Engagement Journalism
By: Melissa Dipento
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Engagement, Higher Education, Journalism, News

Engagement Journalism

A pathbreaking program’s new name underscores how its novel approaches can be game changing — for both audiences and journalists Melissa DiPento Follow Mar 30 · 16 min read

Michaela Román and Jake Wasserman (both far right) are 2020 Engagement Journalism alums.

By Elizabeth Mehren

He had a snappy title for his internship at the Mountain State Spotlight: Inaugural Engagement Reporting Fellow. But what exactly did that mean?

In a hefty document that might serve as a roadmap for this emerging discipline, Jake Wasserman explained how he sought to make engagement an element of every aspect of a startup news outlet in Charleston, W. Va. The news site says “sustained outrage” is part of its core mission.

Point-by-point, in his final report to his colleagues at Mountain State, Wasserman described a kind of journalism premised on being with its audience, not merely for them:

“Nothing about us without us,” wrote Wasserman. Put the audience or citizen at the center of every effort.

“Meet people where they are”: To have full impact, journalism must make itself accessible to its audience.

Listen without judgment and with empathy.

Worry less about objectivity than transparency.

“Speak truth to empower”: Expose abuses of power, recommend solutions and help achieve them.

Jake Wasserman visits West Virginia.

“The idea is to keep after a story until reforms are made,” said Wasserman. He earned his master’s degree in December 2020 from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY) in what was known until recently as Social Journalism. This pioneering program is six years old, and as of April 2021, the degree will carry a new name: Engagement Journalism.

Though the concept is not new and other institutions have taught the subject in bits and pieces, Newmark J-School became the country’s first journalism graduate program in 2015 to offer a dedicated program in this new approach to journalism. With its sixth cohort expected to graduate next December, the program now has 67 alumni. They have landed jobs around the globe in news organizations such as ProPublica, the Miami Herald, The Intercept, CNN Brasil, The Atlantic, and CBS Sports.

Putting a priority on public needs and service

In its essence, the program is “putting a focus on what it is that the public needs — journalism more as a service than a product — putting the audience or the citizen at the center of everything we do,” said the program’s director, Dr. Carrie Brown.

Dr. Carrie Brown speaks to the audience at the Class of 2019’s final presentation event.

Brown said that so many alums working in so many different settings speaks to the degree’s versatility, noting: “It’s not the type of degree that prepares you in a narrow sense for one exact job.”

Engagement Journalism is a hybrid. With its emphasis on technology, its approach to reporting is a product of the 21st century. But it also is rooted in the earliest days of muckraking, searching for and exposing corruption and scandal, especially in government. Engagement Journalism draws heavily on social sciences such as anthropology and ethnography. It emphasizes data analysis. It also envelops aspects of what has traditionally been termed service journalism, producing stories that both inform and recommend action. In that way, it shares traits with solutions journalism, another twist in traditional reporting.

But the distinguishing feature is the very word engagement — so much so that the program’s full new name is Engagement Journalism — Community, Conversation, Collaboration. The three C’s more fully describe the program’s focus on interacting with communities. And while social media are important elements, in the past they had often been seen mistakenly as the crux of the degree.

Conventional journalism — as preached, if not always as practiced — advocates a hands-off protocol. Officially, excess chumminess with sources or subjects is verboten. Empathy, in some cases, is viewed as a sign of weakness, of caring so much about a subject that reporters can’t keep their heads straight. As for taking action, well, that’s up to the story subjects after the journalist files or airs the story.

Engagement Journalism is the opposite of the old-fashioned helicopter-in, helicopter-out model, where a reporter gains “expertise” — or in any case, quotes and maybe adds some details for color — from a quick dive into the subject matter. Rather, Engagement Journalism shares qualities with immersion reporting, gathering information that conveys authority based on extended face-to-face contact and ears attuned to a multitude of voices.

Seeing beyond the rats all around

This occurred with Michaela Román, a classmate of Wasserman’s who also graduated in December 2020. She was struck by how the Prospect Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn teemed with rats, and turned the community concerns with its vermin invasion into a first-semester project for her master’s. She did not merely report about residents’ concerns about the rats. She also took the complaints to “the hierarchy” — building owners and city agencies. Román and another classmate also made a short documentary about the infestation.

“My role would be to collect as many concerns as possible and then take them to the (NYC) Department of Sanitation, push those people, ask them questions and then bring the answers back,” Román said. “I don’t think of this as this noble act. I just think it as being responsible.”

