In visits along Detroit’s Eight Mile Road, WDET teams asked what residents want the city to know about them? One repeated message in the Old Redford/Brightmoor areas: That things aren’t as dangerous there as some people say, and the residents haven’t given up making it better. Among the listeners at right: Ron Jones, with pen, and reporter Rob St. Mary. (Photo: WDET.)
Rules of Engagement 3
Out the station’s door: Where you find
ideas rooted in your community
Third in a series of articles by the executive director of public broadcasting’s National Center for Media Engagement.
Late last summer, Rus Peotter, g.m. at WGBY in Springfield, Mass., attended a community meeting in nearby Northampton.
he discussion turned to Northampton’s upcoming mayoral race, and people seemed uncertain about the election. While many recognized the names that would appear on the ballot, they didn’t know much about the candidates’ values or priorities. How could people learn more about the contenders and what they’d do as mayor? Could WGBY help?
Teaming with the local Chamber of Commerce, WGBY invited each candidate in for a conversation to be recorded, broadcast and distributed online. The Chamber helped raise the money to cover costs and handled the logistics, with guidance from Peotter and WGBY. The result was solid, relevant content — two 30-minute shows that helped local citizens better know the candidates and their proposals for Northampton. By listening to the community and taking collaborative action, WGBY provided a valuable public service that informed local citizens and contributed to a more vigorous civic dialogue.
“It would never have happened if I hadn’t been at that community meeting,” Peotter admitted. “And to me, that underscores the importance of being out in the community. It’s not only where the audiences are, but it’s also often the source of content ideas and other opportunities for public media to meaningfully serve our constituents.”
Increasingly, station general managers like Peotter find that their time is best spent out in the community, building relationships and listening carefully to local concerns. That role demands a special type of collaborative leadership, a critical component of effective community engagement.
Informing traditional content
When stations like WGBY engage successfully with their communities, they discover and understand things that inform and strengthen traditional content, including journalism. Last summer, Brenda Williams-Butts and her community engagement team at WNYC in New York worked closely with the news department to organize a joint field trip to the South Bronx.
Five teams of staff members from the news and community engagement departments — three or four people per team — met and talked with South Bronx residents and community-based organization leaders about challenges and opportunities in the neighborhood. They signed up people to participate in the Public Insight Network (PIN) and recorded their views with Flip cameras.
“Our objective was to strengthen ties in the South Bronx community and document knowledge and information about the community and its perspective,” said Williams-Butts. “The most important thing is that we built relationships and learned things about the community that we didn’t know. Some of what we learned finds its way into news stories or other content. Whether it’s The Brian Lehrer Show, the news, The Takeaway or whatever, we’re trying to build a community conversation on-air, online and on the ground,” she adds. “And the more perspectives and voices we can bring to that conversation, the better.”
Stations like WNYC, WDET and others have begun pairing the Public Insight Network with their community engagement work. With support from CPB, PIN uses digital technology to bring together a network of citizens who agree to share their expertise, insights and knowledge with experienced reporters. Coupled with robust community-engagement efforts, the two approaches can strengthen a station’s content.
Mikel Ellcessor, g.m. at WDET in Detroit, says his station has done just that. Partnering with a community organization named Blight Busters, WDET is organizing and facilitating conversations in neighborhoods along Detroit’s 8 Mile Road, a stretch of Michigan highway that starkly divides the city by race and wealth. It’s a chance for the station to listen (which is a crucial first step of a community-engagement strategy) and learn about Detroit communities where there are few regular public radio listeners. To build trust and have authentic conversations, the station doesn’t record or broadcast the events.
“But,” Ellcessor adds, “we do go back to some of the participants as sources and get their voices on our air when the occasion arises. . . . We’re opening up and including a wider array of voices. It’s not just city and suburban, it’s also race and class. We’re bridging the 8 Mile — there’s no question. We have a wider array of voices, and you can hear it on our air.”
Stations will always need trained journalists to aggregate, vet, analyze and interpret the news. But, given the experiences of WGBY, WNYC and WDET, that job can be easier, and the product enhanced, in organizations that have an engagement ethos and systems that can incorporate the community’s diverse array of voices.
‘Content’ need not be canned
As public radio and television stations embrace their roles as conveners, connectors and collaborators, ideas about what constitutes content are evolving, too. For example, through the CPB-funded American Graduate initiative, more than 60 stations nationwide are collaborating with their communities to address the dropout crisis affecting our youth. Stations such as WGVU in Grand Rapids, Mich., are connecting middle-school students with mentors. Stations such as WGBY, North Carolina Public Radio in Raleigh-Durham and KVIE in Sacramento, Calif., are training youth in radio and multimedia production to empower them to tell their own stories. And in Reno, Nev., KNPB recently held an event that brought together the governor, students, business leaders and university coaches to discuss the local dropout problem and consider collaborative solutions.
