Reimagining Journalism: taking a community-centered approach

Community-Centered Journalism doesn’t hold all the solutions, but it can play a role in helping to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the industry today

The future of journalism cannot look like the past. If we fail to do things differently then we will not address some of the biggest issues facing our industry today. That includes rebuilding trust, tackling news avoidance, and addressing long-term inequities in terms of whose stories get told and who gets to tell them.

These notions lie at the heart of a new report that makes the case for a more community-centered approach to journalism and the principles and processes that underpin it.

Published by the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon, and authored by me, Regina Lawrence and Andrew DeVigal, Redefining News: A Manifesto for Community-Centered Journalism outlines why fresh methods of journalistic storytelling — and story gathering — are needed and how to go about it.

Fundamental to this model is a belief that journalism should not involve reporting “on” a community, but “for” and “with” them. That means stepping away from traditional journalistic practices that have too often been…