Unapologetically Inclusive: How PublicSource made community-centered journalism a newsroom-wide effort

Want a prediction for 2025 and beyond? Newsrooms focused on diversity and inclusion before 2020 will continue leading the way in promoting journalism that serves all members of society.

Among that group will be PublicSource.

As newsrooms — and indeed the nation — grapple with the impact that the recent presidential election may have on efforts focused on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, a hard truth has already been known about the industry’s commitment to these principles.

For a variety of reasons, many newsrooms failed to live up to the goals they set following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. And with the real potential that DEIB efforts, at least at the federal level, will be dramatically curtailed, some newsrooms may be even more fearful of taking on efforts to undo the harm they have caused to traditionally underserved communities.

This mindset of fear, however, may not impact other newsrooms, particularly younger ventures or those that have a long-standing commitment to covering communities with care. For many of these newsrooms, George Floyd was not a wake-up call. It was confirmation that their work was needed in the community. Rather than starting their efforts from scratch, these newsrooms sought assistance to enhance their community connections. Even though these news organizations were already trusted voices within their respective communities, they recognized their room for improvement and growth.

This describes many newsrooms that participated in the Pittsburgh Inclusion Index Initiative from 2022 through 2024. During this two-phase program, the American Press Institute trained four Pittsburgh-area newsrooms on DEIB and community engagement best practices. In the first phase, the newsrooms allowed API to extensively research their internal and external DEIB and engagement processes. Following this effort, each newsroom developed a strategic plan on how they would overcome the challenges API discovered. In the second phase, API, assisted by Resolve Philly, facilitated an in-depth training program on community engagement for a cohort of four newsrooms. For this effort, API also developed a neighborhood-based community advisory committee that provided feedback on how each newsroom could improve coverage and engagement.

Several involved in the project — including WESA, the Pittsburgh City Paper and the hyperlocal podcast YaJagoff — have long histories of engaging with their communities. Through this collaboration with the American Press Institute, all three created plans to strengthen their connections with traditionally marginalized communities. So did PublicSource, the only Pittsburgh newsroom to complete both phases of the Inclusion Index project.

PublicSource’s DEIB and engagement efforts began before partnering with the American Press Institute, which was a later step to better connect with underserved communities.

A brief history: How DEI and engagement hurdles shifted an entire news organization

PublicSource has long held a reputation for community-centered journalism. That is one reason Rich Lord jumped to join the staff.

Lord has earned a reputation among Steel City journalists as a reporter who stays connected with community members. During listening sessions focused on improving the connection between local newsrooms and residents, Lord, who has worked for multiple organizations in the city, was praised as someone who could be counted on to cover news in traditionally underserved areas.

His commitment to community journalism is one reason Lord jumped from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s flagship newsroom, to the hyperlocal shop PublicSource in January 2020.

“I was acutely aware of PublicSource’s style and decided in 2019 that it would be a better place to do more involved, thoughtful, deeper community journalism than any other place in town,” he said.

Community journalism, however, wasn’t always PublicSource’s brand. The newsroom, founded in 2011, initially focused on investigative journalism. Over the next several years, PublicSource often collaborated with other newsrooms. While they did solid work, Halle Stockton, who was one of PublicSource’s first hires as a reporter and is now the co-executive director and editor-in-chief, felt it was too distant from the actual communities in Pittsburgh.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of thought about community engagement and what communities need,” Stockton said.

The focus changed, however, in 2016. That year, PublicSource’s board, with the assistance of a local nonprofit management firm, conducted a series of stakeholder interviews with residents regarding local news coverage. These interviews, particularly those conducted on the street, revealed that residents were concerned with how African Americans and other traditionally underrepresented communities were being covered.

With this information in hand, PublicSource, then led by Mila Sanina, began centering more community voices in its work. In 2017, it launched a series titled “I am a Black girl and . . .”. A collection of 25 pieces, the series mixed staff reports and first-person narratives focused on the lives of Black girls in the Pittsburgh region. PublicSource also published other first-person narratives featuring Black voices during this period and had a specific category focused on social justice issues.

PublicSource provided staff with several training sessions focused on engagement and DEI, which included the critical knowledge of the Maynard Institute and its Fault Lines framework. They consulted with Repair the World to infuse its community sessions with a more inclusive approach and also took the step of emphasizing engagement by bringing aboard a full-time staff member focused on engagement during Sanina’s tenure as editor.

