ONA Issues

(Source: medium.com)

Josh Stearns for Medium, “Building Journalism With Community, Not For It”

Stearns writes about the powerful perspective change that comes with making journalism with your community instead of for your community. It’s a must read for anyone in a newsroom or organization that’s looking to increase reader engagement. 

“While the distinction between “building with” instead of “building for” feels at first like semantics, when we begin to use it as a lens to examine journalism as both a process and a product, we see numerous ways it challenges the status quo.”

When we view the news we make and/or read as either transactional or transformational, we can take a page from the book of Meg Pickard, former head of digital engagement for The Guardian, to see where there are gaps and find out how to best resolve these gaps, as pictured in the diagram below (read more about Meg’s approach thanks to Joy Mayer’s blog here). 

To summarize:

Transactional = less community engagement with your reporting process, less responsibility.

Transformational = collaboration, involvement, and contribution from the community you serve. An authentic, sustainable relationship is established and nurtured.

Read more of Stearn’s work over at The Local News Lab, part of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation’s journalism sustainability project.

Image: Joy Mayer’s recreation of Meg Pickard’s journalist/user engagement chart, as first seen here.

(via futurejournalismproject)