Engaged Journalism

Practices for building trust, generating revenue, and fostering civic engagement

Across the news industry, organizations large and small, commercial and nonprofit, single issue and daily news are experimenting with “engagement”: Audience engagement, engaged journalism, engagement editors and specialists, engaging for trust, and the list goes on. But what is engagement? Why are organizations experimenting with engagement, and to what effect?

With the support of the News Integrity Initiative and the Craig Newmark Graduate School for Journalism at CUNY, in 2018 Impact Architects set out to answer these questions through a four month research project where we surveyed the field to identify the practices organizations consider to be “engaged journalism,” an inclusive practice that prioritizes the information needs and wants of the community members it serves, creates collaborative space for the audience in all aspects of the journalistic process, and is dedicated to building and preserving trusting relationships between journalists and the public. We then dove deep into four very different organizations (Outlier Media, ProPublica, Free Press: News Voices, North Carolina, and McClatchy) to learn not only what they do, but why they engage with communities, as well as how they know if their strategies are working.