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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.