Engaged Journalism explores the changing relationship between news producers and audiences and the methods journalists can use to secure the attention of news consumers. Based on Jake Batsell's extensive experience and interaction with more than twenty innovative newsrooms, this book shows that, even as news organizations are losing their agenda-setting power, journalists can still thrive by connecting with audiences through online technology and personal interaction. Batsell conducts interviews with and observes more than two dozen traditional and startup newsrooms across the United States and the United Kingdom. Traveling to Seattle, London, New York City, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, among other locales, he attends newsroom meetings, combs through internal documents, and talks with loyal readers and online users to document the successes and failures of the industry's experiments with paywalls, subscriptions, nonprofit news, live events, and digital tools including social media, data-driven interactives, news games, and comment forums. He ultimately concludes that, for news providers to survive, they must constantly listen to, interact with, and fulfill the specific needs of their audiences, whose attention can no longer be taken for granted. Toward that end, Batsell proposes a set of best practices based on effective, sustainable journalistic engagement.

A unique theory of trust building in engagement journalism that proposes journalists move to an ethic of care as they prioritize listening and learning within communities instead of propping up problematic institutions. In How Journalists Engage, Sue Robinson explores how journalists of different identities, especially racial, enact trusting relationships with their audiences. Drawing from case studies, community-work, interviews, and focus groups, she documents a growing built environment around trust building and engagement journalism that represents the first major paradigm shift of the press's core values in more than a century. As Robinson shows, journalists are being trained to take on new roles and skillsets around listening and learning, in addition to normative routines related to being a watchdog and storyteller. She demonstrates how this movement mobilizes the nurturing of personal, organizational, and institutional relationships that people have with information, sources, news brands, journalists, and each other. Developing a new theory of trust building, Robinson calls for journalists to grapple actively with their own identities--especially the privileges, biases, and marginalization attached to them--and those of their communities, resulting in a more intentional and effective moral voice focused on justice and equity through the news practice of an ethic of care.

Contemporary journalism faces a crisis of trust that threatens the institution and may imperil democracy itself. Critics and experts see a renewed commitment to local journalism as one solution. But a lasting restoration of public trust requires a different kind of local journalism than is often imagined, one that engages with and shares power among all sectors of a community. Andrea Wenzel models new practices of community-centered journalism that build trust across boundaries of politics, race, and class, and prioritize solutions while engaging the full range of local stakeholders. Informed by case studies from rural, suburban, and urban settings, Wenzel's blueprint reshapes journalism norms and creates vigorous storytelling networks between all parts of a community. Envisioning a portable, rather than scalable, process, Wenzel proposes a community-centered journalism that, once implemented, will strengthen lines of local communication, reinvigorate civic participation, and forge a trusting partnership between media and the people they cover.

A unique theory of trust building in engagement journalism that proposes journalists move to an ethic of care as they prioritize listening and learning within communities instead of propping up problematic institutions. In How Journalists Engage, Sue Robinson explores how journalists of different identities, especially racial, enact trusting relationships with their audiences. Drawing from case studies, community-work, interviews, and focus groups, she documents a growing built environment around trust building and engagement journalism that represents the first major paradigm shift of the press's core values in more than a century. As Robinson shows, journalists are being trained to take on new roles and skillsets around listening and learning, in addition to normative routines related to being a watchdog and storyteller. She demonstrates how this movement mobilizes the nurturing of personal, organizational, and institutional relationships that people have with information, sources, news brands, journalists, and each other. Developing a new theory of trust building, Robinson calls for journalists to grapple actively with their own identities--especially the privileges, biases, and marginalization attached to them--and those of their communities, resulting in a more intentional and effective moral voice focused on justice and equity through the news practice of an ethic of care.

"How Journalists Engage: A theory of trustbuilding, identity, and care explores the ways journalists of different identities enact trusting relationships with their audiences according to divergent sets of principles. Drawing from case studies, community work, surveys, interviews and focus groups, this book documents the now-established "built environment" powered with engagement journalism that represents the first major paradigm shift of the press' core values in more than a century. A proliferation of media-trust programs, grants, foundations, companies, collaborations, networks, and money demands that journalists take on four new roles-Relationship Builder, Content Collaborator, Community Conversation Facilitator, and Professional Network Builder-and be fluent in eight skillsets: radical transparency, power dynamic accounting, mediation, reciprocity, media literacies, community offline work, needs/assets/solution analyses, and collaborative production. These are in addition to the normative skills related to being a watchdog and storyteller. The author posits that this trust-building theory manifesting demands journalism be enacted with an "identity-aware care" through "listening and learning." This identity-aware ethic of care-a theory that comes from developmental psychology and nurtured in gender and women's studies-prioritizes communities over the propping up of problematic institutions that news media have traditionally protected in the name of objectivity. Instead, this theory asks journalists to acknowledge and incorporate their own identities-especially the privileges, biases, and marginalization attached to them-and those of their communities, resulting in a more intentional moral voice focused on justice and equity so that all news participants can feel cared for within information-exchange about public affairs"--

The Journalist-Audience Relationship -- The Promise of Audience Engagement -- Journalism's Imagined Audiences -- When Data and Intuition Converge -- First Imagined, Then Pursued -- The Obstacles to Audience Engagement -- Understanding News Audience Behavior -- Conclusion.

Examines the ways that civic or public journalism is evolving, especially as audience-created content - sometimes referred to as citizen journalism or participatory journalism - becomes increasingly prominent in contemporary media. This book seeks to reinvent public journalism for the 21st century.