Choosing a community in which to embed in the 16 months of the Newmark J-School program is a cornerstone of the Engagement Journalism degree. The word community is defined broadly, extending beyond geography to encompass individuals, groups, social movements, and even organizations. Román first chose advocates who serve as liaisons between governments and residents as her community. She then switched to “neighborhoods organizing around rat infestation.” When the COVID-19 pandemic curbed opportunities for in-person reporting on the rat problem, Román chose a new community among journalists frustrated by the lack of diversity in their newsrooms.

Román’s research included a survey asking Latinx journalists questions such as “What advice would you give yourself if it was your first day in the newsroom all over again?” Or, “Do you have a support team you can count on in your newsroom?” She described her methods and outcomes in an article posted on Medium. Like Wasserman’s final report to his West Virginia colleagues, her article presents a solid case for engagement as a vital tool for 21st century journalists.

Michaela Román, Class of 2020, created “What I Wish I Had Known – By and for Latinx entry-level journalists.”

A conversation, a sketch, and start-up funding

This is probably as good a moment as any to note that Newmark J-School’s Engagement Journalism program was born on the back of a cocktail napkin.

Sarah Bartlett, the school’s dean and a former reporter and editor at the New York Times and Business Week, had recently read the book “Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Strategies for News.”

The author? He was the school’s first faculty member: Jeff Jarvis, who carries the impressive title of director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism and Leonard Tow Professor of Entrepreneurial Journalism. In February 2014, Bartlett and Jarvis were headed West to meet with tech executives. Then, as Jarvis tells it, Bartlett wondered aloud if any of the new strategies described in his book were currently being taught in the classroom.

In minutes, Jarvis recalled, he outlined a curriculum on a cocktail napkin and Bartlett envisioned a new degree program focusing on “needs-based, values-based, service-based journalism.”

The dean was not the only one intrigued by the idea. She and Jarvis pitched it to Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. He provided $200,000 in start-up funds. Next, Bartlett and Jarvis headed to Florida, where the Knight Foundation matched that gift with another $200,000.

Things moved fast. From the day that Bartlett green-lighted the program to the day students enrolled in Engagement Journalism classes, just nine months elapsed. As anyone who has spent time in academia can attest, this speedy trajectory ranks right alongside lightning.

A generation at ease with tech, public confession

It is hardly a coincidence that a 21st-century iteration of the ancient craft of journalism arrives just as many students may be more comfortable with technology than even some of their professors.

Wasserman was 12 years old when he first signed on to Facebook. By then, he noted, he was already a veteran of MySpace. The TikTok generation, as he calls his age group, is unfazed by tech’s terms, let alone its applications. A comfort with a spirit of mass public confessionalism makes it easier for young journalists now to delve into their subjects’ lives and souls, another hallmark of Engagement Journalism.

Wasserman, 24, spent all of four days in West Virginia before the double whammy of the pandemic and a shortage of rental housing in Charleston sent him to his parents’ house in New Jersey. His ease with social media and his tech skills meant that distance was no obstacle in establishing himself as part of and covering a community 554 miles away.

He heard over and over that West Virginians lacking internet service were not receiving absentee ballots for the November election. He responded not just with a remote story on a snafu in the election process but by building a chat bot that helped voters get in touch with county clerks, so election officials could track missing absentee ballots. “I was telling people about the problem and then said, ‘Here’s what you can do about it,’” he said.

His audience appreciated his journalism. Betty Rivard, a Mountain State Spotlight reader, expressed surprise in an email to Wasserman that he worked from far away. She and he had been in such frequent contact that she assumed he was on the scene. But what Rivard really wanted him to know was that his reporting had made an impact on the community.

Betty Rivard, a Mountain State Spotlight reader, told Wasserman his work made an impact on her community.

“A small state like ours can be a bit of a fishbowl, where everyone is very tuned in to what everyone else is doing and who’s connected to who, etc.,” Rivard wrote from West Virginia. “So, in this environment, having a reporter interested in an issue or a story can make a difference in and of itself.”

She added: “I think an awareness of your presence and your interest helped in being able to win a couple of impacting local fights as we got closer to the election. There was also a kind of feedback loop where my involvement led to my getting more calls to help where I was able to develop a bit of a track record in getting things done.”

Specifically, Rivard cited her discovery of a wrinkle in her county’s method of counting absentee ballots. “Knowing that I could have gone to the press” — meaning Wasserman — “brought another level of accountability that I’m sure contributed to this getting taken care of,” Rivard said.

