9. Tips for Personal Community Outreach

(NOTE: This post is part of a series. Series index.)

Accept the need to earn credibility. In many communities, mainstream US news orgs aren’t perceived as very credible—and they may even be viewed with suspicion or anger. This is especially true if your news org has been covering these people poorly or not at all. If you’ve been ignoring or misrepresenting them, why should they respect or listen to you?

Here’s how you can adapt to this situation…

• Be patient. Give them time to give you a chance. Ideally, commit to at least one year of concerted outreach and inclusion effort.

• Wear asbestos underwear. They’ll probably need to vent and criticize first, and it’s important to face that calmly. Feelings matter, especially when building relationships.

• Acknowledge and apologize for skewed or missing past coverage.

• Find REAL community leaders, on the community’s terms. They may not come from conventional established hierarchies, like politicians, organization leaders, or other officials. In many communities, elders, shopkeepers, teachers, parents, volunteers, and even some outspoken teens wield considerable influence. Gaining interest and respect from key individuals has a ripple effect. Ask people whose opinions they respect in their community.

• Plan how to take their suggestions for angles, issues, and stories into account. Point out these changes not just to the target community, but to your entire audience. (Foster understanding between communities.)

• Address loaded issues frankly and directly—class, race, prejudice, etc. Don’t dance around them.

• Avoid polarizing, especially when tackling loaded issues head-on. Writer Michael Kirk (who’s black, and whose girlfriend is Latina) told me: “As long as polarizing people who don’t speak for everyone get all the print and TV exposure, [regaining credibility for news orgs in minority communities] will be a tough road. All my girlfriend’s people have is the Ask a Mexican guy. And all my people have is Tavis Smiley. And you never see them on Hardball, LOL.”

10. Civic orgs...

10. Working with civic orgs, congregations,schools

(NOTE: This post is part of a series. Series index.)

Churches, mosques, civic orgs, community centers all have print bulletins. Consider advertising, supply content, sponsorship of publications or events.

They can offer meeting space for “town hall"-style events.

Community leaders (current and future) tend to be there, they can spread the word.

Offer info resources or collections of content that they need.

11. Simplified stories...

11. Simplified News for ESL and Literacy Students

(NOTE: This post is part of a series. Series index.)

Literacy and language skills are a surprisingly significant barrier to connecting low-income and minority communities to online and print news.

Some Statistics According to the literacy report released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

• About one in 20 adults in the U.S. is not literate in English.
  
• 11 million Americans lack the skills to handle many everyday tasks.
• 30 million adults may not be able to make sense of a simple pamphlet.
  
• More than 60% of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate.

Connecting with literacy and English (ESL) teachers and learners can be an especially powerful way to build goodwill in underserved communities. People who participate in these classes often are (or become) community leaders, or at least have increased influence in their social circle or workplace.

Suggested strategy…

Adapt selected relevant news stories into “Simplified English”—technique used by VOA and other orgs to reach people with limited English or literacy skills. Post these stories online (text and audio), provide a feed for them, and maybe offer print supplement for classes, community centers, etc.

How to adapt stories: Use mostly VOA’s Special English vocabulary (derived from Basic English) with simple sentence structure. It’s OK to introduce new words, just not too many in one story. (Resource: Easy does it: Language made simple, GreatReporter.com, Nov. 20, 2007)

Example projects:

• CA Distance Learning Project has adapted news stories on various topic from around the state so that they’re understandable to people new to English or with limited literacy skills. This is a resource for teachers and students, but news orgs could do similar adaptation for local English-learning communities.

  Example story: A New Plan for a Safer Dam. Adapted from Statehouse Gives Okay to Bolster Folsom Dam Flood Control, by News10 KXTV Sacramento. Includes audio as well as text.

• The Key: “Newspaper for new readers.” Coverage area: Wisconsin. Goals: Provide people with limited reading skills access to the main flow of information in the community and to provide teachers in adult basic education programs with quality materials which are relevant to the adult learner. In addition to the Web, the project publishes an eight-page monthly newspaper with a Wisconsin circulation of 15,000 copies. Partners with Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which donates the printing and provides other guidance and assistance.

  Example story: New Rules Protect Fish In Wisconsin (adapted from this Journal-Sentinel article)

Work with local ESL teachers: Invite them in to meet with editors. Find out which communities are among their students, and which issues or stories those communities would find interesting. Hire them as freelancers to spot and adapt the most relevant current stories.

