Building reach with community-centric media
This post, and others in this series, was originally written in English, our director’s first language. As is our practice, the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund will continue to offer translations of our updates and public writing along with bilingual office hours, interpretation of info sessions and other events to make our thinking and our processes more accessible.
Earlier this month at the North Carolina Network of Grantmakers conference, I joined other funders to explore how we are “Better Together,” whether we’re working to close the digital divide, put our values into action, or own our foundations’ origin stories.
Better together is apt since the task of building North Carolina’s future is all of our work. And yet, I wondered, have we as funders found ways to open on-ramps to that shared undertaking? Are we reaching people who have already been shaping change for generations?
Nora Ferrell, Director of Communications at the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust and Fund Advisory Board member, touched on just this when she said that this “deep internal work has to move beyond our foundations and into communities” during a plenary on foundations grappling with their pasts and using that knowledge to inform their future like the Trust is.
I was on site for this event in my role as Director of The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund to host a conversation with our grant partners about how community media can serve as a conduit to deeper community connections, learning, and listening. Understanding communities–and, more accurately, understanding community members–and finding last-mile connections to ensure our work is useful for its intended recipients goes far beyond the technical exercises of developing messages and choosing channels.
Community-centered media offer a remedy to systems that do not serve everyone and ready-made partnerships for funders to reach historically marginalized communities we prioritize.
Our grant partners give me a front-row seat to how that works in practice. Two of them, JMPro Community Media and WNCU, joined me for that conversation.
JMPro’s participatory, responsive engagement ensures people can hear their communities’ realities across a range of broadcast, print, and digital distribution strategies. Their Spanish, Mam, and K’iche’ coverage expands culturally competent news and information across the mountains.
WNCU is an NPR affiliate licensed to North Carolina Central University serving a 100-mile radius around Durham, NC, with a range of jazz, gospel, and other music paired with public affairs programming online, in-app, and broadcast on 90.7 FM. Their work tackles the local manifestations of NC’s persistent issues with newsroom diversity, news access, inclusive news perspectives and gaps in local content.
Both organizations democratize access to the tools of storytelling and reporting for youth, elders, marginalized communities, and everyone in between. Belonging to the communities they serve shapes how these organizations work, who they hire, and how they operate their businesses.
Meeting the Needs That Commercial Media Often Don’t See
Organizations that operate this way are skilled at working around barriers to access to deliver news and info that meets needs they are uniquely positioned to see. Though digital strategies can be very effective, they don’t work where people don’t have internet –often, those disconnected people need the information most. In North Carolina, an estimated 1.1 million people don’t have broadband access or can’t afford it, according to the NC Division of Broadband and Digital Equity. And those with access to broadband may not have relevant local news, as revealed in the latest News Census from the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM).
There’s something even bigger at stake here, though. The historical commercial news business model hinges on reaching audiences who are valuable to their advertiser clients. Responses to a recent diversity audit by CISLM and The North Carolina Local News Workshop revealed mostly metro-based, largely white newsrooms, and predominantly white leadership, which limits how stories are told, whose stories are prioritized, and the trust, access organizations have to communities of color. Communities who are “hard to reach” are often excluded from news access because of how race and class make them less marketable. I lean here on the analysis of the Media 2070 Project and Victor Pickard’s recent piece in Columbia Journalism Review.
Alternatively, community-centered media’s relationship with their audiences does not demand the creation or scaling of a general audience to drive profit. There are simply different foundational elements in place.
There’s more to say about the gaps in our news and information ecosystem and the people at work closing them, which I’ll take up in future posts. For now, I want to return to the ways community media and philanthropy are better together.
Built on Best Practices
JMPro Community Media co-founders Magaly Urdiales and Julio Tordoya and WNCU General Manager Lackisha Freeman shared with me a few best practices for funders to work with organizations like theirs to meet communities where they are, build trusted channels, and keep community at the center of communications strategy and execution. In the spirit of shared learning and growth, I’d love to share some of their wisdom with you:
On Partnerships:
Broaden your range of potential communications partners to include organizations producing news and information for a community rather than about them, even if your geography has a range of readily identifiable news organizations.
Trusted messengers may be journalists, or they may be community-based organizations.
On Trust-Building:
Targeted reach and trust are more important than scale for effective communication. Audience numbers belie the community impact of specifically serving people underserved or neglected by other outlets in a geography.
Leaders exercise a duty of care to their communities and will not sell their access in transactional ways.
Trust the insights community media leaders share about what communities need and how best to reach them - it’s their core expertise.
On Sustainability:
This work is a remedy to a longstanding market failure. Offer flexible funding, rather than campaign funding, to acknowledge and support the relationally intensive work community media undertake at the grassroots.
Black and Hispanic/Latino leaders have a harder path to institutional philanthropic funding than their white peers. Allies are needed to navigate to the resources necessary to sustain these organizations.
Capacity building support beyond the check can be invaluable if offered with a growth mentality, rather than a deficit frame.
These true partnerships serve communications goals, contribute to programmatic learning because of community media’s wide-ranging insights, and make an impact for communities. As Urdiales noted, their work has helped more than 400 second-generation immigrant youth get fired up about voting and civic engagement. Freeman told about the way WNCU’s podcast Subject to Change created a connection between HBCU students’ early pandemic experiences and Durham’s under-reported Black history.
Where to Go From Here
If you’re interested in starting or expanding upon your own work with local news, community media, or trusted messengers, here are a few paths forward that don’t require organizational strategy changes:
Allocate funds from your communications budget as sponsorship or operating support for community-centric media who already have trust with people you seek to reach.
Join a pooled fund to leverage your investment with other local and national funders, learn from existing work, and benefit from the added expertise, capacity of NC Local News Lab Fund staff.
Fund a news and information ecosystem study, like the ones outlined here, in your geography to surface the players with the trust and reach needed to ensure your communications get to the people you intend.
The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund offers a pooled fund and guidance on understanding your local news and information landscape. If you’re interested in learning more about supporting community media in any of these ways or about what organizations are at work in your geography, email me at lizzy@nclocalnews.org.
This is one installment of an ongoing conversation about how building a more equitable local news and information ecosystem advances a future where everyone in NC can thrive. Sign up for our email newsletter to get updates like this delivered directly to your inbox.