Challenges, however, are often unavoidable. During its transition to community news, Repair the World was brought on as a consultant, and a conversation on race was conducted that went poorly. Other internal issues caused several employees to express concerns about the newsroom’s culture.

Stockton, who assumed the helm of PublicSource in 2022, was aware more could be done to improve the organization’s work on DEI and its relationships with community members.

“We were recognizing, we’re an (almost) all-white staff trying to take on this [work]. We want to do a really good job, and we want it to be meaningful,” Stockton said. So, when the opportunity arose to join the first phase of the Inclusion Index program, she jumped at the chance to learn more about how her newsroom could improve.

Seven years in: PublicSource supercharges efforts to engage communities

The first part of the Inclusion Index project began in Spring 2022. The American Press Institute, alongside the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation, an award-winning chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, did an in-depth dive into how PublicSource was handling issues related to DEI and engagement. The process, which included interviews with staff and community members and a content assessment, led to an internal report of PublicSource’s strengths and weaknesses. Some of the issues in the report, which the organization has openly acknowledged, focused on their coverage. While PublicSource was actively engaging traditionally marginalized communities, the stories far too often focused on deficits.

“We want to work harder to promote empathy and understanding through our coverage,” said Stockton during a public event for the closing of the first part of the project. “That’s something that we can do as journalists while still reporting the tough issues. We want to see how we can incorporate solutions, joy and culture into the coverage of how people are navigating life in Pittsburgh.”

Lord was not on the team that underwent the training during the project’s first phase. But he said the lessons he took from his colleagues, specifically about coverage, were insightful.

“I’ve been, over the years, as complicit as anybody in reporting on the weaknesses of communities of all kinds, and it was a really interesting eye-opener to even think about reporting on communities largely through a strength-based perspective,” Lord said.

Getting more people involved in the newsroom’s engagement process was another area of emphasis cited during the final event and highlighted in a piece by Stockton about the project. As noted, PublicSource has staff members dedicated to engagement work, but based on its work with API, the newsroom learned it was placing too much of the burden of this work on its engagement team.

“As a small team, we work collaboratively to produce regular in-depth journalism, but the workload can lead our team to burnout,” Stockton said. “We’ve formed an audience engagement team to further our mission to connect with the community, but it’s taken time to build the foundation and formalize the processes needed to take our audience engagement to the next level,” she said during the final event for Part I of the project.

PublicSource started formalizing its work and addressing its strategic goals by undertaking a project that combined asset mapping with deep community listening. The newsroom aimed to map the assets of three underserved communities in the Pittsburgh area — Beechview, which has a significant Hispanic population; Wilkinsburg, a majority-black suburb bordering the city; and Perry Hilltop, a diverse neighborhood on the city’s North Side. But rather than leaving the work to its engagement team, every staff member was involved in the effort.

“All PublicSource employees will work together to build maps of the people and places, creating positive momentum in communities,” PublicSource announced in its plan of action. “These maps will inform our work, help us understand our knowledge gaps, and deepen our knowledge of a community and the issues impacting its residents.”

Lord was put in charge of developing the community engagement strategy.

“My job was to work with the editors to kind of envision a framework for doing this, and then deploy the reporters and visuals folks, our whole team, really, including the [sales] staff and everybody to do their parts,” Lord said.

That included Alyia Paulding. The director of membership and development for PublicSource, Paulding, who joined the team in 2020, had never worked in journalism before. As a queer person with a disability, Paulding believed in the organization’s effort to engage traditionally underserved communities. However, as someone who is not a person of color, she recognized the need to learn more about connecting with diverse groups. So, when the opportunity arose to work alongside the newsroom, Paulding was excited to participate.   

“I’ve seen a lot of ways that people have sort of attempted to address equity in the past that have not been successful. So I felt like I needed to be willing to walk the walk,” Paulding said. ‘I think our team is very much on the same page as far as our values go. But I just felt like, if this is something that I really believe in, I need to be part of it. I need to be willing to put time and work into it.”

Over a few weeks, staff teamed up and canvassed two targeted neighborhoods, Wilkinsburg and Beechview. During the canvasses, staff were encouraged to take notes on their observations and meet with residents. From there, PublicSource created asset maps highlighting key businesses, organizations and gathering spaces within each community. Finally, the staff composed stories about each community, building positive stories into each package. The result? PublicSource produced two news packages, one focused on Wilkinsburg and the other centered on Beechview, as part of their engagement work, along with two public maps, each highlighting key community assets for the respective communities.

“Everybody came back with relationships. We did stories, the map, and that’s also paying off,” Lord said. “It’s been a great journalistic exercise just getting to know that cluster of neighborhoods in a way that we would not have without this process.”

Building inclusion infrastructure means everyone is on the engagement team

Participating in part two allowed PublicSource to continue addressing goals from the first Inclusion Index project. Because the second effort focused on the North Side of Pittsburgh, PublicSource was able to get into the third community they sought to map — Perry Hilltop. Participating in this round also enabled PublicSource to advance another goal: creating infrastructure emphasizing DEIB and engagement in their daily newsroom practices.

For this second cohort, API and Resolve worked with each participating newsroom to build long-term engagement plans. Each newsroom was to embed engagement practices into their everyday workflow. Stockton noted that while efforts like Fault Lines were informative, PublicSource, before working with API, hadn’t fully built systems that made engagement or DEI part of everyday practice — especially across the entire news organization.

Derrick Cain, who worked closely with PublicSource as Resolve Philly’s director of community engagement, collaborated closely with the team on their infrastructure plans. He recognized their potential — and their buy-in — so he often pushed them to go deeper. Even though the organization had made commendable progress in community engagement, he felt they still had a lot to learn about building infrastructure that truly prioritized the needs of the community rather than just the needs of the newsroom.

“Seeing how they were eager to implement community engagement throughout their process was something that was refreshing for me,” Cain said. However, he initially didn’t think some of the newsrooms’ ideas would have the desired impact due to a lack of understanding of the targeted communities.

Cain wasn’t wrong. One thing both Lord and Stockton said they had to relearn was the idea of doing engagement for the sake of building connections. In their experience, engagement had to be attached to producing ideas for stories.

“I’ve been doing this long enough that, if I have a conversation, I’m about 12 minutes in, and if I don’t see a story idea, my little alarm bells go off in my mind and I want to abort the conversation and find something else to do,” Lord said. “But I need to overcome that as we do as a profession, and we need to be intent on listening actively and listening thoughtfully, and not being just focused on what am I getting out of this.”

When the engagement sessions wrapped in the summer of 2024, Stockton and Lord had a plan that would center engagement but not burn out the staff. Each quarter, all staff members must chart their routine engagements.

“Our staff is going to be out in the community for interactions that are not transactional on the story level, and we have baked that into our quarterly review process,” Lord said. “We’ve done one full quarter with community engagement as a significant piece of our quarterly review process, and we asked everybody to tell us, Hey, what’d you do? Where did you spend time, not being a reporter looking for a sound bite, or even a reporter looking for a story at all, but just being (you)?”

Community engagement and inclusion is a long game

Following the completion of the training portion of the second cohort, the American Press Institute, assisted by the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation, created a community advisory committee of Pittsburgh residents designed to provide feedback to the newsrooms. The committee, which included nine residents from eight Pittsburgh neighborhoods, shared their perspectives on coverage and tips on stories they felt newsrooms were missing.

In October, Stockton said the advisory committee, which started in July, had already impacted PublicSource’s coverage and engagement efforts.   

“There’s only been a few meetings so far, but we’ve gotten some great feedback and ideas … that we’re following up on,” she said.

And Paulding, from the membership and development team, continued her investment in PublicSource’s community engagement mission after the community canvassing effort through this committee.

“I think that the project overall has brought me into closer contact with individuals in the communities that I want our work to be serving,” Paulding said. “It’s inspired me to reach out and make contact with people and [in] neighborhoods that I don’t have a ton of experience with. It’s helped me to have a bunch of different perspectives in mind as I’m trying to do this work.”

The work, however, isn’t over. When it comes to inclusion, belonging, and connection inside and outside the newsroom, PublicSource is in for the long haul and knows there will always be room for improvement.

For example, organization-wide support and interest in community-centered journalism is a win, but the other side of this win is the loss of talented journalists of color in the newsroom.

Stockton has acknowledged the newsroom’s ongoing issues with recruiting diverse talent. The newsroom still has one African American staff member. Nevertheless, as it had done before the murder of George Floyd, PublicSource will continue to find new ways to engage and build relationships with the marginalized communities that Pittsburgh-area newsrooms have long taken for granted.

In 2025, PublicSource will remain committed to DEI and engagement. Many of these principles and practices will appear within its new strategic plan, Stockton said, which is set to be completed sometime this year.

“This continues to be a pillar for PublicSource,” Stockton said. “It’s part of the DNA.”