convert. And there’s no way to force it. 

Other needs + thoughts:

• Need to turn anecdotes into data, can it be an email? A database?
• Engagement positions were created out of guilt and shame. That can be a powerful motivator. But now they are being let go. 
• Some higher-ups just don’t care. They advocate publicly to save face. 
• Can you create an impact tracker? 
• WBEZ has an open call for community members to come talk to a WBEZ reporter. Then someone transcribes all the notes and puts them into buckets for feedback. 
• Some folks asked for a cheat sheet for how to talk to higher-ups about engagement work.