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With so much attention given to social media and online community engagement, it’s easy to forget about the media’s capacity to foster something a little more old-fashioned: live, in-person conversations. As it turns out, the newly popular “community engagement manager” position is one of the rare growth spots in the industry. And various mainstream to digital-only media outlets — from St. Louis Beacon’s “Beacon & Eggs” to Berkelyside’s Three Michael’s to Public Insight Network members — are focusing on in-person meet-ups and forums.

At Alhambra Source, a local news site in a predominantly immigrant community with a goal of increasing civic engagement, we’ve found that connecting with residents in person is as important as producing original stories for the site. As an extension of that process — and to give feedback to participants in our young adult training program — we wanted to lead a forum in the languages of our community.

Easier said than done.

Speaking about sensitive issues such as inter-racial relationships or immigration is hard enough when the community speaks one language. When a quarter of the residents live in households where no adult speaks English well it is almost impossible.

In Alhambra — a city of 85,000 where there are more than four languages that a significant portion of the community speaks — the local schools cope by having automatic translation at meetings and translators on call most of the time.

For our event, we wanted immigrant residents not only to be able to receive information, but to actually have the opportunity for discussion. To do this, we collaborated with Asian Pacific American Legal Center, an advocacy organization that works with immigrant families and youth. Their organizers had experience doing both direct translation and small group discussions. They provided us with U.N.-style audio devices, gave us some guidance on leading the discussion, and mobilized many of the families they work with to come to the event.

The night of the forum we set up five tables in a local church with designated Spanish and Mandarin translators, a youth reporter and a moderator at each one.

Seventy people filled the room –- arriving early and catching us not quite ready. They were as diverse as the city itself: a police sergeant, teachers affiliated with Alhambra Latino Association, a local author, a Chinese blogger, students and stay-at-home moms. Each chose one of the five tables with a designated issue to discuss.

As an introduction, the young people shared a personal issue they had experienced coming of age in an immigrant community — navigating American-style relationships when your parents had an arranged marriage in India, suffering teasing as a recent immigrant from Cuba, and eating tamales at home while getting addicted to fries at school. The non-English speakers put on their headsets for the presentation, and two volunteers translated into Spanish and Mandarin.

Next, the youth reporters led the discussions about the issue they outlined at the five tables with the help of moderators and translators. And, almost miraculously, five simultaneous discussions emerged in multiple languages.

At one table Irma Uc, a part-time community college student, lead a sprawling discussion in four languages on school nutrition. A mother shared in Mandarin how her son had to take two physical education classes back to back because he could not speak English well. At the other end of the table, another mother shared in Spanish about how her kids did not like that Chinese foods were served in the schools.

“Once it started, it was a blur for me,” Irma recalled.

It was complicated, and sometimes the conversations sidetracked, but it was not Babel. People did exchange thoughts and experiences, the conversation flowing via translators into English, and in turn into Vietnamese, Spanish, and Mandarin.

“For some bizarre reason the conversation flowed easily,” Irma said. “The parents that were there really enjoyed the conversation and they also enjoyed listening in other people’s stories. And this is where the language barrier faded.”

When the event was over, we received one overwhelming criticism: The discussions were too short. Participants said the highlight was the opportunity to address common issues from different perspectives with neighbors with whom you could not usually communicate.

Here are a few more of the lessons we learned:

• Assess your translators’ skills.

  If you are going to do instantaneous translation, then make sure the translator is up to the task. Without pauses from the presenters, this can be extremely challenging, and nothing kills a discussion faster than not understanding. For group discussions, there is more leeway.

• Document the event.

  As a media outlet, the objective was not only to engage residents in conversation, but also to identify new issues and stories. Two L.A.-based media outlets that often hold forums, Zocalo and Southern California Public Radio, record events and post them on their sites. This works for a presentation with one microphone but is hard with the simultaneous smaller group discussions. We’re still looking for a way to document those exchanges, since they provided some of the most valuable elements of the evening.

• Provide food if you want busy parents to come.

  Our partners at Asian Pacific American Legal Center, who have a lot of experience with community organizing, made clear that if we want people to come, then there needed to be food – and it could not just be pizza.

• Provide child care if you want busy parents to come.

  We did not anticipate parents would bring children — or how distracting those rambunctious kids would be. If we did it again, we would have a designated babysitter.

• Partner with an organization with established relationships in the community.

  If you want people who do not speak English well to be part of your discussion, you have to have established relationships with them. Our site, while it contains multilingual content, is English dominant. We turned to local organizations to help make that connection — Asian Pacific American Legal Center was a great partner in our case. Another option is to work with local ethnic press and hold the forum in partnership.

• Control in-language conversations.

  If you have multiple languages, people will tend to go into side discussions by language, which is faster and easier than waiting for translation. You need a strong moderator to bring the conversation back to a central point, if you are truly going to have a multilingual discussion.

A version of this story appeared on Good.is.

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Hyperlocal efforts got an infusion of cash earlier this month, when the neighborhood social network Nextdoor scored $21.6 million from leading venture capitalists. The backers — led by Greylock Partners David Sze, who has invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pandora — are betting that the platform for private, geographically based forums will be the next hot thing in local news and information and could even build community in neighborhoods across the country in the process.

They’re onto something with the potential to foster community. A long line of research identifies conversation as key to fostering civic dialogue and a sense of belonging. Jurgen Habermas’ theory of the Public Sphere, in which residents come together to discuss the news of the day, is one example. In a more recent one, USC Annenberg Professor Sandra Ball-Rokeach took the concept to a neighborhood level. Through studies of more than a dozen Los Angeles communities, she found that interactions between neighbors — whether online or off — can help increase local civic engagement.

But Ball-Rokeach’s research has also found that conversations need to be complemented by neighborhood news coverage and links to local organizations to have significant impact. Moreover, diverse communities require focused efforts that are tailored to their shared needs. Often such efforts must cross linguistic and ethnic lines and the digital divide. These findings have impacted our efforts to create a local news website, Alhambra Source, in a predominantly immigrant Los Angeles suburb. Based on research into community information needs, the site has elements in three languages and works with residents and organizations to report local stories.

Still, a challenge for communities is that Nextdoor’s emergence as a relatively low-cost model to jumpstart forums comes at a time when a recent attempt at hyperlocal news sites, and local news generally, has been faltering. The New York Times announced last summer that it will end its affiliation with its hyperlocal sites. Earlier this month NBC shut down the local data collection and mapping site Everyblock (Nextdoor already has an ad up saying “Missing EveryBlock? join 8,000+ neighborhoods who use Nextdoor”). And AOL’s hyperlocal venture, Patch, still is falling short on promised advertising revenues.

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia, who grew up in Odessa, Texas, of “Friday Night Lights” fame, said he based the site on the type of bulletin boards found at Laundromats and supermarkets and believes that his business will be able to succeed where other hyperlocal efforts have stumbled. One thing that might help, according to Gigaom senior writer Mathew Ingram, is Nextdoor’s restrictive nature. Users must prove their identity (or at least their address) in order to join one of Nextdoor’s neighborhood networks. Another thing Ingram mentions briefly, and what could be key to its future success, is that the Nextdoor model is less expensive than Patch, which hired an editor for every community (though now Patch, too, is considering lower cost alternatives in its efforts to become profitable.)

Nextdoor and other forums can play a crucial part in a healthy news ecosystem, but they work best when tailored to local needs and in conjunction with other news coverage. Julie Moos, Director of Poynter Online, noted in a comment on Ingram’s article that hyperlocal news sites and neighborhood networks can be complementary. “Through Nextdoor I learn about breakins (sic) within a three-block radius of my house; through Patch I learn about the proposed apartment complex being discussed at the town council meeting. Through Patch, I learn about a restaurant opening; through Nextdoor I learn whether my neighbors like the new restaurant,” Moos wrote. “Without Patch and Nextdoor, I would know almost nothing about this community of 17,000.”

Online neighborhood forums are not new, and two that have been held up as models for stimulating discussion and resident involvement are E-Democracy.org in Minnesota and FrontPorch Forum in Vermont. E-Democracy’s founder, Steven Clift, who started the site in 1994, likes to describe the forms as online town halls that “support participation in public life, strengthen communities, and build democracy.” To do so, his team works door-to-door in diverse communities, hires people from the area they are targeting, and employs community organizing tactics. A difference Clift points to between E-Democracy forums and Nextdoor is that they include organizations and businesses, not just residents, to foster dialogue and ensure that they are not “virtual gated communities.” But even with all of that effort, Clift shared on a recent visit to Los Angeles that lost pets are often the most popular posts and that they rely on local news coverage to provide context. Nextdoor has its share of pet posts, too, but as Mashable points out, 20 percent of the content is about crime, making it work like an online neighborhood watch program, as well.

In my local Los Angeles neighborhood in Echo Park, nobody has set up a Nextdoor forum yet, but I have the benefit of at least three local news sites including a Patch and other online bulletin boards. One case that works particularly well is The Eastsider LA, a site started by former Los Angeles Times reporter Jesus Sanchez, who also happens to be my neighbor. In the past two weeks, seven out of eight posts from community members on his forum have been about pets — from chickens found on the entrance to the freeway to a found dog that had just been skunked. Sanchez creates most of the editorial content himself, from well-reported short posts about the record number of City Council candidates to why my favorite local gardening store is being forced out because of higher rents. The combination of the forum and reported news has changed my relationship to my neighborhood, informing me, making me feel more connected, raising issues and generating discussion — in other words, it has fostered a sense of community.

A version of this story appeared in GOOD magazine.

That conversation started me thinking about the need for a program in the style of AmeriCorps — or Teach for America or Peace Corps — for journalism in under-reported and diverse communities. Call it Reporter Corps. The service-learning model would train young adults in journalism and teach them how their government works, pair them with a local publication in need of reporters, get them some quality mentors, provide a stipend, and set them loose for six months or a year reporting on their own community.

Just about a year after my conversation with Emma, I am very pleased that the first class of six Reporter Corps members started this month at Alhambra Source, with support from USC Annenberg and the McCormick Foundation.

Broadly speaking, the Reporter Corps goals are not that different from AmeriCorps, the national service-learning umbrella program that supports 80,000 people annually:

• Get things done
• Strengthen communities
• Encourage responsibility
• Expand opportunity

But unlike AmeriCorps, which addresses education, environment, health, and public-safety needs, Reporter Corps focuses on news and information needs. If journalism is a public service crucial to democracy, the demand for such a program is clear: Local news coverage — despite a recent flourishing of online community sites — has been in decline for years.

Reporter Corps members tour the Alhambra Police Department. From left, Captain Cliff Mar, Albert Lu, Esmee Xavier, Alfred Dicioco, Irma Uc, Jane Fernandez, Javier Cabral.

In many immigrant communities and less affluent areas, the result has been that mainstream reporting has all but disappeared or been reduced to sensationalism. Alhambra, an independent city of about 85,000, lost its local newspaper decades ago. More recently, the Los Angeles Times and other regional papers have slashed their coverage of the area. Local television rolls into town when there is a murder or the mayor’s massage-parlor-owning girlfriend flings dumplings at him in a late-night squabble (yes, that happened). The Chinese-language press is active, but very few decision-makers can read it. All of this, in turn, has contributed to a population with low levels of civic engagement.

Despite, or perhaps due to, the lack of quality news coverage, I found a ready supply of young Alhambra residents interested in reporting opportunities. Students navigating a depleted community college system or recent college grads un- or underemployed and facing the lowest employment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds in 60 years came to the Alhambra Source eager to contribute. Although they had limited journalism experience, in many ways they have proven to be natural reporters for a multiethnic community. They are all immigrants or children of immigrants, speaking Arabic, Cantonese, Spanish, Tagalog and more. As a result, they can cross ethnic and linguistic lines better than many reporters. They also often have a deeper understanding of what stories matter to fellow residents, from the challenges of not being able to communicate with your parents because you’re not fluent in the same language to the need for a local dog park.

