Here at Abridged, Sacramento’s new nonprofit local news outlet based at the city’s PBS station, KVIE, we celebrated our one-month birthday by announcing the launch of the Community Reporters program, an initiative meant to put the power to tell Sacramento’s story in the hands of the people who live here. That might sound cliché, and the program might sound like many that have launched at other organizations, which often struggled to find footing and eventually closed up shop. But we don’t see this program as an add-on or side project. We see creators as a critical component of our mission to authentically cover the mosaic of communities that make up this region.
Arriving at the recognition that our small but mighty team of talented journalists can’t do it alone didn’t come easy. As journalists, we tend to think we can do things those without our training, education and experience can’t, and it’s true that our bar for quality journalism is high, and even higher when you’re trying to both establish a new brand and, in our case, protect the integrity and credibility of the PBS brand.
But journalism is not about the journalists. It’s about the people who live here and need a strong source of local news that goes far beyond the coverage shrinking teams can provide as legacy companies continue to underinvest in local news. And who knows a city better than the people who live there – even if they didn’t go to journalism school?
That’s why we’re casting a wide net in seeking contributors who are first and foremost dedicated to serving the community. Formal education or experience in journalism is not required, and in fact, we’re particularly interested in storytellers who are not already influenced by traditional newsroom culture and thought processes – like social content creators who are already doing high quality, boots-on-the-ground work that often carries forward many journalistic traditions, and have demonstrated that they can authentically engage audiences that traditional media outlets struggle to reach. With a little guidance and training, we believe we can align the work they’re already doing with the core principles like fact checking, fairness and a commitment to public service that power our journalism. We want people who can bring fresh eyes and thinking to the coverage, and we want them both representing and digging into communities that other local outlets too often ignore.
We’re actively working to learn from the lessons of past community programs that failed to work. First off, we’re paying our contributors a competitive rate for every story they publish. We’re not just offering the pride of a byline as compensation, we’re offering real money, which not only incentivizes the work, but also demonstrates the value of what our community reporters provide. We’ve also developed a robust training program drawn straight from foundational college-level reporting courses, and combined it with an ongoing series of workshops with journalists and nonprofits to provide advanced training on key topics like ethics, fact checking, the First Amendment and more. Community reporters will also have a dedicated staff editor and a direct line to the entire Abridged editorial team, so support is never far away.
We’re pairing the team with a newly created Community Insights Panel made up of local leaders representing different neighborhoods, backgrounds, and communities of shared interest to serve as a sounding board and an idea generation machine, furthering our effort to take a holistic, authentic approach to local news coverage.
Our goal is not only to build a small army of community reporters to expand what Abridged offers in the here and now, but to build a foundation for a new local news ecosystem in Sacramento that can sustain for many years to come.