As a community liaison to a local news advisory committee, you have a responsibility to the members and the communities they serve. I knew this when I agreed to help facilitate the community advisory committee organized by the American Press Institute as a part of its Inclusion Index project in Pittsburgh. From my outsider’s perspective, newsrooms lack detailed organizational goals and struggle to relate to specific communities. In contrast, from my insider’s perspective, residents lack understanding of what journalists do and how they do it. An advisory group should help residents understand these processes.

We dug into topics that newsrooms felt especially ill-equipped to handle, guided by the experiences of residents and those equipped to support traumatic experiences. We bridged the disconnect between residents and how they can amplify their voices and use the reporting as a tool to achieve the change they seek.

As I liaised between residents and newsrooms, I empowered residents to serve as subject matter experts of their community’s wants and needs, rather than relying on industry professionals who are routinely seen as the experts. But I also had to ensure their expertise would be taken to heart by the news participants and inform not only coverage but structural changes within the news organizations who were also engaged in this process.

Community advisory boards are supposed to be more than a source of information for the newsrooms. Consistently relying on community residents to be a check and balance for news coverage without also allowing them to have input on structural issues within the newsroom is extractive. In my role as liaison, advisory committee members often asked me how their presence changed reporting practices. If this advisory committee’s expectations exclude the newsrooms’ internal operations, then this quickly becomes an extractive exercise.

The advisory committee has to be more than stories and sources for the participating newsrooms. How stories are edited, who is covering what stories, what is shared in the stories are all procedural, and the advisory committee should be used to address those challenges. Otherwise, it becomes a cycle of finding a solution with no solution in sight.

The residents who participated in the Pittsburgh Community Advisory Committee were a remarkable group of community staples with nothing to lose and everything to gain. As a liaison, it was important to ensure residents could speak to what they observe, and that those observations would be correctly understood and interpreted by newsroom members who also attended the committee meetings. The group’s intersectional identities allowed me to rely on their voices and experiences to reach further than if they were simply a resident or a community leader or an ongoing source for coverage. There was success in choosing people who hold multiple identities. Now, these newsrooms have access to the people, resources and tools to hold themselves accountable when reporting on their diverse communities.

For communities that wish to launch similar projects, awareness may be the first goal but it cannot and should not be the sustained goal. Community engagement must be more than a labor of love. We need to respect people’s time and energy. Making people aware of an issue without also giving them a way to address it is a recipe for anger, frustration and distrust. Too often, community members engage in these exercises with no ability to change outcomes. Without a method to structurally change participants’ experiences, specifically with the news, a cycle of analysis paralysis is inevitable.

Further, putting people in a position to discuss problems without being afforded the ability to access solutions or tools for accountability perpetuates a cycle of harm. This is how community engagement becomes an institutional exercise of extraction. To make it truly impactful, that “seat at the table” would include decision-making abilities within the institutions carrying out the engagement. That’s often not what happens. And no, collecting their feedback is not a decision-making activity. It is a way to get information on what decisions were made.

We need to bridge intent and impact by ensuring feedback informs both policy and practice — true material gains. This is one of the reasons why this project turned quickly from an “advisory” to a “working” committee.

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. Collectively, we need to redefine relationships within all professions, but the benefits in journalism can be immediately seen. Competition creates silos in an already siloed world. We gain more experience, exposure and trust when we  work intentionally with others.

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