Posts tagged community engagement

Ian Hill: A new perspective from the community

KQED’s Ian Hill guest blogged for us this week about the station’s experimentation with “open newsrooms.” 

One possibility, I thought, might be to set aside time in reporters’ schedules specifically to meet the residents they were covering on the Residents’ home turf. A model for this had been established by the Center for Investigative Reporting, an organization that partnered with my employer, KQED News.

They called it an open newsroom. Think of it like a meetup or a mixer for journalists and the community. Reporters tell residents they are going to be at a coffeeshop in their neighborhood at a specific date and time, and any resident is welcome to come and chat.

Read the rest of the post, including tips on how your news org could launch its own open newsrooms. 

Your guide to becoming engager

Check out our director of radio engagement’s presentation on engaging your community – from shifting your mindset to building partnerships and more. 

How does your newsroom handle public forums?

We asked this question in an informal poll during our last webinar. Out of 51 respondents: 

25% said a person on staff devotes part of all of his/her time to them.

12% said their our reporting staff splits up the work.

45% said their reporting staff works with other departments to hold them 

18% said departments outside of our newsroom handle them 

Interesting results. How does your station handle events? 

Resource of the week | Measuring community engagement

Chicago Public Media (WBEZ) is no stranger to community engagement. (See here, here and here.) For years, connecting with their community has been a vital part of their production process.

Now, the station is taking it to the next level: Assigning metrics to their engagement work so they can better evaluate their impact. Breeze Richardson, Chicago Public Media’s director of strategic partnerships, recently penned a case study on this topic. Here’s our snapshot of some of the metrics they chose and why.

Online News Association Hires Community Engagement Manager

The world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists has community engagement manager.

KETC's 'Homeland' Immigration Project

“Homeland aims to ‘apply public media sensibilities, expertise and capacity to address a complicated and polarizing issue,’ said Amy Shaw, KETC’s vice president of education and community engagement.”

pbs.org