Engage communities of color with your election coverage
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By Massarah Mikati
Communities of color have been the focal point of elections and campaigns, especially over the past few years. But because of a history of media harming those communities, many lack trust in news outlets. Election SOS’ Massarah Mikati was joined in conversation by Brandon Tensley, Capital B political reporter, Kavitha Rajagopalan, Asian Media Initiative Director with the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, and Vanessa Maria Graber, News Voices Director at Free Press, as they explored how you can authentically reach and engage these communities with your election coverage, and make your reporting relevant to their daily lives. The session will help you develop election coverage that is created with and for, not just about, communities of color.
This incredibly insightful discussion covered so much, including:
🤝 Actionable ways to build trust with communities of color
⚠️ Advice on navigating sensitive topics, such as the Israel-Gaza War
📨 Strategies to ensure your reporting reaches communities after publication
We’ve packed this post with the best goodies from the conversation:
Full recording
Top takeaways
- Engage communities of color by focusing on people-centered reporting that highlights the human impact of policies and legislation.
- Amplify and support community-based news media, especially those serving marginalized groups within diverse communities.
- Conduct community information needs assessments to understand barriers to civic participation and provide accessible, multilingual resources.
- Build long-term relationships and trust by consistently showing up — especially in-person — listening, and demonstrating a commitment to the community, such as through volunteering and service journalism.
- When covering sensitive topics, do thorough research, present factual information, and include diverse perspectives to avoid further harming communities.
- Develop scalable engagement plans with clear short-term and long-term goals, and track measurable impact to demonstrate the value to organizational leadership.
Conversation highlights
On making your election reporting relevant to communities of color
“Give human dimension to… legislation and policies. Big newsrooms always talk about [it] in a way that’s detached from the everyday lives of people.”
-Tensley
“It’s very important to understand what your community is looking for before you produce reporting.”
-Rajagopalan
On building trust with communities of color
“I think it’s important to understand that community newsrooms play a critical role in providing language access. But language access is not just the spoken language — it’s also the language of the community and the cultural touch points.”
-Rajagopalan
“You have to do more to show that you’re an ally and that your journalism outlet is actually doing a public service.”
-Graber
“All journalism, in the end, is you’re asking people to trust you with their experiences and their stories. So that requires you earning that trust and investing in them in return.”
– Rajagopalan
On non-extractive engagement
“When people want to track impact, I think of short-term and long-term goals. In the short term, we’re going to meet lots of people, we’re going to do community mapping, we’re going to have listening sessions. And if you notice, none of that is content. That’s just doing the work to find out who the people are. And then long-term, that might be partnerships and co-creating stories together, building your source list.”
-Graber
“The Black Political Power Tour [is a] way to marry our digital journalism with the communities we serve by actually being in conversation with them… it’s a way for us to not stop at writing a story that we publish online.”
-Tensley
“The people that do [engagement] well make a long-term commitment, invest the resources that are needed, and they follow through with the things they say they’re going to do. That’s what makes it not extractive.”
-Graber
On maintaining trust while reporting on the Israel-Gaza war
“There is a legacy that we can call to in which communities of color use our newsrooms to support and show solidarity for each other. And I think it’s contingent upon organizations like mine to remind our newsrooms of that legacy and heritage.”
–Rajagopalan
“Look for whose voices are missing… You need to do research on this. You have to educate yourself.”
-Graber
“How do you ask the best questions to get the most rigorous, thoughtful answers and responses that can actually shine a light on the complexity of these issues? How do I ask questions that will actually be worth my interviewee’s time? Do I think this [story] will do justice to what I was told? Will this story make people feel proud of their contributions to it?”
-Tensley
“We have to engage in human-centered storytelling. The more time you spend in community, the more you begin to understand the complexities.”
-Graber
“Sometimes it’s good to stop trying to be cute and just make the point that you’re trying to make. There’s a lot of power in simplicity and not trying to dress things up too much.”
-Tensley
Engagement ideas
Tune into the full conversation for the nuanced, brain-powering insight. But lucky for you, the panelists also shared ideas for specific engagement tactics that you can start implementing immediately:
