Earn the trust of a diverse audience by investing in relationships

We can’t talk about widespread distrust of journalists and declining readership trends without first talking about who mainstream news was historically created for (and, who it historically left out). Most newsrooms already know how to create content for middle class, educated, and white audiences, but we’re missing so much of the story if we ignore the repairing and rebuilding work that needs to happen with the readers who have been massively underserved.

If we’re willing to make the investment, it means we can create journalism that’s inclusive of diverse communities and generates greater impact. At Chalkbeat, we’ve seen this journalism propel state action, shut down corrupt schools, and elevate voices often not heard at decision-making tables. It’s slow, diligent work, and it’s worth it.

The news industry has been terrible at gaining and growing a diverse readership. Historically, it has cared more about advertising and subscription dollars than public trust and community service, and it shows. Often, news organizations try to solve this problem and grow new audiences by investing in social media and new SEO strategies. Without allocating time and resources, creating audience and engagement teams and saying, “Go forth, build the readership among X neighborhood or X group of people,” won’t be successful. Newsrooms are often stretched incredibly thin, so the harder tasks of changing behavior and culture are overtaken by the immediate needs. Organizations invest in tools, but not in trust.

We bake listening into everything we do.

Authentic listening in journalism doesn’t just magically happen. You have to design intentional patterns of behavior. Reader callouts — using Google forms to pose a question or prompt to readers and letting their responses help guide our coverage — have helped fuel Chalkbeat’s reporting for years. These surveys let us hear from several voices all at once and shape our journalism on the front end, rather than our reporters showing up to a community meeting or school pick-up line with a story already in mind. We work with nonprofits, community organizations, and neighborhood experts to help get our surveys in front of non-Chalkbeat readers.

We use free survey tools to create reader callouts. Here, we asked about early learning experiences and received responses from parents, educators, and school leaders.

COVID-19 made this work even more essential as in-person spaces for our journalists to hear new perspectives disappeared. We launched more than 40 callouts in 2021, and heard from over 6,300 people on topics ranging from learning in a pandemic to gun violence and student debt. We used these surveys to infuse our journalism with parent, teacher, and student voices at critical moments in time. And we don’t stop there. We return to these groups of people with new information and new questions — to make sure we’re answering the most pressing questions and producing journalism that matters to them. This helps us form a community built around relationships and good information.

We proactively elevate voices, and hold ourselves accountable.

When people feel represented in journalism — when they hear and read voices that they trust and that remind them of their own stories — trust is built. But not enough newsrooms have systems in place to hold them accountable to source diversity. This is changing. We’ve started internal audits, where we track our source diversity and are now building a product with the Reynolds Journalism Institute to make this work long lasting at Chalkbeat and newsrooms beyond. We have to develop better systems industry-wide to keep track of whose voices and perspectives we’re elevating in order to hold ourselves accountable.

Since 2019, Chalkbeat has tracked the racial demographics of its First Person essayists in order to audit the diversity of those represented on the site. We are building a tool to help the newsroom track demographics of the sources within our stories.

We use inclusive language and style.

We want people to feel seen and understood in our stories, not misrepresented or othered by our word choices. We never assume — we always ask people to self-identify. We are careful never to “other” anyone by using a description that separates or denigrates them. Instead of using a label to identify someone with a disability, situation, or illness, Chalkbeat uses people-first language, such as a student experiencing homelessness rather than a homeless student. Like reporting, language should be continuously evolving and responsive. After George Floyd’s death, Chalkbeat added antiracism to our list of core values, promising that by committing to antiracism we can “offer stronger, more honest coverage, and build more trust with our readers.” As we reflected on what that meant with respect to language, we decided to capitalize the word Black when describing race, people, and culture, giving the term and the people and culture it describes as much weight and respect as when we capitalize the words Indigenous or Latino.

These are some examples of how Chalkbeat uses people-first language to be as inclusive as possible.

We design events that prioritize listening and trust building.

Events are a powerful tool to elevate quality journalism, to reach new communities with your work in creative ways, and to think strategically about creating impact. But too often, journalism organizations design events to elevate voices that already have a lot of power and platform, or create events that won’t attract readers beyond their usual circles.

Designing events around listening, conversation, and centering new voices has always been part of our strategy. We elevated students as experts on their education experiences and connected them to decision makers. We strived to make in-person events easy to attend by providing childcare, translation, and meals. Whether in person or virtual, our goal of listening has remained the same. We view our events as service journalism — and as a way to reach new audiences. In our pivot to virtual events, our goal of listening remained the same. 

Chalkbeat's events prioritize elevating the voices of students and educators.

An unexpected benefit of the virtual world is that we could design events for anyone across the nation to listen and learn, and we got feedback in our post-event surveys that our virtual events were helpful and engaging. We know we reached new folks with them — of the 2,271 event attendees who joined live, 1,758 became new newsletter subscribers.

Lastly, we also ask our event attendees for voluntary demographic information, so we can hold ourselves accountable to creating events that attract a wide range of people. Of event attendees over the last year who took our survey, 52% identified as a person of color.

We’re creating products that make high-value information easy and accessible.

Digital media — like all types of media — is guilty of producing content in formats that aren’t accessible to many of the people we want to reach. Two of our markets — Memphis and Detroit — have particularly terrible internet-at-home rates, so we’ve used SMS tools to text people with important information. One example: When the pandemic started and school buildings began closing, Memphis parents told us that it was difficult to understand the district’s new food distribution system. We published maps in English and in Spanish online that made it easy to find free food sites, and we created a texting tool for folks without internet access. The tool was used nearly 300 times within two weeks— about half by Spanish speakers. We made accessing high-value information easy — and that builds trust and loyalty.

SMS tools have allowed Chalkbeat to connect with people who may not have reliable internet access. We've used this to share free meal sites and solicit questions before town hall meetings.