Introduction to Community Reporting

We all deserve to have a say on the matters that affect our lives. Whether it is an achievement or a crisis, our experiences are important and we all have the right to be heard, especially when reporting harm or injustice.

Historically people’s voices have been ignored by those in power and their life experiences overlooked in favour of professional expertise. That is especially true if the groups are already marginalised within society. Those who are isolated often have the least opportunities to speak and be heard. But things are starting to change.

Over the last decade, driven by the advancement of technology and a slow and subtle shift in power, there is an emerging movement called ‘community reporting’ that is challenging the rules of who gets heard and held to account. Over the course of this short training series, we hope to share a little bit of insight into community reporting so that you can explore ways to introduce or enhance it within your own networks. We look at how to set up community reporting networks, how to explain the concept and get people excited about unearthing unheard stories and new ideas.

Welcome to our community reporting course, we’re very excited to have you with us.

As you watch and listen, please use the comments section under each video as a space to add any comments or ask us any questions you have, as well as interacting with colleagues from the other organisations taking part.

This first module introduces the concept of a community reporter and the role they can play in bringing underreported stories to light.

So firstly, what is community journalism? Sometimes known as participatory journalism or citizen reporting. Essentially, it’s members of a community playing a more active role in gathering or recording or disseminating news. Often it’s seen as an alternative to the media,
a kind of activist form of newsgathering. But essentially, it’s often a response to the fact that the media doesn’t often get deep enough into society and into our communities.

On Our Radar was founded in 2012 in the wake of a huge civil uprising called the Arab Spring. A citizen-led revolution was toppling dictatorships across North Africa and the Middle East. A big increase in mobile ownership meant that these revolutions were captured live by those citizens from a thousand angles, sending real-time news feeds out to the world. These weren’t polished broadcasts, they weren’t produced by people with press passes or training. They were raw, real time accounts streamed via video, wonky photos or short texts sent to twitter. They triggered global conversation on social media as well as feeding into the media, who were struggling to get into the spaces using traditional models. In this way, all those texts, and recordings, captured on people’s mobile phones shaped both the news agenda and world history.

The role of the community or citizen reporter during the Arab Spring radically changed the rules around who makes media. Traditionally, the media was a profession that rarely made room for the voices of women and girls, deaf or disabled people, minority communities, or those in vulnerable situations. Community reporting opens this right up and offers society a chance to get a far deeper, more accurate picture about people’s experiences, as well as giving a platform to the human stories that are missing.

The strength of community reporting lies in trust and access. Communities have access to their own spaces and the people around them that they know will trust them and will share information more readily than they would with an outsider. So armed with basic technology but lots of trust and access to community spaces, ordinary people become the creators of news.

While we are not in the middle of a citizen revolution, we are living through extraordinary times, and many are experiencing unprecedented levels of crisis. There has never been more need for alert and active community reporting; to reveal both the terrible impacts of the pandemic and the entrenched issues that were there long before the lockdown began. But also to capture the resilience and ideas, the community coping strategies that can inspire others to take action and move forward. While lockdowns make it impossible to take to the street, our social networks are alive and full of information if we ask. In this way, we can also be responsible for shining a light on the shadows and shaping a deeper story of society.

Mobile technology has empowered citizens to become producers of insight.

Does anyone know when the first mobile phone was released? Well it goes back further than you might think! The first attempts at a wireless phone were by the Germans in 1918, when they were tested for military trains. The first ever real mobile telephone call was made in the US in 1973. That handset didn’t go on sale until 1983 and then it cost $4,000! In the UK, comedian Ernie Wise made the first public phone call on New Years Day in 1985, splendidly dressed in a top hat while standing outside a pub in east London. How’s that for some random knowledge!

Since then mobile phones have rippled around the world, reaching almost ever populated part of the planet. They have made instant communication cheap, fast and easy and have connected social and trade networks in a way that was previously unimaginable.

