Design events and digital spaces to create — and measure — impact

Nearly 40% of people in Chicago said in a recent study that they lacked information on their neighborhoods and how to get involved in civic life. Chicago Public Media decided to try something new to solve this gap.

They plan to launch chicago.com this fall, which will feature some news stories from WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times. The ultimate goal, though, is to design a space to help people connect with each other. They’ll measure how the experiment is working via surveys and community focus groups.

Creative, boundary-blurring projects like this allow newsrooms to connect with communities in ways that help them increase their reach — and see firsthand how their journalism is making a difference.

With careful planning, events and newsroom-created gathering spaces can help local media measure impact and trust.

Surveys of audience needs can show the gap between what people want versus what’s available to them. For example, research from New_ Public found that more than two-thirds of suburban residents say they are interested in using digital spaces to find recommendations in their community, but less than half were doing so. If a newsroom created a local online space to serve that need, they could measure impact by the quality of the online comments, for example.

“The ability to convene members of a community at a local event is, in my mind, a marker of community impact,” said Talia Stroud, director of the Center for Media Engagement, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a board member at New_ Public.

“The number of people who come and the value that they take away from the event are a testament to impact,” she said

Building from a baseline of trust

Local journalism gives people a sense of place and institutional memory, and bringing people together in service of better understanding the world around them is an act of journalism. People are eager for experiences where they can make sense of the world and get to know people — even people who share different beliefs — but the top barrier they face is a lack of opportunities to do so, according to a 2025 report from More in Common.

Local journalists can be the conveners who make that happen. Just under half of readers rated local news as the best source of useful information — far outpacing national news, influencers and AI chatbots, according to recent polling conducted by the Media Insight Project. And new research from the Pew Research Center shows the most active and engaged community members are most likely to trust their local news.

Local newsrooms are well-positioned to host events — both online and in-person — in their communities that help increase trust and, in turn, grow revenue and loyal readership. The project at Chicago Public Media — created in partnership with Roundabout, a nonprofit tech organization established by New_ Public — is being celebrated as a home-grown social media network.

Events and dedicated spaces can serve as a catalyst for these and other impact signals for newsrooms to track, but they are also time-consuming and can be expensive, and many local newsrooms don’t have staffing or money to spare. Here are some guiding principles that news leaders can use to proactively design events and platforms that work.

Ask a question before you plan

Here’s a big one: How can we understand how community-centered journalism makes a difference in people’s lives?

Open Campus, a national nonprofit newsroom covering higher education, partners with local news organizations to hire and provide editing support for reporters. They recently embarked on a new project covering community colleges, which tend to receive the least amount of news coverage.

Notably, the outlet is partnering with local organizations to convene community members to learn more about their experiences with higher education. These structured advisory councils, led by hired facilitators, will help them understand the communities they are covering. In Texas, participants recruited for local community councils are signed on for a commitment of at least 6 months, and they will receive an honorarium for their time.

This structure is intended to help establish the trust needed to get nuanced answers and allows the newsroom to measure change over time in a meaningful way. Separately, in Arizona and North Carolina, Open Campus is planning partnerships with groups like local libraries to host a listening tour. The idea here is to play with form and determine whether an open house or a smaller focus group is more effective.

Measuring impact depends on the type of gathering. With the community councils, for example, they plan to do pre- and post- surveys as well as record and transcribe conversations using academic-level word sorting tools to find anonymized themes that develop. The listening tour has a slightly looser format, but it still had solid plans for measuring engagement by gathering feedback about coverage and assessing information gaps in communities. And in both cases, they hope to build new relationships and learn what kinds of stories will help readers the most.

The goal is community-centered journalism, and the events will help reporters do more of that work.

These types of in-person events have another benefit. Intentionally convening journalists and community members is part of the work to rebuild trust, said Caroline Porter, director of product & strategic partnerships at Open Campus.

Trust is foundational to what we do as journalists, and it is one of the factors that drives readers to donate or subscribe, according to research from Trusting News. But it remains one of the trickiest types of impact to measure during events. Events where there’s an interactive component give newsrooms a way to reconnect with readers and build relationships.

Design a process to measure impact — and consider a partner to help

Measuring relationships is best done over time so that newsrooms can see what is changing and what is effective. And when there is a plan to measure impact from the start, it gives newsrooms a chance to pivot when the desired impact ends up landing differently than expected.

KQED’s Discord community, which Impact Architects supported as an independent learning partner, provides an example of this. As a public radio station, KQED has a show, Forum, that engages with the community by inviting people to call in to the station. The Discord server was originally conceived as a way to connect with younger listeners of the show. They chose this online community-building space because it already had a track record of working well for podcasters.

The initial work creating the community, led by Francesca Fenzi, was funded by a grant that helped the station properly staff the project from the beginning, said Ethan Toven-Lindsey, editor in chief of KQED. They set out to bring new audiences into the fold, but soon discovered the people using the Discord server were digital natives who were already existing listeners, while others wanted to join but were facing technical hurdles. Staff created how-to videos explaining how to join the Discord community and offered in-person events to demo the platform.

Because KQED was measuring not only who was using the Discord community but who wasn’t, they were able to identify the roadblocks to participation and ultimately grew that online community.

Critically, the station approached the project as a way to learn. Instead of being disappointed when the original hypothesis wasn’t as expected, they were energized by the ways they could measure impact and then pivot how they approached the work in real time.

“Don’t try to make it do all the things,” Toven-Lindsey said. “Pick one or two signals that you are going to value above all other things. Be willing to adjust if those aren’t working out.”

Consider creative ways to reach new audiences

Ruth Serven Smith, a reporter at AL.com who previously served as a senior managing producer, said that she likes to plan events that are unexpected and, critically, not boring. It can feel safest to host events where reporters are on stage, moderating an academic-style panel discussion, but mixing it up can build connections with a new audience and unearth new impact signals.   

“If everyone in the room is the usual suspects, officials, people with complaints, gadflies, I don’t think we’d accomplish anything,” she said. “The question is how you bring new people into the room.”

For example, with a Birmingham DREAMs and Beyond the Violence event, Serven Smith partnered with Birmingham Poet Laureate Salaam Green, who agreed to work alongside the newsroom to plan and execute the event. The goal was clear in the beginning: They wanted to bring new people into the room and build a relationship that would continue after the event ended. A bring-a-friend campaign was a simple way to get new people in the room, Serven Smith said. It’s also an easy and informative impact metric to track.

Intentionally sharing how to reach journalists in the newsroom after the event ended helped keep the momentum. All of this work was planned at the onset to ensure they could measure impact beyond the number of attendees.

“Look, if your goal is filling a 500-person theater, that’s a fine goal to have,” Serven Smith said. “But I always think it’s worthwhile to collect email addresses, do a survey, add in something creative and intentional so that in addition to revenue, you are also furthering the goal of relationship building in community news.”

There is some research that shows how engagement from events can increase revenue. Designing a holistic process to map the user’s journey from the event space — digital or in-person — to engage participants will allow newsrooms to create a playbook that takes into consideration what works in their local context.