From the early 2010s until now, our industry saw the rise of what I’ll call Community Engagement 1.0 — that is, consulting communities about their information needs and genuinely serving our audiences by delivering journalism that fills in those gaps. The earliest explanation of this that I’ve seen is from a 2011 blog post titled “What does ‘community engagement’ mean?” by the late Steve Buttry, former director of student media at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication. Buttry wrote succinctly: “Community engagement = News orgs make top priority to listen, to join, lead & enable conversation to elevate journalism.”
That same year, Joy Mayer, executive director and founder of Trusting News, described in a slide deck that engagement involved knowing more about “why people turn to us, what they want from us, how we can help,” and emphasized that involving our audiences in the journalism we produce makes it “more in touch, more comprehensive, and more present.”
Since then, the engagement journalism movement has become increasingly widespread, in part thanks to the popularity of platforms like GroundSource and Hearken that specialize in supporting newsrooms with this work. Today, media organizations ranging from neighborhood startups to legacy broadcasters have embraced the practice and integrated it into their news-gathering workflows.
All of that is fantastic. And yet.
Overall interest in the news is still unequivocally declining. The Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report says that long-term trends in attention loss, news avoidance, and news fatigue suggest the public is becoming more ambivalent about the news — and it’s a global phenomenon impacting countries from Argentina to the U.K. Even more alarming, young people make up a significant proportion of that decline.
It’s why, for the past few years, I’ve been obsessed with honing in on what the precise function of news really is in our modern times. Why do we, as journalists, do what we do? What’s our fundamental value? And how do we translate that value to the public in a way that’s clear and accessible?
The zenith of venture-backed, pageview-driven media (of which I was a part) in the 2010s diverted the focus of newsroom management towards chasing eyeballs in exchange for digital ad dollars. We veered off course, mistaking volume for value and clicks for connection.
Community engagement best practices have tried to rectify that, with more and more newsrooms making a concerted effort to listen to the communities they serve. Even so, though, one nagging question that kept coming up for me was: Do these audiences understand how they can use this information in their daily lives, however tailored it is to them?
If there’s one quibble I have with Community Engagement 1.0, it’s that newsrooms employing this approach are still focused on process rather than outcome. It’s understandable, after all, since journalists are historically trained to just focus on the reporting, and not the consequences of their reporting.
But that’s no longer cutting it.
To be clear, I don’t mean to say that engagement journalists don’t take great care to reduce harm, and gather information from sources through a trauma-informed lens (they do). Rather, I mean that we can be more concerned about what we’re not doing than what we are delivering.
Enter Community Engagement 2.0, which I describe as leveling up community engagement best practices to encourage the public to move from engaging with the news to engaging with the world — that is, their neighborhood, city, province/state, country — around them.
And let’s face it: The world is in survival mode. So journalism at its core should be information that’s useful or user-friendly, that helps people navigate their lives on a daily basis, that helps them make decisions impacting their future, that helps them take action. “Useful” also means focusing less on needlessly anxiety-inducing information that causes paralysis, and instead on concrete solutions that someone can actually take action on. We’re talking brass tacks. “Get in, get out” kind of information. “How do I eat?” kind of information. “Where do I live?” kind of information.
At The Green Line, a hyperlocal information and community services organization I founded in April 2022, engagement and action are built into our foundation. Our mandate is to deliver “information you can actually use in your daily life,” and to investigate “the way Torontonians live to report on solutions, actions and resources that help you become happier in our city.”
The information we provide aims to not only help people advocate for themselves through voting and other democratic processes so they can effect policy outcomes, but also to support each other through mutual aid. It’s likely not a shock for you to learn that governments worldwide are enacting funding cuts that will result in a reduction in public services, so helping people help themselves will be more than a matter of building character.
People may be turning away from the news, but they’re not — nor will they ever — turn away from useful, thoughtfully curated information that helps them do something about their problems, and ultimately improves their lives.
Anita Li is the publisher and CEO of The Green Line.
