When I was approached with the idea of leading a Pittsburgh-based community advisory group I was excited, but largely clueless about what I was getting into.

The concept was simple: Bring community members representing different city council districts into the same room with members of local media to candidly critique neighborhood coverage and share story ideas that might have been missed. The goal was to hold the media accountable for the perceptions its coverage creates and its impacts on the very real people, communities and institutions it exposes to the world, with the hope of creating new sourcing relationships with new stories to tell. This approach was facilitated as a part of the API Inclusion Index work in Pittsburgh.

What I didn’t know, but would quickly learn, is how uncomfortable and personal the discussions could get and, despite it all, how dedicated the committee was to making the process work.

Another lesson was that this formula, if applied with the right people, can work in any community. And every community has the right people. It’s only a matter of finding them, bringing them together and creating conversations that lead to actionable changes.

Setting the agenda

First, we break bread.

For six months, immediately after community members clocked out for the day and journalists met final deadlines, the Pittsburgh Community Advisory Committee met for an hour-long discussion of the news that was covered the previous month. We would dive into topics like school closures, community violence, the city’s shrinking affordable housing stock, and how representation of Black and brown faces was often minimized through stories of poverty and tragedy.

But for the first half-hour, we ate dinner. We talked about our days up to that point and traded stories about the news of the day or our lives. We got to know each other and built a rapport that made discussing difficult ideas a little easier. This time to connect was crucial to the group’s success and will keep reporters and advisory group members in contact beyond this cohort.

After dinner, community members would have the floor to talk about the news coverage they saw and didn’t see throughout the month. The news discussed mostly focused on each council district but also stories about arts, politics, culture and other topics. These discussions led to anecdotes about things happening throughout the city and region.

At times, discussions about housing or violence led to heartening personal accounts about neighbors, loved ones and friends. The advisory board members also held no punches when talking about how stories by our media participants reinforced negative perceptions of their communities.

Navigating discussions

I thought these conversations would be more difficult to moderate than it ended up being. Community members were blunt but not rude, and our media partners took critiques in the spirit intended. However, when needed, I used timing and the format allowing everyone to have a say to help pivot conversations.

Members of the media responded directly to critiques, but had a block of time to discuss the month’s coverage from their perspective. They also discussed how they were applying the strategic plans created during the American Press Institute Inclusion Index cohort, which were designed to assess and improve coverage of traditionally underserved communities.

One challenge of navigating intense discussions such as these is timing. After dinner, we had roughly an hour to give each advisory board member and media organization the floor. In a room of 15-20 people, this required paying attention to the clock and the flexibility to recognize when an important discussion that shouldn’t be interrupted was happening.

Another (positive) challenge was our group’s ambition. In addition to the conversations, we wanted to walk away with tangible assets in the form of a local media contact list and a list of community sources for media. And in the final two months of the cohort, we decided to host a community listening session exploring the topic of mental health in the region.

These ideas came as the result of organic conversations and weren’t in mind at the beginning of the cohort. Anyone making a similar advisory board should know that new goals and agendas will come up, and it’s important to make time for unexpected conversations.

Discussions of the contact lists were relatively straightforward, so I blocked out the final 10-15 minutes of the meeting to focus on them, depending on how engaged everyone was involved in discussing the month’s news.

The community listening session took more planning; we had to figure out our key questions, who to invite and how mental health professionals could help to guide the group during potentially sensitive topics. We also had a one-month timetable to finalize the plans, so we dedicated half of our November meeting to planning that event.

Expectations and outcomes

Like anything created from scratch, seeing results takes time. And in a local media environment with smaller newsrooms and fewer resources than in the past, hearing about a story doesn’t immediately lead to coverage. This can lead to frustration, so it’s important to be transparent about the process and the difficulties newsrooms can have prioritizing stories.

However, advisory groups aren’t powerless. One reason we decided to host the community listening session is because we had several meaningful meetings where mental health took center stage, but many ideas came up that hadn’t been covered by any local media, let alone members of our group. The listening session was another opportunity for the media to gain valuable insight from Pittsburgh residents and experts that could lead to a story down the road.

Finally, just when you’re not sure if it’s working, you’ll notice the difference. Advisory board members who were frustrated that the ideas they shared weren’t being covered in the second month were sharing links of spot coverage and follow-up stories that our media advisory board members wrote by the fourth month.

Beyond the coverage, the biggest difference that our community members noticed was presence. Local media was in Manchester, Sheraden and Woods Run, walking their streets and talking to their neighbors. Reporters were no longer strangers and the communities that got to know them were less guarded. That may be the cohort’s ultimate success and, hopefully, its lasting legacy.

Deborah M. Todd is a Pittsburgh-based journalist and editor and president of the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation. She serves as co-coordinator of the Pittsburgh Media Advisory Board.

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