For the first class of Reporter Corps, we selected six high school graduates — four in local community colleges, and two recent college graduates — based on their connection to the area, growth potential, and passion to improve their community. In the spring we plan on expanding the project to work with another USC community news site, Intersections South LA.

The approach appears to fall into a larger trend in youth media initiatives to work increasingly with high school graduates rather than solely younger students.

“Within the youth media groups we’re hearing more and more a thirst that involves the grads. The job market in many of the neighborhoods these groups are active in is really abysmal. Some go to community college, some don’t,” said Mark Hallett, the senior program officer for the journalism program at the McCormick Foundation. “Neighborhoods aren’t finding coverage.”

Across the country, local news sites are working in diverse ways to put this population to work. Many have small internship programs. In an example similar in spirit to Reporter Corps, New American Media has teamed up with the California Endowment to work with 16- to 24-year-olds in California communities such as Fresno, Coachella, and Long Beach for youth-led media efforts.

The Endowment also funds some successful high school journalism programs, such as Boyle Heights Beat in East L.A. (which is also affiliated with USC Annenberg), but Senior Program Manager Mary Lou Fulton notes, “it requires a greater investment in teaching, mentoring and support.”

Unlike high school students, who tend to be busy and sometimes lack maturity or real-life experience, grads often have an excess of time and more advanced critical-thinking skills. “For these youth, this work is a part or full-time job, meaning they are able to spend more sustained time on reporting and develop deeper community relationships to inform their reporting,” Fulton told me via e-mail, noting that all of the students in their programs also receive either an hourly wage or stipend. “All of this increases the chances that the content they create will be more timely and have greater depth.”

What if we united efforts like this on an even larger scale — with the vision that Teach for America applied to failing schools in the 1990s — and adapt it to local journalism? Would the nation see a boost in engaged citizens, more young people at work, new jobs, and — we can dream — even new models for how local news outlets can make money? We see Reporter Corps as a step in that direction, with a focus less on taking smart, highly achieving young people and placing them in at-need communities, and more on training young people to report on their own communities. Whether or not participants go on to become professionals, they will be exposed to new opportunities in the government, legal, education, and social service sectors. In the process, local news, often considered a dying art form, might just be reinvented and reinvigorated by their energy.

Alhambra Source and Intersections South LA are cornerstone projects of the new Civic Engagement and Journalism Initiative at USC Annenberg, which aims to link communication research and journalism to engage diverse, under-served Los Angeles communities. USC Annenberg professors Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Michael Parks spearhead the Alhambra Project, and Professor Willa Seidenberg directs Intersections South LA. Daniela Gerson heads the initiative and edits Alhambra Source.

1. Investigate your community’s news and information needs before you launch.
While few news organizations are likely to have a dedicated team of researchers and scholars at their disposal, they can — and should — identify community information needs to guide the development of their site. On the simplest level, that means a reporter should know his or her beat well and do some investigating before launch.

As a journalist in Alhambra, for example, I witnessed firsthand the civic participation gaps and the barriers between ethnic and linguistic groups that our researchers had identified. The lack of civic participation was made evident in 2010 when five incumbents ran unchallenged, prompting officials to cancel the elections.

The need to cross language lines became clear when school and government officials, police officers and other community leaders all told me that they could not understand the most active press coverage of Alhambra: the Chinese-language newspapers. These newspapers target about a third of the city’s population, and yet city leaders had no idea what was being reported. Identifying basic communication needs such as these can help define the goals of a local news source and also establish a baseline that can later be used to demonstrate the site’s impact to funders or other supporters.

2. To effectively build a community contributor team, hold regular meetings, play to contributor strengths, and remember they are volunteers.
We work with community contributors — in our case that means Alhambra residents who volunteer and tend not to have professional journalism experience. Initially, I set about recruiting Alhambrans to report stories that might interest them or their neighbors. I searched for people already producing content online, talked to leaders of community organizations, and spread the word about our new site. Once we launched the site, we featured our contributors prominently with a call for others to get involved.

