According to the tenets of civic engagement, those who live in a community are best qualified to identify its problems and most invested in finding solutions. To start regaining the public’s waning trust in the media and improve the relevance and accuracy of the news, journalists are beginning to ask community members what they should cover and how they should cover it.
News & Events
UO report examines how journalists can regain public trust
What’s driving that growing sense of distrust in the media? And what might be done to repair it? Those questions are at the heart of a year-long research project from the SOJC.
Rattled: Oregon’s Concussion Discussion is a joint project
Rattled: Oregon’s Concussion Discussion is a joint project of InvestigateWest, Pamplin Media Group and the Agora Journalism Center, made possible in part by grants from Meyer Memorial Trust and the Center for Cooperative Media.
Studying Emerging Engagement
How do we know that audience engagement works? And how do we define success in the first place? Thomas R. Schmidt takes on these questions.
New initiative Finding Common Ground offers funding for newsrooms to expand existing engagement projects
The Agora Journalism Center will provide seven grants of up to €10,000 each to European and North American news organisations.
Gather platform helps journalists who give the public a voice
To help connect people working in engaged journalism, the Agora Journalism Center recently launched Gather, a project and platform to support community-minded journalists and other communications professionals.
Agora to host engaged journalism workshops
To broaden the impact of the emerging community of engaged journalism practitioners, the Agora Journalism Center will be hosting engagement workshops across the United States with the support of a $100,000 grant from the Democracy Fund.
Agora Journalism Center partners to analyze youth concussion data
InvestigateWest, the Pamplin Media Group and the Agora Journalism Center announced a partnership to collect and analyze return-to-play strategies and information.
The Continuum of Engagement
The question we often forget to ask ourselves is: How can we motivate more journalists (and journalism students) to put the community at the center of their work, be better listeners, and understand more precisely the needs of the public? Until we can think of the public not just as “audiences” and “consumers,” but also as experts and partners in the communities we aim to serve, we shouldn’t expect to receive the public’s complete trust.
Gather, a platform for journalists working on community engagement, launches
“We’re not trying to repeat what already works on platforms like Facebook and Slack. But we also want to disrupt the notion that is echoed on these stream-of-consciousness platforms like Facebook, that whatever’s the latest is always the best. We want to be able to honor the work that’s in the past, too, and give people the opportunity to find it. That’s critical and will make this platform even more powerful.