Other examples abound. Austin’s popular Triple A station KUT uses its air to recruit volunteers for local nonprofits through a campaign called “Get Involved.” KUT produces and airs short features — each profiling a spotlighted group — and invites listeners to check the group’s website and learn more about volunteer opportunities. In the past six years they’ve provided this service for almost 80 organizations.
“Frankly, we look for organizations that serve underserved members of the community . . . folks that probably don’t listen to KUT,” says Hawk Mendenhall, p.d. “But we have such a large reach, and the idea is to get the folks that can do some of these things out in the communities where there aren’t a lot of resources.”
In situations like these, the “product” isn’t necessarily a broadcast program. It may be a meeting, a facilitated discussion, a youth radio club or a publicity effort to raise awareness or connect people with community resources.
Regardless of platform or product, we must do our best to make sure that the activities are conducted in accordance with public media’s strong reputation for quality and integrity. After all, we live in a time when people access content via many devices and experiences, and they should be able to assume that stations apply the same standards to everything they do. That’s part of the public-media brand promise.
Guarding editorial integrity
Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) has a long track record of engaging in what were once nontraditional editorial partnerships. TPT will soon celebrate the 10th anniversary of Minnesota Channel, their effort to partner with local nonprofits to co-produce content for broadcast, often with the partner having an editorial or funding role or both. It’s an intriguing model that has reaped benefits for TPT and the Twin Cities community.
Still, arrangements like these in which community partners play a role in content can make some people uncomfortable and raise legitimate concerns about opening the door to editorial influence and conflicts of interest.
“Nobody said anything about giving up editorial control,” observes Bill Hanley, TPT’s longtime v.p. for public engagement. “We always get lots of opinions from a lot of smart people, but of course we still have final say over what goes on our air. We make it very clear to our partners that we have editorial standards that we will not compromise.
“In 10 years we have had just a very few disputes with partners about editorial direction and integrity, and we have ended those partnerships decisively and promptly,” Hanley says. “The truth is that the vast majority of our partners care as much as we do about the honesty and integrity of the content. They know it’s in their best interest to help us maintain our standards.”
For Minnesota Channel and others, it’s a remarkably different landscape from the situation in the 1980s, when many public broadcasters adopted editorial guidelines that came out of their conference at the Wingspread conference center in Wisconsin.
Since then, the emergence of the Internet, digital channels, social media, and mobile devices has demanded that stations now publish on multiple platforms and often engage in more complex editorial partnerships. Editorial standards haven’t necessarily kept pace with the changes. New content arrangements, new social media tools and a deeper understanding of relevant local service have also brought new challenges in how we think about, and apply, our editorial guidelines.
Over the past year, the CPB-funded Editorial Integrity for Public Media project (see box below) has addressed that challenge. They’ve held an inclusive dialogue among stations, national organizations, philanthropic leaders, producers, journalists and media scholars to inform and shape a new foundation of principles, policies, and practices that both hew to the core values and best traditions of public broadcasting and help realize the enormous potential of emerging, digitally driven public media.
Early next year, the project team expects to complete its work and disseminate a series of ideas to guide stations through setting policies and practices.
Toward deeper relevance
Ironically, as we in public media work hard to safeguard editorial integrity and avoid misperceptions, we can inadvertently compromise other values — such as diversity. Sometimes we’re uncomfortable with voices that sound different, so we go to the same sources over and over. Or we invite new voices in, but they turn us down, maybe because we haven’t built trusting relationships with them by engaging them on their terms first.
“Some people say they don’t listen to public radio because they don’t hear people like [themselves] on the air,” explains Mike Arnold, senior director of content development and strategy at PRI. “Community engagement can help bridge that gap by connecting us with people who aren’t currently part of our direct constituency. If that knowledge translates to content, community engagement can be a growth strategy.”
Indeed, changing demographics present an enormous opportunity to broaden our community networks, better reflect the communities we serve, and deliver more relevant content and essential local service to a wider swath of people. But we may need to engage them first.
“That is the thing of the thing,” adds WDET’s Ellcessor. “It takes institutional leadership and leadership courage to say to your editorial team, ‘We’re going to restructure what we’re doing.’”
During a session at the recent National Educational Telecommunications Association Conference in Kansas City, Mo. CPB President Pat Harrison described the transition from outreach to engagement. “Outreach is about pushing out information,” she said. “Engagement is a shift in mindset about building a relationship with the community. It’s about being out in the community, meeting people where they are, truly understanding them and then working with them to serve their needs in ways that are relevant and meaningful to their lives.”
The key to unlocking that potential lies in getting out and engaging the community honestly and authentically. And you might discover some new content in the process. You could ask WGBY’s Rus Peotter, but he’s probably out at another community meeting.
Copyright 2011 American University