Newsrooms need to think about where their priorities intersect with those of their community members – particularly those who have been previously overlooked by the media.

In some countries, media capture puts the majority of news outlets in the hands of just a powerful few; in others, the news media has not done enough to represent and meet the needs of marginalized groups. Stronger, two-way relationships with a wider audience are a stepping stone to more impactful journalism – and can even help newsrooms’ bottom line.

At IPI’s 2023 World Congress and Media Innovation Festival, Jacqui Park led a conversation with three journalists at the forefront of addressing this problem: Jazmín Acuña, co-founder and editorial director at El Surtidor, Paraguay; Shirish Kulkarni, an innovation and inclusion consultant based in the UK; and Samantha Refilwe Pilane, co-founder and content producer at INK24 Media, Botswana.

‘Lots of news, but little information’

Kulkarni suggested that terms like “news avoidance” wrongly put blame on consumers, rather than acknowledging the reasons why people may turn away from journalism. These may include disengagement if the formats and angles used don’t fit into their everyday life, or distrust due to historic misrepresentation of their community.

“All my research shows that people are crying out for journalism that makes sense of the world for them”, Kulkarni explained. “That’s the purpose of journalism, that’s what we’re all trying to do, but if you look at the journalism that exists in the world, it often does not do that.”

When choosing which stories to cover, and how to cover them, journalists should think about what news events mean for individuals in their audience.

All three panellists agreed that a shift away from breaking news, and towards reporting on systems, context, and consequences, can help readers to feel a sense of agency in a chaotic world. Even when reporting on macro issues such as corruption or politics, it’s possible to focus on the impact on ordinary people.

Welcoming the audience in 

“Anyone can have an audience, but it’s much more important to build communities around the valuable information, who can act on that information”, said El Surtidor co-founder Acuña.

El Surtidor achieves this by regularly convening spaces where community members can engage with one another and members of the newsroom. By taking conversations away from the influence of algorithms and into the real world, this offline engagement can help tackle polarization.

There is also the question of formats – creating journalism in a way that fits seamlessly into the target audience’s lives. At El Surtidor, a mobile-first approach reaches younger digital natives, and is accessible in Paraguay where poor internet connectivity means most people access news on smartphones. The team also takes inspiration from outside the journalism industry, looking to other mediums and industries that successfully capture the attention of their target audience: music, movies, comics, and video games.

“When we talk about visual journalism at El Surti, yes we’re talking about quality journalism but we’re also talking about beautiful, jazzy and sometimes even humorous images and graphics that we get from pop culture. We use a lot of memes in our reporting to try to establish a deeper connection with our readers”, she explained.

In Botswana, Refilwe Pilane’s team at InkMedia are developing a project that would see QR codes set up at places where people already convene – bus stops, universities and so on. These would allow people to scan the codes while waiting, and watch a video from the newsroom.

Actively engaging the community brings benefits in both directions, not only by demonstrating the positive value of journalism to potential readers, but also by allowing the audience to add to that value. Kulkarni’s former newsroom, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, invited story ideas from the public when the team wanted to look into the issue of precarious employment in the UK.

The word “idea” rather than the journalistic term “pitch” was a deliberate choice – by speaking to people in ordinary language, and keeping the initial stage low-effort at a maximum of 200 words, they received almost 100 submissions which the team whittled down. These formed the basis of some of the newsroom’s most successful work, including an investigation into the pay of drivers working for food delivery service Deliveroo.

Shirish said the story only worked because of community involvement that helped them receive invoices from drivers: “That is a story we could not have done as journalists [alone]. A, we wouldn’t have had the idea, B, we couldn’t have built the trust.”

Community engagement as a business model

Engaging overlooked communities is important for fulfilling journalism’s role as a pillar of democracy, but rather than being an “extra” it can be embedded into the business model too.

With programmatic advertising no longer delivering reliable revenue for many publishers, new models such as subscriptions or memberships rely on close reader relationships.

For both InkMedia and El Surtidor, engagement has become a superpower – both organizations work for external clients on documentary-making and strategies to reach young audiences respectively.

All three innovators are proof that community-building becomes a positive cycle: demonstrating the value of journalism to audiences builds trust and relationships that provide real value to the newsrooms, boosting their impact and even revenue.

As Refilwe Pilane put it, “the task at hand is aligning the priorities of the newsroom with those of the audience”.