Monthly meetings in our office space have been crucial to the strength and expansion of our team. They are part newsroom story meeting, part community advocacy, and part social gathering (we always include a potluck dinner). After the first few meetings and the site launch, I no longer had to actively recruit contributors — at least one new candidate would contact me each month. As our reputation grows, so has our team. That doesn’t mean everyone sticks around: like any volunteer community, we have to work to keep people engaged and interested in giving their time. But enough new people come to keep up the site’s content and energy, while a regular base of contributors provide a core continuum.

3. When it comes to community contributions, a personal perspective is often crucial to a story.
Community contributors often want to report because they have an agenda they want heard. Obscuring that under a veil of objectivity just does not work on a community level. I’ve found community contributors are great for insight stories and features, sometimes providing our most creative articles, ranging from a critique of the local food rating system (“A=American, B=Better, C=Chinese”) to a call for new bike laws to a visit to the local psychic “Mrs. Lin.”

One story type that I have found community contributors can consistently produce better than outside reporters is a first-person piece incorporating a wider perspective. The stories that have received some of the highest traffic on our site and met our research metrics of increased civic engagement have tended to be of this type. Some examples include a story on the challenges of inter-generational communication for a child of immigrants, one about growing up Arab or Muslim in a mostly Asian and Latino community, and one about why a church community organizer takes issue with a city ordinance.

Finally—and this is important—keep in mind that these are not professional reporters. Everyone needs an editor, and working with community contributors often means multiple drafts and intensive fact checking. Many times it would have been easier for me to have done the story myself, so it is important to match volunteer reporters with pieces to which they can add value.

4. Crossing language and ethnic divides cannot be achieved through multilingual content alone.
Before we launched, we intended to be a site in the three languages most spoken by our readers — English, Chinese, and Spanish. We quickly discovered that we lacked the resources. And as it turns out, such a plan might not have been worth the effort.

About a quarter of Alhambra residents live in households where no adults speak fluent English. There is a clear need for foreign language media, particularly in the ethnic Chinese community. But that does not mean that the community would be interested if we created a multilingual website. From anecdotal interviewing, we found that these residents are satisfied getting their news from ethnic publications and are less likely to go to a website.

Instead, we found many other important ways to bridge the language divide. Here are four:

• Building a multilingual team, which helps expand the range of stories we can cover and the types of people we can interview
• Translating local foreign-language coverage into English
• Translating selections of our own original content into Spanish and Chinese (through two means: high-quality human translations for select articles and Google Translate function across the entire site)
• Establishing relationships with ethnic press so they print versions of our articles in their newspapers.

5. Use feedback loops as engagement and learning tools.
We use polls and surveys extensively on the site to engage residents, create a link between them and city officials, and improve our coverage. Some of our most successful surveys have ranged from where to find the best local burger or boba to whether the city should ban fireworks sales to which supermarket should come to Main Street.

We often incorporate the findings from these informal polls into stories. It enables more residents to participate on the site in a simpler way than writing a story, and in public policy issues, it offers a means for us to share community feedback with the government. For example, when the city council recently acted to limit pay-for-recycling, less than a handful of people from the public came to the meeting (like most days). But on our site more than 100 people voted to express their opinions, the vast majority against the ban. The city council then decided to grant a reprieve to one market.

We also use the polls to gauge our impact and to see on which topics residents would like more coverage. We have surveyed residents about what stories they would like to see, research questions they would like answered, and even improvements we could make to our website. Engaging the community this way enables us to better respond to their needs. After all, a community news site, like a city itself, is a work in progress.

Alhambra Source is the pilot project of a new Civic Engagement and Journalism Initiative at USC Annenberg. The project aims to link Communication research and Journalism to engage diverse, under-served Los Angeles communities. The Metamorphosis Project is the primary researcher, and Intersections South LA is another project site. This is the first in a series of articles on the topic of creating and evaluating local news websites that strive to increase civic engagement.

USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, responding to the dearth of reporting on Alhambra and the challenge of creating a media outlet in an ethnically and linguistically diverse area, launched the Alhambra Project in 2008. Michael Parks, former director of the journalism school and former editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, a communication researcher and director of the Metamorphosis Project, collaborated with support from the Annenberg Foundation. Parks was interested in investigating how local news coverage could better serve communities. Ball-Rokeach, whose research had previously found that the Alhambra area had one of the lowest levels of civic engagement in Los Angeles County, wanted to explore how creating a news product grounded in local needs could improve that level of engagement.

I joined the project in early summer of last year. As a journalist with a background in immigration reporting – and with a smattering of community organizing skills, including managing a Brooklyn farmer’s market and running a small non-profit magazine – my assignment was to take the research ideas and help translate them into an online news source grounded in local needs.

Mapping the contours of a community

While communication doctoral students conducted focus groups, media monitoring and field research, my job was to research an appropriate fit for our news product. Every day last year a new local site seemed to appear online, giving rise to a range of hybrid approaches where professional journalists worked with residents to create new versions of the community newspaper.

From studying these other models, I realized we would face some major obstacles in creating our theoretical goal of a “common storytelling network.” In particular, to function in Alhambra, where roughly a quarter of households have no adult who speaks English well, multiple languages were needed. But how to create a hybrid site that is multilingual, and, of particular interest to me, how to do it with a full-time staff consisting only of myself?

Putting technology to work

To answer some of these questions the Alhambra Project hosted a “deep think” which brought together a select group of USC Web engineers and news innovators. The workshop led us to focus on how a news website could serve communities of interest across ethnic groups. Although it would, at times, be easier for me to just report and write the stories myself, another focus was making this a community project, and using digital tools as much as possible to encourage participation.

It was increasingly clear that we would not, at least initially, be able to translate all of the pages on the website. Automated machine translation, available through Google and other providers, has gotten to the point where meaning can be conveyed, but nuance is lost. We decided to translate static pages, such as those explaining the workings of the site, but at least in the initial stages, we would have to rely on automated translation, paired with a disclaimer, for the rest.

Even without being able to translate all stories into three languages, other linguistic methods to bridge community information sources appeared. As I met with government officials, I learned that almost none were reading what the relatively active Chinese media said about them. In the spirit of New America Media, one of the first elements we added to our site was a selected aggregation and translation of stories, at least half of which come from the ethnic media.

Seeing the results on Main Street

Despite great effort on all sides, it took us a year to complete our multilingual site, the Alhambra Source. For me this has been a major source of frustration, but as we approached launch date I realized that perhaps it might have been to our advantage. We needed time to create a team of collaborators of both community members and students from a high school program that could inform site development and feel a real sense of ownership. A significant component of the communication research, as well, needed that time to come together. This fall, USC will be conducting a major study of civic engagement levels in Alhambra, with the intent of updating it in two years to see the effect of the news product.

On a recent Saturday evening, I was very encouraged to hear what Kerrie Gutierrez, a mother of five who has gone back to school to complete her bachelor’s degree, had to say. We were at an outdoor festival on Main Street Alhambra, when the founding community contributor for the Source approached a woman holding an infant. Using an iPad from USC Annenberg, Gutierrez showed the woman a story on Alhambra artist Yolanda Gonzalez. “I wrote that article,” she told the woman, “and I’m not a journalist.”

She then explained the collection of stories, including one about how Alhambra had recently canceled its elections for the first time ever because no challengers had stepped up to run against five incumbents. Other stories, Gutierrez said, had been translated from Chinese, and soon most local news and events would be there, in whatever language was necessary. The woman nodded enthusiastically about the prospect of this website, and signed her name to subscribe to our mailing list.

Until that moment, so much of the site had been theoretical, even if it was well-researched theory. But when Kerrie Gutierrez explained the Alhambra Source, I began to see how this type of journalism initiative could affect lives in this community. The site is just barely launched, and even I’ve been surprised how exciting it is to watch the site begin to develop and take on a life of its own.