For something so small, the mobile phone has had a staggering impact and nowhere more so than in journalism and newsgathering. Until recently, only qualified reporters and professional journalists were trusted to tell the world about a crisis or a matter of community importance. Formal communications training was expensive and inaccessible to most people. To gather and share news, you needed camera and sound equipment that was unavailable to most people. As a result, a small group of elite people were responsible for shaping the way the world understood one another.

Since the arrival of mobile phones and, particularly mobile internet, information has started to flow from communities everywhere. It’s like a huge dam has broken. Under the sheer volume of mobile and digital content, the media, NGOs and governments are all scrambling to change the way they get information. People no longer need to wait for a news reporter to arrive and ask them questions. Today, someone in every community in the world has a mobile phone that can at the very least send text and call through information. Simple text and voice reports are the cornerstone of community-led storytelling.Smartphones can also enable people to share stories via messenger services such as WhatsApp, or capture news reports using video or photography.

Because people instinctively carry their mobiles with them all the time, they are there when communication or monitoring teams are not. They are there as community events unfold and they are in people’s pockets when emotions are high and reactions are raw. This is rarely captured by traditional journalism or research techniques. Because of this, mobile is such an exciting tool for reporting – a little bit of power in everyone’s pocket.

So now we should have convinced you about how wonderful community reporting is and how mobile can help to shift power and amplify voices! Now it’s time to start thinking about HOW we can mobilize our own communities to start reporting. While many community reporter networks spring up spontaneously, often in response to a crisis or breaking news story, there is a great deal of value in purposefully setting up community networks and investing in their capacity to document community issues when they emerge.

Before we go any further, you might be asking yourself – Who can and should be a community reporter? Well the great news is that absolutely anyone can be a community reporter. We always say that curiosity is the key ingredient – an active interest in what is happening around the community and a drive to capture and share it.

Over the next few modules we will look at the models of reporting that you might want to consider and explore in your own communities. Each model has a shape and a place in community journalism.

To recap, the general role of a community reporter is:

• To act as a reporting bridge between their local community and influential platforms
• To use personal and community spaces to sensitively record issues affecting people’s lives.
• To share that information with relevant people and platforms

Community reporting can take very different shapes, but each of them engages communities collecting news and stories.

We will look at three slightly different approaches that all make sense for different situations.

A Longitudinal Journey, which is the long term coverage of a steadily unfolding story from a range of shared experiences; and Deep Dives – in-depth exploration of a story by an individual or small group; we also work on Reporting sprints, which are rapid coverage of swiftly emerging stories curated from a range of varying community vantage points

A Longitudinal Journey is a great way to tell a story that takes place over an extended period of time. It gives you the opportunity to develop your skills over that period and build your confidence as a reporter. This method has its risks though, especially if you are dealing with subjects that have health issues or those with chaotic personal lives.

A Deep Dive is a great way of exploring a topic in depth. If you are dealing with a complex story in which there are many different groups and viewpoints, a deep dive will allow you to fully explore each point of view and present the story in its entirety. A dive does not need to be short; it could be a day long or spread out over several months, as it is not the time period that is relevant but the depth of community access. It works well when a trained community reporter with mobile access is tasked with crowdsourcing insight from groups who lack the mobile connections, language, literacy or perhaps confidence to engage as reporters in their own right.

Sometimes you will be reporting on issues that are taking place in real time, and that might be fast paced and constantly shifting. Reporting sprints are a reporting model where you can enable networks of individuals from marginalised communities who are at the centre of life-changing national or international events to report their stories and the stories of their communities in real-time.

Too often institutional processes are driven and dominated by those who have the confidence, resources and opportunities to make themselves heard. The lived experiences of those who are marginalised by poverty, poor health, disability, stigma, conflict and displacement are often complex and diverse, yet are routinely explored and assessed through an outsider’s lens and language, tethered to funding windows and project timelines. Meanwhile, insight held by marginal communities is such a valuable asset to institutional learning, is often overlooked or masked by intermediaries.