As Wasserman observed, “Sometimes things are beyond measure through traditional quantitative metrics. I thought this was a good testimony to the success of Engagement Journalism.”

Wasserman was not thinking about journalism when he finished his bachelor’s in public health at Rutgers University. He was considering a doctorate in anthropology. But through his father, Wasserman met Jarvis. Wasserman told him he didn’t like the way news stories were presented, and the professor told Wasserman about this new thing — Social (now Engagement) Journalism.

“I became fixated on the idea that your journalism can do work, that it can provide information that people need,” Wasserman said.

Reassessing the dynamics of power

He also liked the potential of this new paradigm, shifting the once-distant role of the reporter from observer to participant.

“I believe that Engagement Journalism reassesses the power dynamic between the journalists and the people they are writing about,” Wasserman said.

In what he calls the “before times,” pre-pandemic, “I would have coffee with someone, not write anything down, just listen,” he said. His reasoning was “start with empathy, listening and then reporting is what comes later.”

In one Newmark J-School class, “we actually did ethnographic listening, going into this place, noticing what people are wearing, what they are talking about, what the weather is like, descriptions of everything around.” This training came in handy, Wasserman said, doing work in the South Bronx in his first semester. “Getting to know people by listening” is how he characterizes this strategy.

Another class brought another breakthrough. “I didn’t know how to code before I went to journalism school,” Wasserman said. The Newmark professor who taught him this skill was John Keefe, a graphics and multimedia editor at The New York Times. Wasserman ended up taking three courses involving coding, partly because “I just thought it was really cool,” and also because, in the early days of the pandemic, “it was a distraction from the fact that outside there were freezer trucks full of dead bodies.” Coding, unlike the virus that was coursing through America and the rest of the world, “was rigid. It made sense,” Wasserman said.

Like many others in a field centered so firmly on the use of language, Michaela Román said she was an admitted math-phobe when she started graduate school. She grew up on the Texas-Mexico border. Her multicultural upbringing made her want to document the social discrepancies and contradictions that she witnessed first-hand.

To her surprise, Román said her favorite course at Newmark J-School was Metrics and Outcomes, focusing on “how we measure impact.” Among the questions this class addressed: “What kind of feedback did we get? And what happened after the story?” Román said she learned the value of “going to the community and listening to find out if it actually worked for them. Did the story provide information they were lacking?”

These were concerns Román, 25, had not always considered in her work as a photojournalist after earning a bachelor’s in journalism from the University of Texas-El Paso.

Román worked as a photojournalist after graduating from the University of Texas-El Paso.

She, too, was not persuaded she needed a graduate degree in journalism. Then she received a “full ride” scholarship offer from Newmark J-School, followed by a fellowship funded by the Knight Foundation as part of CUNY’s diversity initiative. Though she still was unconvinced she needed a master’s, Román said she changed her mind after talking to Carrie Brown. She was sold by learning about the idea at the core of Engagement Journalism — of “working with people, especially people who are often left out” of traditional news coverage.

Román said she is “so happy” about the program’s name change. “Social Journalism” always required an explanation, she said. “But even the dailies are hiring Engagement reporters.” For Román, the term engagement means “you report solely based off what a community wants you to report on.”

The importance of skepticism and independence

If that tactic means blurring journalism’s traditional lines, so be it, Román said: “Pushing that space, that is what this program really is. We’re kind of breaking down the idea that you can’t work together in a community.”

Brown, the program’s founding director, said students in the program have focused on communities “that have historically been overlooked and people who are oppressed.”

She also agreed that the partnerships between the journalists and their communities “really does push some of those boundaries.” But she said there is still a reliance on “a lot of the fundamentals, like verification of reporting.”

Both Brown and Jarvis said that instilling skepticism in students — young and often inexperienced in the field — is vital to teaching Engagement Journalism.

“It takes a lot of time,” Brown said. “We have so many conversations about the nuances around understanding what kind of narrative we believe, and why.” The program directs students to “interrogate their own assumptions,” and invites discussion about “power and how to look at it,” Brown said. To promote the critical thinking that makes students less likely to swallow information without fully assessing it first, “we do a lot of exercises around examining our own inherent biases.”

Developing the wariness that helps shield journalists from accepting false material at face value comes partly with experience, Jarvis said. The skill is crucial when journalists form close relationships with subjects — the crux of Engagement Journalism.

“The students have to learn first to trust themselves,” Jarvis said. “The way we do it is by presenting ‘uh-oh’ cases, cases where things have gone wrong.”

