Community Engagement & Trust

We asked five leaders with community engagement experience outside of news about the opportunities they see for local media to build trust or belonging, from using physical spaces like libraries and community gardens to digital platforms that support shared experiences.

When we founded The 51st, we wanted to lead a news organization shaped by D.C. residents. And the Community Connector program has become an integral way of doing so.

From the outset, we knew we wanted to highlight art and help people connect with other residents who had a positive vision for Birmingham. Here are methods that helped us fill a historic theater for a fun and engaging evening.

If cultural experiences beyond the Blues were offered, would visitors be interested? And what could be done to help local residents build capacity to compete with the larger tourism industry?

By partnering with teachers, editors and writing mentors embedded in the communities that newsrooms hope to serve, journalism can build pathways for people with lived experience to join the civic conversation.

We asked four summit participants to share more about the ways they are empowering communities with skills and opportunities to have influence in their local news ecosystem.

The Houston Chronicle created small-scale experiments that tested how strategically work with a creator while navigating potentially thorny issues around ethics, control and impact. In this series, they walk you through what they did.

Every community has a commons — a park, a library, a garden — a shared space that only thrives when people care for it together. Our local information ecosystems are no different. At our recent Local News Summit, we asked the room: What does it mean to be gardeners, guards and stewards of the local information commons?

We know psychological safety might feel like a ‘nice to have,’ but what if the failure to create that safety is silently stalling your best ideas and alienating your next generation of leaders?

As research continues to inform this slice of the news industry, we’ll continue learning, too. Who gets to be called a journalist in 2025 and beyond? What is the future of trustworthy information, especially considering the access to and trust for online content creators? How might journalism adapt to the rise, or co-opt the styles, of news influencers?