Building bridges with a community liaison

The structure and leadership of a community advisory committee can make a big impact on the effectiveness of the effort. And because these types of committees are organized by and for news organizations, community member participants require extra support and advocacy to ensure the experience is beneficial for them, too.

The community liaison role is essential for this task — providing an outsider’s perspective similar to that of the neighborhood representatives while acting in a facilitator capacity.

During API’s pilot community advisory committee in Pittsburgh, the community liaison was quick to note the ways in which assumptions about the editorial process and sourcing kept community members and newsroom leaders from operating on the same page. She also made sure everyone had a shared understanding of the role neighborhood representatives served in the group — not just as a check and balance for news coverage but an important perspective on structural issues within the newsroom.

Addressing assumptions

Amber Thompson — founder of de-bias, which aims to help address systemic bias in organizations — served as the Pittsburgh committee’s community liaison and approached the role with the understanding that her responsibility was to the neighborhood representatives and the communities they serve.

“From my outsider’s perspective, newsrooms lack detailed organizational goals and struggle to relate to specific communities,” she wrote in an essay for API. “In contrast, from my insider’s perspective, residents lack understanding of what journalists do and how they do it.”

Here are some assumptions she saw emerge, and how those could be addressed:

• Committee members were concerned that news articles were not being produced immediately. Consider implementing a substantial onboarding process, including core tenets of journalism and how newsrooms work as well as a newsroom tour and observing an editorial meeting.
• Some members were concerned that the effort would have no long-term or material impact. Establish processes to track, share and celebrate gains with the community, as well as to publicly share lessons learned from advisory committee meetings. Did the advisory committee lead to stories, help your newsroom rethink an engagement practice, or encourage and change hiring practices? Let the community know.
• Newsrooms didn’t always view neighborhood representatives as subject matter experts. Instead of turning to industry professionals who are routinely seen as experts, news leaders should recognize that community participants are experts in their neighborhoods and lived experiences and should be treated as such.

Looking beyond community engagement

Advisory committees can easily and unintentionally become extractive when people are put in the position of discussing problems without the opportunity to access or influence solutions — and that’s a recipe for anger, frustration and distrust.

“Too often, community members engage in these exercises with no ability to change outcomes,” Thompson wrote. “Without a method to structurally change participants’ experiences, specifically with the news, a cycle of analysis paralysis is inevitable.”

Consider what type of seat at the table community advisory committee members could have to ensure feedback informs both policy and practice.

Thompson offers this advice for journalists looking to establish or participate in a local news advisory committee:

• Trusted sources may be experts on a topic or community, but their views should be nuanced and not predictable. Sources should be more than go-to people known for their stance as a protagonist or antagonist on a topic.
• Challenge expectations around what makes someone an expert and place more significance in nontraditional forms of expertise that communities may value. Journalists must build deeper relations with communities to give context to tools such as labeling sources — a practice just as crucial on the clock as off.
• Move beyond a competition mindset and embrace collaboration across your news ecosystem. The stories told from collaborating newsrooms had some of the most impact on the residents and their respective communities.