Another risk in aligning closely with a community is its potential manipulation of journalists. Starting with the notion of objectivity, journalism is rife with implicit challenges. Engagement journalism demands a balance between advocacy and independence.

“Oh yes,” Jarvis agreed. “On the one hand, we tell the students to help the communities tell their stories. But we stress: You are not their mouthpiece … What we emphasize here is independence.”

Learning to recognize one’s own inherent biases is another pillar of the program, even if this may not be the easiest lesson to absorb, Carrie Brown said.

Training students to avoid becoming too close is “obviously not something we can just automatically do, and guarantee, beyond asking them to engage in critical thinking,” she said.

Wasserman said that when he started the Engagement Journalism program, he had challenges with this distinction.

“At first I thought what Social Journalism was about was advocating for my community to do the work for the community,” he said. With time, he grasped that “what it’s really about is recognizing the abuses of power within social communities and describing them. I think it’s important to give people the tools that they can act upon themselves.”

An approach to meet with troubled times

No one who is not living under a large rock could argue that journalism, as a practice and profession, is not in flux — or in real trouble. Local news, in particular, is in jeopardy, numerous studies show. The conventional, advertising-based business model has not adapted well to a news universe driven by technology.

Engagement Journalism may or may not save journalism, but Jarvis predicts its gospel will spread. He recalls trading emails with Stephen B. Shepard, the J-School’s Founding Dean Emeritus, in winter 2005, when the school was in its infancy. Shepard told Jarvis that he envisioned CUNY’s first graduate program in journalism in its 174-year history as “an agent of change” with no less a mission than to “change the field of journalism.”

“So, yes,” Jarvis said, “we hope that by example we inspire other schools to bring in these programs — and they are doing that.”

The University of Oregon’s Agora Journalism Center endorses “relational journalism” and lists “transforming how journalists inform and relate to their local community” as a goal. The Engagement Lab at Emerson College in Boston summons various disciplines to focus on “studying and designing media and technology that is transforming civic life.”

These new, community-based models may be transformational to local reporting — which has its major challenges. A recent report from the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Journalism found that the United States has lost more than 2,100 local print outlets since 2004. Rural counties are among those most impacted, the report added.

Another report, in 2019 from PEN America, addressed the “decimation of local news” by proposing “a major reimagining of local news space, in which local reporting is re-conceptualized as a public good.”

In Massachusetts and Hawaii, commissions have been proposed to study journalism in underserved communities, or to examine the implications for democracy of the disappearance of so many local news outlets.

The editor-in-chief of an Italian media startup called Will Media Italia declared that 2021 should be the year when “we start listening to our audiences’ needs.” Francesco Zaffarno continued: “The best way to meet (this) demand is to ask people what kind of information they need.”

In other words, Engagement Journalism may have emerged just when it is needed most.

Transforming journalism

In the meantime, as curricula expand elsewhere, graduates of Newmark J-School’s Engagement Journalism program are getting jobs. “Engagement” — as in “Engagement Editor” or “Engagement Manager” or “Engagement Reporter” or “Audience Engagement Producer” — crops up as a job title more often now as the school’s graduates enter the workplace.

Allen Arthur, ’16 recalled that when he “walked through the door on 40th Street” as an incoming student, “I’d never really written a story or requested a record.”

The program taught him to branch out and find creative reporting techniques. Arthur chose formerly incarcerated people as his community. As part of his research, he set up a “listening station” at the birthday party of a young woman killed in the crossfire in a shooting in Harlem public housing. Today, Arthur is Online Engagement Manager for the Solutions Journalism Network.

Wasserman said his dream job may not even exist at this time. For now, he said he could imagine working as Engagement Editor at a national or local news outlet. “It might be at ProPublica, it might be at the Charleston Gazette-Mail,” he said.

Before she completed her Engagement Journalism master’s, Román said she assumed she would follow a traditional path, climbing the career ladder until she reached a prime spot like The New York Times.

Now, “I don’t think that’s true at all,” she said. “You can have a lot of impact at smaller places — not even necessarily a legacy daily. Ten years from now, I might be editor at some place that does not exist right now.”

But even as the Engagement Journalism graduates launch careers as what Jarvis calls “apostles” of this discipline, he playfully cautions that they may be journalistic Trojan Horses: “They come in and say, ‘Sure, I can do this,’ and then they start changing attitudes.”

He mentioned an alum who went to work for The Marshall Project and “just wowed them” with her Engagement Journalism strategies. The next year, on her model, The Marshall Project made an Engagement Journalism intern part of its staff.