A rights-based call for voice and inclusion can garner consensus from a moral direction but can come up against organisational barriers of cost and capacity. Framing inclusion as an investment in communities can help release resources ring fenced for the purpose of community capacity building and encourage institutional buy-in.

But proposing voice and agency as an investment in more effective processes is a far more interesting proposition. This asset-based approach to participation builds on the value of community insight, framing it as a cost-effective shift that, as well as strengthening learning, offers counterbalances to the seismic public crises of division and marginalisation.

One of the joys of working with an asset-based approach is that its success speaks for itself. When something of value is required by one body and held by another, it is a relatively straightforward role to bridge the supply and demand – where the bridge-builder exists solely to close a gap that both sides struggle to navigate themselves. Communities hold insight that decision-makers need and news audiences want. Their voices are unusual, their world’s are unexplored and their form of expertise is untapped.

The insight shared through the community reporting projects has contributed to changes in electoral practice, medical practice, and governance. It has helped to comfort those with diagnoses, inform public audiences of hidden lives and offered a new way of looking at some of society’s most complex issues.

It can feel like you’re going the extra mile to set up these networks, but these stories will have more depth, authenticity and texture than someone from outside trying to produce these stories from afar. They will have more impact – depth of evidence, funding sources, change policies. Public wants authenticity – people pay more attention to someone telling their own story.

Community reporting differs from reporting done through a professional media apparatus in that it is undertaken by individuals amplifying stories from their communities that might not be heard otherwise, and in many cases utilizes consumer grade technologies such as mobile phones and handheld cameras.

Previously we spoke about what a community reporter IS, but it’s also important to know what a community reporter ISN’T. One of the ways to think about this is doing a S.W.O.T analysis.

The S of SWOT stands for strengths. Now, undoubtedly, community reporters’ strength is the trust that communities have in them. They are from the same community and their shared experiences mean they are more likely to tell community members something of importance than an outsider journalist or researcher. The other is the strength of their own lived experience. Life experiences are highly valuable and that enables community reporters to ask informed questions of those around them who have shared those experiences.

W in SWOT stands for weaknesses. They don’t have years of formal training like
professional journalists or researchers. People train hard and learn on the job to get where
they have. So the little boost of skills that we can give through training is not a replacement for the vocational skill set that professional journalists and researchers will have.

So the O is for opportunities. Community members have the access to move freely in their communities without being really conspicuous, they can speak the same language, and are familiar with the places people may be. Being present in a community all the time: living, breathing, seeing, bearing, witness to what’s happening around you can throw up so many reporting opportunities. If someone is curious and watchful they will be there when someone is ready to share their story for the first time or something happens that is key to capture and share

Now, finally the T stands for threats – reporting can bring risks and personal safety must come first. When someone is putting themself in a different role and giving themselves a slightly different perspective. they are going to open yourself up to that little bit of extra risk. So it’s really important to ensure that everyone is clear that no story, no information is ever, ever worth the risk to someone’s life, well-being or health. As community reporters actively open up space for people to tell them things, they may hear things that are hard to hear or come across things that really concern them. If that’s the case, we stress that they should stop, pause, and ask for guidance.

Dialogue sits at the very centre of participatory approaches. It is the result of a two-way process that goes beyond the extraction or prescription of information.

By extractive we mean systems that just suck information out of communities without any repsonse. For example, a survey or poll that does not share back any results with participants.

By prescriptive we mean systems that just push information into communities without enabling the communities to respond. An example might be a mobile health programme that broadcasts an SMS with health info to people’s handsets.

There is a squeamishness about relationships in organisations yet they are fundamental. Even in journalism, there is a lack of certainty as to how to maintain institutional boundaries when building trust. But someone is far more likely to remain engaged if they feel heard and understood.

Maintaining an equal transparent dialogue is one of the simplest ways to develop and sustain a professional relationship and it is the bedrock that we build our technology and methodology on. Tracking that dialogue in a shared system that other team Members can access helps to protect the process, maintain accountability and also helps ensure the dialogues are not lost. The result is the creation of a rich qualitative data set through tracked dialogue.

