How to Create a Community-Centered Newsroom

Community engagement is the buzz phrase of the moment. But what does it mean to place community at the heart of your journalism? Where do you begin, what do you need to understand, and how can you measure if it’s successful? What is the role of social media in this, and is it only for people on Snapchat?

This course will take compelling examples of community-centered news from around the world, and combine it with a strategy outline that any newsroom can follow, big or small, in order to bring community expertise into your reporting – as well as sharing some key mistakes that you’ll need to avoid so that your work will be taken seriously.

Handouts:
- Presentation slides

Who should take this training:
- Journalists interested in engaging their audience
- Engagement editors who want to improve their skills
- Editors who want to understand the potential of community engagement to improve their journalism
- Brands and marketers who want to engage their audience

About the instructor:

Andrew Losowsky is the Project Lead of The Coral Project. Founded in 2015 as a collaboration between Mozilla, the New York Times, The Washington Post, it helps journalists get closer to the communities they serve through software and guides to best practice. He oversees all aspects of the project’s work, including its research and strategy. He is also an occasional adjunct teacher in the Journalism+Design department at The New School. Previously, he was a Senior Editor at The Huffington Post, part of a skunkworks team at News Corp, and ran editorial operations across eight cities for a media startup based in Barcelona, Spain. In 2013, he was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Community work has always been at the heart of his practice, and he is passionate about bringing to journalism more voices and experiences from the people formerly known as the audience. Because journalism needs everyone.