Local journalists try new methods to reach, serve, and build trust with audiences

Chicago — At the Independent News Sustainability Summit in the Windy City this month, hosted by Local Independent Online News Publishers, news entrepreneurs from across the U.S. and beyond swapped strategies on the nuts and bolts of making the business of local news work in 2024. LION recognized the winners of its annual Sustainability Awards, and conference sessions wrestled with practical questions and challenges facing members — running effective fundraising campaigns; building out new revenue streams; redefining and thinking bigger about the mediums and products that deliver news; what role legislation should play in the future of local news; how to embed community engagement into the core work of journalism; and how to reach, and build trust with, new audiences.

In a session focused on that last question, five journalists, founders, and membership directors offered takeaways from their own experiments. Coming from very different organizations across the U.S. and Canada, most shared a conviction that journalism must be rooted in being concretely useful to the communities it serves, and act like a part of the community — which, in some cases, means taking actions beyond the traditional boundaries of reporting. Presenters also made the case that doing listening legwork to earn community trust before reporting creates a stronger foundation for good journalism; they said this approach empowers audiences to share ideas about what they want to see covered, ultimately leading to more impactful and community-serving reporting.

At The Jersey Bee, journalism as repair and power-building

When was the first time you were distrusted as a journalist?

Simon Galperin, executive editor of The Jersey Bee, asked everyone to think about that question — and especially about scenarios where the person who distrusted them had less power.

For Galperin, it was when he was a student journalist at Rutgers; he wanted to report on a soup kitchen and was (politely) turned away. However well-intentioned, he was someone they’d never seen before, who was doing nothing to help them.

“Why would anyone there talk to me? Why would anyone in that room read what I wrote? Why would anyone else read what I wrote? The best case scenario for my subjects,” he reflected, “would be that nothing would change in their lives, and the worst case scenario was that I could ruin them.”

Many people distrust the “why” of journalists, Galperin noted, believing journalists are motivated by clicks, or money, or pushing out their own agendas.

The lessons of his soup kitchen encounter are baked into the Bee, part of the Community Info Coop, which works to meet the civic information needs of BIPOC and working class communities and develop service models for information districts. (Galperin thinks news should be funded like a public utility.) He’s built up the Bee around the question of why communities exploited and left behind by media should trust, care about, or support its journalism.

The answer he landed on is that the Bee must be useful to, and build power for, its community, while acknowledging and working to repair “the harms of journalism and other institutions.” The Bee is guided by an information hierarchy of needs, with issues essential to survival like food access and shelter as the foundation for anything else. Its stated mission is not just to meet information needs and improve civic participation, but to “improve quality of life in East Essex County.”

The Bee’s newsletter, The Daily Buzz, is distributed in a dozen editions serving different towns and cities. Galperin says the Bee is acting as “a force for cultural integration in one of the most segregated and unequal areas of the country,” in response to “the harm of a century of media redlining that made it harder for people of color and working-class communities to access the resources available…just because there was a lack of information.”

After launching in April 2020 (initially as The Bloomfield Information Project, before reorganizing into the Bee last year), the organization sourced and distributed thousands of cloth masks along with callouts for text message updates about food aid. It distributed food, sent those texts, and listened to stakeholders for three years before launching its food access beat this year.

Galperin has found that thinking about how to help “has enabled us to enter spaces where journalists are usually more trouble than they’re worth,” including food pantries and regional public health coalitions.

In August, the Bee created a pamphlet that provides information on how to access free food. It includes a list of local food pantries and their hours, places to apply for food benefits and aid, and the Bee’s text message line for food updates. When it saw a local school distributing its own poorly formatted flier, the Bee volunteered to improve the flier — exemplifying an increasingly popular conception of the journalist as an involved public servant, rather than removed documenter. The school invited the Bee to its next community event — which, to Galperin, is proof of success.

The Bee, Galperin said, has at its heart a commitment “to finding ways to fix things, not just documenting what’s broken.”

VTDigger recruited community ambassadors, and paid them

In 2021, the more than decade-old investigative nonprofit VTDigger was seeing a lot of success; its audience had doubled.

The news outlet was thinking about creating a regional bureau in northwest Vermont, but wanted to do a community listening initiative in the area first, director of membership and engagement Libbie Sparadeo explained. She saw that project as an opportunity both to inform the new bureau’s priorities, and for the entire organization to be more deliberate about its community engagement and understand what Vermonters from different backgrounds and life experiences needed from their local news.