As well as building relationships, the dialogue itself can be a creative output. If a participant is struggling to find their voice, you can record a phone interview or track an SMS or online chat with them that helps to capture their experiences and reports. With their consent you could choose to publish the dialogue or edit and transcribe it so just the participant’s voice is heard.

So in a nutshell, conversation is queen when it comes to community reporting! Extractive and prescriptive models are far less likely to sustain engagement. When considering who might manage or mentor the community think about their capacity and appetite for dialogue – for the best networks are the most talkative!

For both smart or simple phone users, there are a range of different tools people can use for community reporting. Around the world, communities are using a range of SMS, phone calls and voicemails, and mobile audio and video and photo tools to capture and share news. One of our previous reporters called it ‘the power in your pocket’.

Audio and video can be a really powerful reporting tool, because it allows people to hear the voices of those involved. Most smartphones have inbuilt tools for recording audio and video, but members of your communities don’t have a smartphone, they can leave a voicemail report or request a callback to share a report over the phone.

WhatsApp, or our preferred chat app, Signal, is soaring in popularity as a communications channel and it is perfect for multimedia reporting. We use Signal to manage individual reporters and also to set up reporting groups, where everyone can come together to collaborate on stories or just offer feedback as people report in.

For those who are offline but still keen to write, SMS reports can mimic the ‘less is more’ approach to news sharing that has made Twitter and Instagram so successful. Short or ‘micro’ reports sent via SMS tend to be curtailed to around 160 characters can be standalone news items or thread together as a series of reports. One offline reporter from northern Sierra Leone once sent in a 300 word blog to us using just SMS. It was up on the news platform within 30mins.

We have regularly set up free virtual phone voicemail lines for people to ring and leave reports detailing their own experiences or summarising their community reporting. In one project, we encouraged reporters to set up community interviews and then ring the line when the interview was starting so the voicemail captured the dialogue. By using a virtual line, rather than a handset, we are able to download the voicemails as digital audio and then edit them, transcribe them or post them directly. Just a few ways of overcoming the digital divide!

In times of lockdown, or where someone is facing other challenges in getting out into their communities, then social media channels, chat apps and even making phone calls to friends and family can be used community newsgathering.

Dementia Diaries was a collaboration with people in the UK with early stage dementia. The project has become the first national archive of individuals’ experiences of living with dementia. It was one of the first Radar projects to use the Longitudinal Journey solution. Early scoping revealed how communications technology had become inaccessible for many participants. Therefore the group co-designed a simplified 3D printed mobile handset to enable reporters to ring a voicemail inbox and record independent audio diaries of their diverse experiences of dementia. These audio entries were curated and made accessible via the Dementia Diaries website with the intention of reaching both those with a diagnosis and public audiences. In the first 18 months, the network submitted over 3000 entries. Their collective insight was staggering.

Each participant received ongoing mentoring and support from Radar’s editorial team. Mentoring calls were tracked alongside a record of the diary entries submitted by each participant. This allowed the editorial and outreach team to work closely together to support individuals and encourage their storytelling. As well as reaching the general public through coverage on Buzzfeed, Sky News and European media outlets, the Dementia Diaries project contributed to the way local authorities, the NHS and other services manage and care for people with dementia, with packages of the audio diaries used by the NHS to train nurses and new hospital staff.

In the project evaluation the diarists said they felt that they had been able to contest predetermined ideas of dementia in society. In addition, the analysis of media coverage and social media responses showed that where people with dementia were directly involved in generating content, and where the content was presented in their words, it appeared to generate a greater sense of positive connectedness and empathy. The evaluation of the project demonstrated that Dementia Diaries had a positive impact on the lives of the individual diarists. They reported very positive health and social effects as a result of their participation, including bolstering confidence and increasing self-esteem.