This week’s action: Collaborate with someone playing an information role in your community.
Giving your journalism a job is a good lens through which to assess what value your content creates. But you can also apply that lens to your news organization itself — not just the content it publishes, but the people who create that content and how it is distributed. What role do you play within your community? And who else in your community is embodying the same or complementary roles?
One step toward sustainability is embracing collaborative intelligence — the idea that the public and professional journalists have complementary roles in creating news, Tom Rosenstiel writes in The Next Journalism.
“The news industry must begin to see journalism less as a product of newsrooms alone than as a continuous community conversation in which professional journalists and newsrooms play only a part,” he writes.
Most local news leaders understand the importance of community engagement, often via community listening sessions or opportunities to contribute. But Rosenstiel writes that your newsroom’s role in the community can and should be fluid, and that “anyone in the community, not just credentialed newspeople, can play any number of roles and commit ‘acts of journalism.’” These community news roles, researched and outlined by the New School’s Journalism + Design Lab, are:
- Facilitating conversations on local issues, surfacing community needs and bringing people together.
- Documenting public meetings, community events and experiences to preserve community history and knowledge. This could be organized or someone taking a spur-of-the-moment video of something newsworthy.
- Commenting to share experience, expertise and ideas to add to community discourse.
- Inquiring and seeking out added perspectives and sources for local concerns, sharing what they’ve learned and sometimes challenging authority.
- Sensemaking to help people understand and contextualize issues and events.
- Amplifying community experiences, news and information through word of mouth, writing or social media.
- Enabling by sharing one’s resources to support others who produce and share local news and information, often by subscribing, donating or training.
- Navigating others to access information and services they need to take action and solve problems.
You should recognize roles from this list that your newsroom has embodied, but other community individuals or organizations probably came to mind, as well.
“Broadening our sense of purpose doesn’t mean abandoning what we’ve always done,” Rosenstiel tells API. “Community listening and engaged journalism, for example, can be put into a larger conceptual framework of how news needs to change.”
Understanding your newsroom’s part in this information ecosystem as both fluid and at times interchangeable with others can help you shift from a community engagement mindset to one of continuous community conversation.
Try it out
Start here: Review the list of community roles and identify at least one person or organization in your community who has played each role.
Take action: Select someone from the list and have a conversation with them about what they’re seeing in the community, and how they feel about the role they’re playing — is it incidental, or are they filling an information need?
Reflect: Imagine what a more sustainable and mutually beneficial relationship with that person or organization might look like. What would it involve? How would a stronger partnership between your newsroom and that person benefit the community?
Dig deeper
- Journalism has many roles. It’s time to embrace the role of convener.
- The shared future of local news: Stewarding the information commons
- Know how your journalism fits into the information mix
- Journalism + Design Lab’s Community News Roles framework
Gratitude goes to Tom Rosenstiel for contributing to this series. Rosenstiel is the former executive director of the American Press Institute and currently serves as Professor of the Practice at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. He is the author of several books, including The Next Journalism: How the Press Must Change to Serve Democracy. Rosenstiel has no current affiliation with API.
