{"id":2944,"date":"2026-08-14T19:09:06","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T19:09:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/?p=2944"},"modified":"2026-08-14T19:09:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T19:09:06","slug":"nine-ideas-for-strengthening-journalism-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/nine-ideas-for-strengthening-journalism-2\/","title":{"rendered":"NINE IDEAS FOR STRENGTHENING JOURNALISM"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n\n\n\n
TAPPING INTO A COMMUNITY’S
\nroots can make your journalism more complete and compelling. That’s because it will allow reporters and editors to:
\nGET IT FIRST<\/strong><\/span>
\nJournalists will hear about events, trends, and people’s concerns long before they reach the community’s official world of politics and institutions, where they tend to get framed in official jargon and technical terms. In Wichita, for example, a Harwood Group researcher found that a local supermarket was planning to close – and what the closing meant for the people and their neighborhood. This was months before\u00a0Eagle<\/em>\u00a0reporters knew, and before the story had become part of the official community debate, where people’s concerns often get overshadowed.<\/p>\n


\nEXPAND SOURCES AND VOICES<\/strong><\/span>
\nAs journalists dig deeper into their communities they will discover an expanded group of “Go To” civic spaces and sources to understand community concerns and events better. These sources will provide authentic community voices and perspectives, allowing a newspaper to reflect more accurately the “wholeness” of the community.<\/p>\n


\nASK BETTER JOURNALISTIC QUESTIONS<\/strong><\/span>
\nThis work can help journalists gain insight to frame tougher and more probing interviews, not only with citizens, but with a mayor, business leaders, and other sources for news. For instance, having a deeper understanding and sense of context, of people’s concerns on a particular problem like youth violence can prompt a journalist to ask a superintendent of schools probing questions about how a recent proposal reflects people’s concerns; and if not, how the proposal relates to those concerns.<\/p>\n


\nSEE MORE POSSIBILITIES FOR FRAMING STORIES<\/strong><\/span>
\nBy tapping into civic life, journalists can gain a rich sense of the dimensions of community concerns, issues and events; the context in which people think about a topic or challenge; the various perspectives that are in play (moving from perhaps two to many perspectives); the emotions at work; the ambivalence people experience and the nature of their struggle to make sense of things; and the language people use. These and other kinds of insights can lead to new possibilities for framing news stories.<\/p>\n

 <\/td>\n


\nWRITE HARDER-HITTING STORIES<\/strong><\/span>
\nOften when journalists hear about tapping into civic life, they groan and say, “We don’t want to write ‘soft’ stories. We need to keep our edge!” doing this work can help journalists create an even sharper edge by knowing what and how the community thinks; gaining a clearer sense of the underlying\u00a0tensions<\/em>\u00a0that are at work; uncovering the different dimensions of concerns, perspectives and voices. These and other insights can help journalists produce stories that report authentic tension rather than conflict that is based on extreme views and often leads readers to turn away from a newspaper’s pages.
\nIMPROVE STORY AND PLANNING MEETINGS<\/strong><\/span>
\nBy tapping into civic life, journalists can bring deeper insights, more probing questions, a stronger sense of personal engagement, and new ideas to story and planning meetings. This is a critical part of how tapping into civic life can truly help to strengthen the newsroom’s daily product.<\/p>\n


\nCREATE MORE MEANINGFUL NEWSROOM CONVERSATIONS<\/strong><\/span>
\nInformal newsroom conversations are where a lot of daily work and breakthroughs occur for journalists. Tapping into civic life – and encouraging the newsroom to talk about what is being learned in every-day conversations – will improve the ability of individual journalists and teams to work smarter and harder.<\/p>\n


\nBRIDGE CIVIC LAYERS<\/strong><\/span>
\nPeople in communities often have trouble connecting, for instance, their neighborhood conversations to discussions they hear in civic meetings or public hearings. Newspapers can help people see those connections (when they indeed exist) by coverage that bridges the different layers of civic life. For instance, as people talk about education in their neighborhood, they also want to know how their concerns connect to a civic association or a school board discussion.<\/p>\n


\nUNCOVER JOURNALISTS’ PRECONCEIVED VIEWS OR BIASES<\/strong><\/span>
\nPeople who gather information and write come to their jobs with their own personal experiences, ideas, and beliefs. By aggressively tapping into the dimensions of civic life – its rich mixture of voices, perspectives, tensions – journalists can begin to uncover and understand their own preconceived views and, while not abandoning them, perhaps be more aware of them in their reporting.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TAPPING INTO A COMMUNITY’S roots can make your journalism more complete and compelling. That’s because it will allow reporters and editors to: GET IT FIRST Journalists will hear about events, trends, and people’s concerns long before they reach the community’s official world of politics and institutions, where they tend to get framed in official jargon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publications"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2944"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2945,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions\/2945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev-testinglink.com\/projects\/civilorg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}