Today's trust tip: Engagement is key to earning trust (part one)
Hi there. Joy here.
Most journalists have an avalanche of feedback coming at them. Emails, phone calls, social media messages, online comments … it’s overwhelming. If you’re thinking there’s no way to thoughtfully respond to all of it, you’re probably right.
And yet you know being responsive to your audience and defending your work are important, right?
It’s been more than a decade since I dove headfirst into the world of engagement, and I definitely see trust-building as a subset of that work. At its core, engagement is about making sure journalism is focused on the people it aims to serve.
I love how Jennifer Brandel of Hearken describes it in this post.
"Engagement happens when members of the public are responsive to newsrooms, and newsrooms are in turn responsive to members of the public. It’s a feedback loop."
"A litmus test your newsroom can use to know if there’s actual engagement going on (by our definition at least) is this question: What role does your audience play in your journalism? If there’s no meaningful answer, it’s likely there’s no meaningful engagement."
So, what does engagement mean to us at Trusting News? We talk a lot about asking for input or feedback, including strategies like:
✅ soliciting questions to guide coverage
✅ taking questions about your journalism in a live video
✅ doing an AMA-style text-based Facebook post
✅ conducting an audience survey
We talk about being truly social — being in conversation with the people you aim to serve. That involves a lot of listening and responding, not just talking. Much of what we train newsrooms to do is fundamentally about noticing and addressing audience questions and perceptions.
It's also about defending our work as journalists. We advise newsrooms on how to craft a response when their integrity is questioned or when misassumptions about their work are rampant.
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