Tracks power, privilege, and processes of community trust building in digitized media ecologies, focusing on public dialogues about racial inequality.

A unique theory of trust building in engagement journalism that proposes journalists move to an ethic of care as they prioritize listening and learning within communities instead of propping up problematic institutions. In How Journalists Engage, Sue Robinson explores how journalists of different identities, especially racial, enact trusting relationships with their audiences. Drawing from case studies, community-work, interviews, and focus groups, she documents a growing built environment around trust building and engagement journalism that represents the first major paradigm shift of the press's core values in more than a century. As Robinson shows, journalists are being trained to take on new roles and skillsets around listening and learning, in addition to normative routines related to being a watchdog and storyteller. She demonstrates how this movement mobilizes the nurturing of personal, organizational, and institutional relationships that people have with information, sources, news brands, journalists, and each other. Developing a new theory of trust building, Robinson calls for journalists to grapple actively with their own identities--especially the privileges, biases, and marginalization attached to them--and those of their communities, resulting in a more intentional and effective moral voice focused on justice and equity through the news practice of an ethic of care.

The Journalist-Audience Relationship -- The Promise of Audience Engagement -- Journalism's Imagined Audiences -- When Data and Intuition Converge -- First Imagined, Then Pursued -- The Obstacles to Audience Engagement -- Understanding News Audience Behavior -- Conclusion.

Contemporary journalism faces a crisis of trust that threatens the institution and may imperil democracy itself. Critics and experts see a renewed commitment to local journalism as one solution. But a lasting restoration of public trust requires a different kind of local journalism than is often imagined, one that engages with and shares power among all sectors of a community. Andrea Wenzel models new practices of community-centered journalism that build trust across boundaries of politics, race, and class, and prioritize solutions while engaging the full range of local stakeholders. Informed by case studies from rural, suburban, and urban settings, Wenzel's blueprint reshapes journalism norms and creates vigorous storytelling networks between all parts of a community. Envisioning a portable, rather than scalable, process, Wenzel proposes a community-centered journalism that, once implemented, will strengthen lines of local communication, reinvigorate civic participation, and forge a trusting partnership between media and the people they cover.

Donald Trump might have been the loudest and most powerful voice maligning the integrity of news media in a generation, but his unrelenting attacks draw from a stew of resentment, wariness, cynicism, and even hatred toward the press that has been simmering for years. At one time, journalism's centrality in reporting and interpreting important events was relatively unquestioned when a limited number of channels and voices produced a consensus-based news environment. The collapse of this environment has sparked a moment of reckoning within and outside journalism, particularly as professional news outlets struggle to remain solvent. Alternative voices compete for attention with and criticize the work and motivations of journalists, even as a growing number of journalists question their core norms and practices. News After Trump considers these struggles over journalism to be about the very relevance of journalism as an institutional form of knowledge production. At the heart of this questioning is a struggle to define what truthful accounts look like and who ought to create them or determine them in a rapidly changing media culture. Through an extensive accounting of Trump's relationship with the press, and drawing on in-depth interviews with journalists and textual analysis of news events, editorials, social media, and trade-press discussions, the book rethinks the relevance of journalism by recognizing the limits of objectivity and the way in which journalism positions certain actors as authority figures while rendering the less socially powerful invisible or flawed. This ethos of detachment has staved off vital questions about how journalism connects to its audiences, how it creates enduring value in people's lives (or not), and how diversity needs to be understood jointly at the level of production, reporting, and audience in order to rebuild trust.

Explores how the decline in local political reporting has depressed citizen engagement with local politics in the US.

As an installment of Routledge’s Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Electronic Media Research Series, Political Communication, Culture, and Society focuses on the expansive concept of political communication and illuminates the processes, contents, and effects related to myriad forms and vehicles of political communication. Whether involving traditional print or broadcast media, social media platforms, or face-to-face discussions, political communication today has shaped how we perceive others and understand the world around us, including our place in it, and ultimately, how we engage with others as social, cultural, and political beings. Hailing from multiple locations and drawing on a multitude of theories as well as quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the volume’s contributors examine how communication intersects with politics in a broad swath of contexts, ranging from climate change to migration to the notion of political correctness. Collectively they ask and answer questions about how today’s richly textured media ecology shapes our political world and how political messages can fuel – and ameliorate – the issues that deeply cleave societies around the globe. Relevant to scholars and students of journalism, media studies, and communication sciences, this volume will help interested readers better understand today’s increasingly complex sociocultural world through the lens of political communication.