Overall, the months-long community listening project included online surveys of 386 Vermonters, and 154 one-one-one interviews. But Sparadeo emphasized that community ambassadors were the secret sauce of the initiative’s success. Specifically, she recruited five community ambassadors and paid them $20 an hour to support VTDigger’s outreach.¹ In advertising the positions, Sparadeo highlighted that VTDigger was looking for people “networked with communities — specifically BIPOC communities and multilingual communities.”

The ambassadors were tasked with reaching out to family and friends, sharing the survey with them, and interviewing them. They’d then meet with Sparadeo once a week to share findings, and would sometimes connect her with people they thought she should talk with more.

“Our project was so, so much deeper for having these five people to help us on it,” Sparadeo said. People were more comfortable, and honest, sharing frank criticism with the ambassadors — and the ambassadors, in turn, became people who could vouch for VTDigger in their communities well after the completion of the project. The in-person component of the ambassadors’ work allowed them to reach people VTDigger couldn’t have online.

One of the five ambassadors was a migrant farmworker who went by M; she was able to help, in particular, with interviewing some of Vermont’s community of migrant dairy farmworkers. “We knew that this population was really isolated from Vermont news and from local news,” Sparadeo said. “We wanted to hear what they would like to know about Vermont.”

The project led to a set of recommendations for the newsroom — including offering free advertising to BIPOC businesses, which VTDigger put in practice through its Underwriting for Racial Equity program.

Sparadeo advocated for implementing that program on audience grounds, too. “What we’re really doing by offering this advertising,” she said, “is giving something to someone before extracting something or asking someone to share the story.”

“Journalistic rap” to give Montreal’s youth a voice

La Converse, a Francophone publication serving underrepresented communities in Québec, laid the groundwork for its mission by building a newsroom that reflects its audience.

“The reason I, as a Roma woman, wanted to become a journalist is because I saw the direct effect [the press] had on my community,” founder and editor-in-chief Lela Savić said. That personal experience with seeing the press as a medium that wrote about, not for, her community, often with harmful effects, informed her vision for La Converse to be the opposite.

“École Converse” is one piece of bringing that vision to life; La Converse trains young people in reporting, and guides them through creating projects that describe what’s going on in their communities.

Those projects can take on unconventional formats. Last year, after a workshop led by local rapper Raccoon, seven young Montrealers worked together on a rap about their own lives and communities set to the beat of “Banlieusards” (one line from one of the seven participants, Snowside: “They label my people minority / Gentrification of neighborhoods is a priority for people in authority”).

That rap was part of a bigger project that grew out of La Converse’s desire to serve the community with its reporting. Montreal has seen a surge in gun violence over the past few years, and La Converse was initially focused on solutions-based reporting. But Savić heard from the local youth she aspires to serve that they didn’t need more solutions stories. One person told Savić, “We just want to see people like us, who come from the hoods, who haven’t assimilated, who look like us, and who are on the way to succeeding, or who have succeeded.”

That idea became the basis for La Converse’s “Hood Heroes” series (a finalist at this year’s LION awards). The series was shown at Montreal’s forum on gun violence, where the mayor and police watched it.

Like Galperin, Savić emphasized how doing impactful journalism that serves, and reaches, a community creates a feedback loop. Many of the “Hood Heroes” La Converse featured have become informal ambassadors for La Converse, and trust the organization enough to suggest story ideas. La Converse can also play a networking role, connecting youth looking for mentorship in certain fields with these adults.

Beyond the Hood Heroes project, Savić highlighted the “Dialogues” events La Converse holds — community gatherings for nuanced conversations of complex, often sensitive topics, like making girls from the hood visible and grappling with anti-Black racism in specific contexts like housing.

Savić sees these events as ways to “radically serve the community,” she said. “How do we create a space that becomes a service? The event is the service, and then the excuse of journalism is we just get to write about it. But the focus is to do something that’s really important for people.”

True community engagement takes time, Savić added — sending out a survey or doing a meeting or two doesn’t cut it. “It’s being there,” she said. “It’s showing up to protests without writing about it, but just listening to see what is happening…when you do publish, publish intentionally.”

The Art Rebellion meets artists where they are (including Instagram)

Makeda Easter was an artist before she was a journalist; she grew up dancing and playing music, and “found journalism in my mid-twenties on accident.”

While at the Los Angeles Times, Easter created a project called “Rise of the Dancefluencer” inspired by a dance class she was taking outside work. Easter knew that story needed to be interactive and visually engaging, and wanted it to actually reach dancers, so she advocated for a strong audience engagement strategy on Instagram.

