![]() Like many legacy media outlets, the Free Press is contending with dwindling resources and traditional perspectives that pose challenges to the newsroom’s desire to expand its coverage areas. Gopwani calls these steps “building blocks” that formed the foundation of the BridgeDetroit partnership and moved the Free Press team toward more fulsome coverage of Detroit and its many different communities. Also, a new Report for America fellow is focusing on economic mobility, as well as who’s included and excluded in Detroit’s post-pandemic recovery. It started by launching beats that focused on Metro Detroit, including poverty, opioid addiction through a “human” lens and how former inmates are reintegrating into society. Over the past few years, the Free Press has methodically built a solid foundation for reporting on underserved communities that eventually led to the BridgeDetroit partnership, according to Gopwani. “We know that we’re actually meeting audience needs.” The relationships with nonprofits help the Free Press “address issues that in some cases have been on our radar - but this helped us get to it faster - and in other cases, weren’t on our radar, but we’re covering things that people are finding important,” Gopwani says. BridgeDetroit, a new nonprofit journalism and engagement organization that collaborates with Detroiters to cover issues that matter most to them, is building a model to continually gauge reader priorities. Outlier runs an SMS service to take questions about audience needs, adapting it for COVID-19 questions, and now for questions about the election. This reputation enables it to more easily form partnerships with other local organizations, including community-driven media outlets that focus on topics or communities where the Free Press doesn’t have as much capacity and together, they can collaborate to better serve all of Detroit.Ĭase in point: This year, the Free Press is partnering with Outlier Media and BridgeDetroit. “The fact that a lot of Free Press reporters and editors are viewed as experts in their field and in their coverage areas has made people really comfortable about representing the organization and talking to people and, in some cases, bring people together for conversation.”Īs Detroit’s longstanding newspaper of record, the Free Press has both state-wide and national name recognition. In addition, Gopwani says the paper’s journalists are already comfortable with outreach and interacting with the public to some degree, so engagement shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for them. And that’s taken various iterations,” she explains, adding that having the support of management increases the likelihood that Free Press journalists across the board will adopt these practices, which are uncommon in a legacy newsroom environment. “At the Free Press now for three years, made it a priority to expand audience to underserved audiences and people we weren’t reaching before. The Free Press’ Executive Editor Peter Bhatia is committed to expanding the audiences it serves, according to community engagement director Jewel Gopwani, making it much easier to integrate audience engagement practices into the newspaper’s editorial process. Some audience engagement efforts will succeed, and others will fail, but journalists should persevere to develop strong relationships with underserved communities in the long term.Consistency and authenticity are essential to regaining the trust of underserved communities, so newsrooms should create an inclusive work environment that affords respect to their own journalists from these groups.Legacy media outlets should partner with community-driven journalism organizations to help them fill in gaps in coverage.The Free Press wants to improve its relationships with and coverage of underserved communities in Detroit through audience engagement. That same year, the newspaper had a daily print circulation of 131,000 and a Sunday circulation of 925,000, both down from 2018 levels. The Free Press’ website,, attracted 8.8 million monthly visitors in 2019. At 189 years old, it is the local paper of record. The Detroit Free Press is the largest daily newspaper covering Detroit, Michigan.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |