Maintaining momentum in the newsroom

A major goal of the Inclusion Index is to have newsrooms build infrastructure around their efforts to better serve communities, including systems for accountability — especially from the communities these news organizations seek to serve.

Following the Pittsburgh community advisory committee, several stories have been produced because of the conversations and engagement work the participating newsrooms did during the project. The effort has also brought together community members who may have otherwise not shared information — they discussed issues with one another and invited each other to events.

This part — the bringing together of community members — is another essential function of a community advisory committee. While the newsroom can hold a unique position as convener and connector, this function goes beyond the newsroom to support healthy, thriving communities and neighborhoods.

Let community members guide your newsroom’s efforts

There’s no hack or shortcut — spending meaningful time with community members yields authentic and complex relationships that can be mutually beneficial.

Glynis Board, education and health & science editor at Pittsburgh’s NPR affiliate, WESA, was one of the journalists who participated in the community advisory committee. She wrote about the authentic and meaningful connections between participants enabled by the structure of the meetings, which she said were the most beneficial components of the Inclusion Index cohort.

“After breaking bread together a few times, ‘the media’ grew a face and some humanity, and ‘the community’ became more complex and interesting,” she wrote for API. “Real relationships started to emerge. Laughing together became authentic and not an obligatory, anxiety-induced social lubricant.”

While Board has participated in other diversity and equity initiatives, she noted that offering community participants a stipend for their leadership and putting them in the driver’s seat helped push the cultural needle in both her organization and the community. Ambitious change may not be possible without finding the avenues to empower community and value their invaluable contributions, she said.

Maintaining momentum

Continuing to work for meaningful change within the newsroom requires a lot of heart and patience. Board said she hopes to see ongoing community advisory committees — but that requires a larger ecosystem of media partners.

Here are some ways to continue the momentum of an advisory committee, as suggested by the community representatives:

• Create a landing page for the committee to share content inspired by the meetings as well as acknowledge, celebrate and further invite residents into this work
• Build out lists of local media contacts for committee members, and community sources for journalists
• Work to engage larger traditional newspapers and TV stations in this work — one community advisory member noted the disappointment that these channels, which have large audiences, were not present to hear perspectives from underserved groups
• Hire more journalists of color to increase diverse voices and lived experiences around the decision table
• Invest in workshops to understand the historical traumas of a community and how to take a trauma-informed approach with reporting news stories or engaging with local residents
• Investigate the backstories and/or root causes of issues to provide a holistic perspective
• Provide follow-ups to stories focusing on the changes resulting from the initial story