Visit local ESL classes. Talk to students about how your news org works, what your goals are. Ask where they get their news, and what they like/don’t like about it. Invite their input. Ask how they would be most comfortable interacting with you about the news (communication channels/tools).

Offer relevant resources: Provide a Simple English guide to common forms for government programs that under-served communities often encounter—medicare, welfare, housing, immigration, etc. Could be useful to cross-link with news coverage of those programs, to promote readership.

12. Highlight best contributions...

12. Highlight Community Contributions

(NOTE: This post is part of a series. Series index.)

Don’t “ghettoize” content by and about communities in your area—especially if you haven’t been doing a great job of connecting with them before.

Highlight and prominently display (alongside your professional content) the best contributions from community members. Could include…

• Comments left on your site (stories, forums) or letters/voice mails to editors or reporters.
• Stories, photos, etc. contributed to your site or submitted privately.
• Postings from local people to blogs, forums, social media venues
  
• Content from community publications.

Of course, always get permission to republish, and offer payment as warranted. Money demonstrates professionalism, even if it’s not a lot of money. Don’t expect to “use” them for “free content” if you think it’s good enough to highlight.

Examples and resources

• The Fray Front page of Slate.com’s active discussion forums highlights best content picked by readers, editors.

• Construct Your Community’s Info-Structure, Jan Schaffer, J-Lab.

• Misreading the Tea Leaves, Steve Outing: “Since writing my recent Editor & Publisher Online column on the lessons learned about grassroots media from the demise of my company, the Enthusiast Group, a number of commentators seem to have seized on that to suggest that ‘citizen journalism is dying.’ Combined with the demise earlier this year of hyperlocal grassroots news network Backfence.com and other failures in this realm, we now have a new wave of media people professing that this proves the concept is a failure.

  “Good grief. My company’s experience proves no such thing. As is clear to anyone who read my column, I suggested that grassroots media is a mega-trend that won’t abate, but I believe that what user content needs to succeed as a business is professional editors to be the ones to sift through it all to find the stuff that people will care about, and technology to identify and distribute content that matters to very small groups of people (e.g., everyone who lives in your neighborhood).

Mexican Like Me

Roberto Suro’s presentation on the demographics of Hispanics in the U.S. resonated with me.  Born in Mexico and raised on the border of Arizona and Mexico in a fairly small town called Nogales, I was interested in hearing what researchers had discovered about folks like me. 

According to Suro, I fall into that category of Hispanics that tend to be the highest achieving.  I was foreign-born but raised in the U.S. and continue to enjoy the benefits of the American school system.  And although I do speak Spanish, English is by far the stronger of the two languages. 

As Suro pointed out, Latinos, or for that matter, anyone with a solid education and, in turn, a healthy income tend to be heavier users of the Internet.  As some folks said at the seminar, what draws people like me to read news on the Web or to advertisers probably isn’t that different from what lures others.

There are, I suppose, incredibly subtle cultural references that may pique a second generation’s interest.  We do, after all, miss the place much of our family calls home.  But the more pressing question, I think, is how to reach those who feel alienated from the mainstream media because they feel it just doesn’t speak to them at all.

Suro mentioned the problem of papers covering only a small percentage of what goes on in the Hispanic community.  The Los Angeles Times, for example, covering gangs without reporting on too much else. 

In that spirit, I wanted to point you to a young Mexican journalist who has noted the problem of underrepresentation in the U.S. media.  He’s reported for both the Los Angeles Times and the L.A. Weekly.  From what I can tell, he is now based in Mexico City.  His blog is worth checking out if for no other reason than that sadly, there aren’t too many other Hispanic journalists who are in the position to speak forcefully for the community from which they stem.

--Lilly Fowler

About This Blog

The Knight Digital Media Center has partnered with the Maynard Institute on this special workshop with the goal of helping news organizations develop strategies that will ensure their online content reflects meaningful interaction with “Communities of Difference.” By sharing ideas that support these communities as well as bridge them, we believe online news organizations can play a much greater role than their legacy counterparts in contributing to social and civic dialogue. Communities of Difference are defined simply as everyone who is not like me (or you). In this time of vertical associations built on personal interest and affinity, there is even greater need for horizontal connections or intersections.

This blog reflects the way four USC Annenberg graduate students interpret what they hear during the three-day workshop: Total Community in Cyberspace—Growing Your Audience. We invite you to comment on what you read or to contribute your own insight and ideas to the concepts we are discussing.