VIDEO: How can journalists build community?

By Jennifer Neutel

Participants at a Global Media Forum workshop experienced a community-building exercise that drew them into deep discussions in groups of three.

The five workshop facilitators, which included The Gazette Company CEO and president Chuck Peters, wanted participants to experience a community-building exercise that could be mirrored in their own communities.

“I could not have asked for better engagement and development than occurred in those 90 minutes with people from all over the world,” says Chuck of the workshop.

Axiom News recently released this video documenting the workshop and what participants said they took away from the experience:

Participants asked each other questions such as: Why did you come to this room at this time? What common themes do you see among the three of you? What issues is your community facing and how could journalists engage in those issues? What gifts do you bring to a global community trying to develop best practices on these issues?

The Gazette Company is exploring community building as part of its effort to discover how a community can create information it finds meaningful.

In addition to Chuck, facilitators included Wartburg College Department of Communication Arts’ Travis J. Bockenstedt and Dr. Penni Pier, Axiom News CEO Peter Pula, and applied anthropologist Benjamin Smith.

“It was only fitting that we partnered with Axiom News and The Gazette Company to engage in a conversation about community building,” Travis says. The college’s Department of Journalism and Communication deeply values relationships that help it engage in conversation about using news media to build local communities, he says.

The Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum took place June 30 to July 2 in Bonn, Germany.

Related Post:
Global Media Forum workshop a unique community-building exercise

The Gazette Company’s We Create Here effort is one of three pilot sites participating in the ASNE/Journalism That Matters partnership exploring how and why news organizations are engaging with their communities. This story is written by Axiom News.

88x31
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Skip to toolbar