That story “planted the seed” for the kind of work Easter wanted to do. She left the L.A. Times in 2021, feeling in part that “working in a mainstream institution, there were a lot of limitations on the types of stories I could pursue.” (Today, she’s based in Chicago.) Out of interest in highlighting and amplifying the role artists play in social movements, she went on to found the Art Rebellion in 2022.

“I’m thinking of it now as less of a news site and more of a platform and resource that uplifts and empowers artists and cultural workers and creatives around the country,” she said. “I see my work as helping to amplify just how essential the arts are in our society.”

Easter believes that, even as a solopreneur, “journalism itself can also be an art form.”

At the Art Rebellion, she thinks about how to put each project into the world in as many forms as possible, to help it reach more people. “My target audience number one is always artists,” Easter explained. “And so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about: Where are artists? Where do they congregate?”

Two answers, she said, are social media and physical spaces like galleries. Since creating the Art Rebellion, Easter has experimented plenty with format — including newsletters, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. “I’m always playing around to see where I can get the most active engagement from people,” she said. “If you’re not reaching the people that you want to reach, then what’s the point of doing the work?”

Easter also cares about doing “journalism that tangibly helps people.” Starting last year, inspired by Refinery29’s Money Diaries and her years as an arts journalist in L.A., she surveyed and interviewed local artists anonymously about how much it costs for them to live. (See also: Canopy Atlanta’s My Two Cents project.)

Consistent with her general strategy, Easter publishes the Artist Pay Project in various mediums, including Instagram. (Easter pays artists $100 to complete the survey.) She’s done about 30 surveys so far, and has funding to do more — overall, she hopes to build a database of about 100 profiles.

“A lot of artists don’t know how to price their work; they don’t know what other people are paid, because people don’t talk about it,” Easter said. “They don’t know how to negotiate; they don’t know how to demand more.” She hopes the Artist Pay Project “can help artists make their lives better.” Now, to get the work in front of more people, she’s working on turning that project into an art installation.

How do you get a new project off the ground while doing everything else?

As the former director of news experimentation at LAist, Ariel Zirulnick described her job as “to figure out how we could do a lot of those new things while also maintaining the core operations.” That often feels like an impossible task, she acknowledged; after the other four presentations, “you might be sitting in the audience and thinking, ‘this is all amazing, but how do I do that on top of everything else I’m doing?’ Or, ‘I am also doing things like this every day and I am exhausted. How do I keep it up?’”

So, for newsrooms thinking about trying to actually make innovative audience engagement and reporting projects along these lines happen for the first time, or make that work sustainable, Zirulnick packaged some tips into what she called a “30-second MBA tour”:

• “Your strategy is stronger when all of the different things that you do speak to each other, and they complement each other. They end up reinforcing each other, and they end up propping each other up.” Drawing on the framework of Michael Porter’s activity systems maps, Zirulnick explained that when you start a new experiment, it’ll sit outside the other activities you’re doing. Your goal should be to bring it into your overall strategy — and let go of things that don’t serve that overall strategy. At LAist, for instance, Zirulnick explained that voter guides, stories explaining power in campaigns, and interviews with candidates on air all reinforced one another as parts of a strategy for LAist be a one-stop-shop for election results. (Election results on the website could help get that information on the newscast faster; candidate interviews could help inform the voter guides; etc.) But in 2024, LAist wanted to add in-person workshops on researching a ballot, which didn’t immediately feed directly into the other activities, making it a heavier lift.
• Remember that an experiment is two things: an experiment in serving your audience, and an experiment in a new way of working. That’s difficult, and strains resources. But thinking about these as two separate experiments can help you more clearly evaluate what worked, and what didn’t.
• Think of each new effort as a “try”; make processes repeatable; and document them meticulously — down to details like “how much time did it take to get in touch with the post office for that postcard campaign?”
• A benefit of applying that meticulous documentation to the costs of your processes: You can use proven processes to apply for a grant, rather than having to come up with a new initiative. For instance: If you already do listening sessions, and know how much each one costs, you can apply for grants to fund that existing work you already do, and want to keep doing.
• Take the time to think about your big picture: If you bring a new activity into your overall operations, think about what that means — has your mission, or strategy, changed? Do you need to remove something else that no longer fits with the rest of the work you’re doing?

1. Sparadeo noted that VTDigger got creative about how it paid the ambassadors — one, for instance, didn’t have a bank account, and an ambassador on Disability couldn’t receive checks to her bank account without risking jeopardizing her benefits. Some of the payments were via Venmo, and others took the form of Visa gift cards.