Community-Centered Symposium attendees work together during a collaborative activity.
12 innovative community news projects that built trust and relationships
From student-led newsletters to cafecitos and audio history, the Community-Centered Symposium helped newsrooms and support orgs connect with their communities
This year our Community-Centered Symposium hit the road and convened at Mirror Indy in Indianapolis. Our co-hosts were kind enough to supply their space, support, enthusiasm (and maybe most importantly, endless coffee to everyone’s delight) for the journalists and news leaders who took part in our two-day workshop.
The mission of our Community-Centered Symposium is to help journalists build collaborative, community-centered initiatives that are innovative for their newsrooms. They ideate multiple ideas to propose for implementation when they return to their communities and learn from the sessions and cohort.
Each participant in the symposium walked away with practical and new-to-them projects with a plan to launch at least one in their community. Below we are sharing a few of the projects they created from the symposium workshop and with the support of their cohort and RJI, and their advice for newsrooms who want to replicate their ideas.
Here are the projects:
J. The Jewish News of Northern California
Held an event centering community stories, archives and local history that included a bank of rotary phones for participants to record voicemails about their lives.
Began hosting O’odham Media, an online platform dedicated to uplifting O’odham voices, culture, and lived experiences through writing and photography.
Held a community-centered gathering at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix to create a space for connection and listening that featured a series of interactive and participatory activities.
Launched a survey to gather input on how residents receive information and news, and ask about what topics they want to see covered more in local journalism. From that input, conducted a handful of listening sessions focused on one of the issues identified in the survey.
Sent each of the 37 participating news businesses a box of chocolates in the mail, with one simple ask: Upon receiving your “sweet treat,” please share a win in the private Slack channel. The wins submitted by cohort participants ranged from program-related successes, to broader newsroom achievements, to personal celebrations.
Teamed up with an after school program to have a listening session with students about what they want to see in the news, and then the students created our April newsletter.
Hosted two events at local coffee shops to kick off a new, traveling community engagement series called Coffee & Conversation.
Launched a community dinner for our audience of news leaders and product thinkers. We wanted to create a safe and joyful environment for people to talk about the challenges their newsrooms face around understanding or serving their audiences and how that spurs product decisions and impact measurement.
Comprehensive coverage of an environmental story led to The Edge readers throwing a party for the news site to celebrate both a victory for the forest when the judge ruled against the power line, and to celebrate The Edge having kept them all informed.
Partnered with Factchequeado to lead a workshop, for mostly folks with little experience with journalism, at the Queens Museum about how to identify misinformation and improve your information diet.
Built a centralized impact tracking system in Airtable to better document how our journalism is amplified and how it creates change over time.
Cite this article
Duncan, Kat (2026, June 2). 12 innovative community news projects that built trust and relationships. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/12-innovative-community-news-projects-that-built-trust-and-relationships/