Inviting — and making sense of — meaningful participation

It’s hardly revelatory that journalism does not reside at the center of most folks’ lives today. We all now have more access to information, to analysis, and to opinions than at any point in human history, so newsrooms play a less central role on where and how we learn about the world than they did just a few years ago.

But while information continues to proliferate, we all agree there are plenty of areas where our experience consuming it is lacking, and where journalism might fill essential gaps. In particular, news organizations have the ability to translate, synthesize, and curate what can too often become noise into meaningful, actionable insights for audiences.

This requires, though, for newsroom to embrace a participatory model — an embrace has been slow in coming. No doubt, today’s information environment means the industry has the potential to be more participatory than ever before; the methods of communication exist so that journalism can, in theory, act as a living, active process among news organizations and the communities they serve.

However, newsroom staffs continue to shrink, even as the territories they cover continue to grow and get more complex. Considering that news organizations have rarely had a handle on serving the full range of voices within the communities they seek to serve to begin with — even when budgets were more robust — it can easily seem out of reach to sustain such acts of participation and to continue to feel the pressure to “stick to the basics,” even as those basics seem to service a dwindling audience

I know this feeling all too well. Many of my own experiments over the years — such as launching a “community liaison” team at Univision several years ago — have failed to persist beyond the pilot.

When they’re attempted, newsroom initiatives aimed at adopting a participatory culture carry significant risks: promises that can’t be followed through on, an endless well of audience feedback that we can all get lost in, conversations that devolve into a toxic cesspool without the necessary support systems for effective moderation.

No wonder it feels safer for many to continue to steer away from encouraging participation in any scalable way.

Tested platforms exist that invite people to participate in productive ways. For instance, in the past, I’ve had the opportunity to help lead projects that use digital tools such as Polis to help newsrooms gather widespread public feedback. (See more about our pilot with Bowling Green Daily News via Slate and our work with Louisville Public Media.)

Such tools can be highly effective at gathering feedback but still provide challenges for journalists and other stakeholders — and for audiences — to make sense of the resulting information that is collected in a way that can drive understanding and action, that can move beyond the individual ideas collected. That’s especially true, again, when resources in most newsrooms have never been more strapped.

How can journalists invite participation and use it to help audiences make sense of what is happening in their communities? How can public engagement be harnessed productively, to provide well-rounded feedback that takes into account ideas, sentiment, and knowledge from throughout the community while still providing cogent insight?

This is where the promise of new technologies — AI and otherwise — can be especially productive. Discussions about automation in newsrooms have too often focused on continued cost savings and job elimination — for instance, on utilizing conversational AI to generate public-facing stories. But I’m especially interested in how these tools can assist journalists in making use of a wider range of inputs to inform the newsroom’s agenda and the stories they produce.

For instance, Innovation Engine is currently working with Google’s Jigsaw team to utilize their new Sensemaking tools in ways that could help journalists and other stakeholders make efficient use of a significant volume of public feedback. By utilizing new capabilities for data categorization and pattern recognition, data-comfortable journalists — who do not necessarily need to be schooled in significant data analysis — can use these tools to invite public feedback, make sense of it, and provide insights in return.

In 2025, I hope we find new ways for newsrooms, key institutions, and audiences to have access to tools that quickly and efficiently help handle what humans struggle to do well — like find patterns amidst a sea of input — and then focus journalists’ energies on what they can do best — that translation, that curation, that synthesis.