Engaged journalism: What it is and how to do it

A brief history of engaged journalism

Engaged journalism can be traced back to the public journalism (or civic journalism) movement, which was conceptualised by US journalism thinkers Jay Rosen and Davis Merritt in the 1990s (although it can arguably be traced back to every journalist throughout history who has ever tried to treat their audience as active citizens and partners, rather than as just passive consumers).

It’s had a revival in recent years – primarily under the name of engaged journalism, although you also see terms such as social journalism, participatory journalism, and community journalism, which may be seen as subsets of each other or separate concepts with plenty of overlap.

Much of its revival is thanks to a change in revenue strategy by many publishers and the rise of the membership model which is openly dependent on a close relationship with the audience. 

How do I get started? 

First off, it’s worth warning that engaged journalism should not be confused with how we usually define social media engagement, when people interact with your posts through likes, comments and shares. Although social media engagement may be part of an overall engaged journalism strategy, the latter tends to go deeper and nearly always focuses on quality rather than quantity.

It’s perhaps easier to think of engaged journalism not as a clearly defined “type” of journalism, rather as a mindset or a toolbox that can be applied to all aspects of your editorial work. It’s about breaking down the gap between newsroom and audience. So how do you do that? The same way we build relationships and break down gaps with strangers in real life. Conversation.

I spoke with audience strategist Catherine Edwards, a former colleague at The Local who is currently working with the International Press Institute and Free Press for Eastern Europe, for her input. She describes engaged journalism as “having regular conversations with your audience and feeding those insights into your journalism”.

“Engaged journalism can be holding online or offline events, running surveys, encouraging discussion about your journalism or other issues relevant to your community, and the crucial part is having some kind of system or process that feeds the input you get from your community through these efforts back into your work,” she says.

We’ll get to that last crucial part in the next step. But first, if you’ve never done engaged journalism before, it might make sense to try your hand at a few specific tactics first. Here are three ideas for relatively non-time-consuming things to get the ball rolling in your newsroom:

Three things to do today:

• Post a survey – use it as the basis for an article (here’s Krautreporter’s template)
• Run an ask-me-anything chat in your social media (afterwards you can turn this into a question-and-answer article – this guide to explanatory journalism may be helpful)
• Spend an hour reading (and responding to!) reader comments on your site

How do I level up? 

Engaged journalism can be taken however far you want to take it, with limited time and resources being the roadblocks that are the hardest – if not near-impossible – to shift. 

In the last step, we looked at a few ideas for tools from the engaged journalism toolbox, tiny experiments that you can run in your newsroom. To level up, it’s time to make engaged journalism part of your entire strategy – remember, it’s a mindset, not a one-off article.

“Engagement happens when members of the public are responsive to newsrooms, and newsrooms are in turn responsive to members of the public,” writes Jennifer Brandel, the founder of Hearken, a consulting firm that focuses on engagement. “It’s a feedback loop.”

That feedback loop is created when the newsroom asks for the audience’s thoughts, the audience offers their thoughts, and crucially, the newsroom then acts on those thoughts. A structure for this could look different in different newsrooms: perhaps you have an audience engagement editor on your team, perhaps each and every reporter is responsible for it – just make sure, especially if there’s shared responsibility, that the structure is rock solid.

Edwards, who has worked with multiple newsrooms, says that the most surprising and positive discovery for her has been to see how willing audiences often are to engage.

“It always makes me happy to see where readers have chosen to give a really thoughtful response – sometimes especially when it’s constructive criticism,” she says about surveys.

“The second thing is that sometimes engaged journalism will set you off in a new direction. You might start asking about one specific topic which you think is the story, and find that your audience says ‘actually, this aspect is more important’”.

“In several newsrooms I’ve seen that when they ask questions about a specific subject topic, they’ll get responses from people who don’t have a question but want to take the chance to give feedback on something else. This can help with things like surfacing tech issues to gathering testimonials, or highlighting a new idea for coverage you’d never have thought of.”

The Bureau Local uses Slack to organise an “open newsroom” conversation with their community every week. Pop-up newsrooms in partnership with community libraries have been a useful tactic for many news sites in reaching out to not-yet-but-potential audience members.

Super-engaged readers are not only likely to consume more of your journalism; they are your most loyal fans and your most powerful marketing representatives, as Danish news site Zetland showed when their members helped them recruit thousands more members and turn a profit. This is a strategy that only works when there’s already meaningful audience engagement.

Three things to do next:

• Create a structure for a feedback loop
• Forward any relevant feedback you found when going through reader comments in the last step to the appropriate people. Then act on the feedback. Then tell your audience.
• Find the best space for you to have conversations with your audience, whether it’s online, through physical events, through pop-up newsrooms, surveys, newsletters and so on.

Pitfalls – mistakes to avoid

One-way engagement is a speech, not a conversation. This means that newsrooms can’t only get their community to contribute to their coverage; they need to reach out to the community too.

Engagement doesn’t have to be advanced, but a key thing is to maintain the feedback loop, so that the audience doesn’t feel like they’re engaging but get no response from you in return. Never ask for your community’s feedback but forget to listen. Never listen without responding. 

In the “how to get started” section we spoke about tools in your engaged journalism toolbox. Although these are a good starting point, be careful not to think of them as a box-ticking exercise. A survey can be used to engage with readers, but it is not automatically engaged journalism.

The conversation must be meaningful. That’s both in the sense that your audience should get something out of it, and that the conversation should be meaningful for the news site. Chatting to readers without a plan is nice, but it’s also time-consuming with minimal return on investment if it’s not clear to journalists how it links to the overarching mission of your news organisation.

“The main mistake I see is newsrooms seeing engagement as an add-on, rather than thinking about how it can tie in with both their own goals and the needs of the audience. The goal of engagement work usually isn’t to get the highest possible volume of responses; it’s for you to find out something from your audience that will further your work,” says Edwards.

“If you’re writing about a science-based topic, say COVID vaccines, you probably don’t want to ask readers a broad question like ‘What do you think?’, because they’re not the experts – but you could ask if they have questions on the topic that you could answer in future articles.”

“Another common mistake is not planning on how you’re going to fit engagement work in, because it is extra work and takes resources. You might start getting some great input from readers, but if you don’t have time to do anything with it, both your journalists and readers will get frustrated. I would always recommend starting small so you can get a feel for how to organise resources.”

Three things not to do:

• Keep asking without responding
• Think of engaged journalism as something easy to do on top
• Fail to have a plan

Where can I find out more?

There are so many organisations to mention, but here are a few:

Krautreporter is a German member-funded news site which focuses on explanatory journalism and strong engagement with readers. Their playbook about engaged journalism is a must-read.

In 2018 the European Journalism Centre ran the Engaged Journalism Accelerator. Scroll down to “outcomes” to view a database over engaged journalism in Europe as well as case studies.

Gather is probably the most well known platform for journalists working in community and audience engagement and is a fantastic opportunity to connect with others in the same field.

Hearken is a tech, training and consultancy firm that helps newsrooms engage with audiences. It’s worth following some of their writing on how to build deep relationships with communities. 

If you’re working for a local newspaper, be inspired by The Bristol Cable, a member-owned cooperative in Bristol, UK, which focuses on investigative journalism together with readers.

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