As more media companies move toward subscription and membership-based models to generate revenue, engaging with readers has become ever more important. Yet some institutions seem uncomfortable with building community outside their walls. How should journalists approach this task? This week, I asked a group of experts during a weeklong series of interviews on our Galley discussion platform. Mike Masnick—who founded his site, Techdirt, as a one-man blog—said that the fundamental mistake many news outlets make is “not realizing it’s always been a community building business.”

Joy Mayer, who runs the Trusting News project, said that, at a time when trust in journalism is extremely low, and many readers are suspicious about bias, engaging with them is often the best way to convince them you deserve their trust. “We work with newsrooms on ways to draw attention to their mission, motivations, processes, and ethics. If you work to be fair, what does that look like?” Mayer said. “It’s natural for the public to be confused, overwhelmed, and frustrated by what they see journalists do. But if journalists believe in their own work, they need to take the time to explain why.” Summer Fields, of Hearken, a tech consultancy for media companies, told me, “We’ve seen that the more your audience sees you are valuing them, the more likely they are to trust you as well as support you, either financially or with their time.”

Lauren Katz, of Vox Media, said that the company has used crowdsourcing projects to report on a number of investigative stories, including one about healthcare costs that involved asking readers for their personal experiences. More than two thousand submissions poured in. And that was the start of a relationship. “It’s not just that we want them to tell us the thing and then never talk to them again,” Katz said. “It’s an invitation to be part of an ongoing conversation.” Najva Sol, of Quartz, has seen engagement come from revamping the site’s comment section. “We knew that creating a civil community experience requires a culture change,” she said. So Quartz made a number of alterations, including shifting its terminology from “commenting” to “contributing,” outlining community behavior agreements, and reaching out to experts in the Quartz readership and encouraging them to weigh in.

ICYMI: Everyone is admitting what they get paid to work in journalism

Other media outlets see engagement as an ongoing series of social events, said Christine Schmidt, who is soon moving from Nieman Lab to join Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund. The Dallas Morning News and Block Club Chicago regularly hold office hours in libraries and coffee shops to meet with people who might not be subscribers; the Morning News recently hosted a bus tour of Dallas with one of its columnists, something he started doing as a way of onboarding new interns. “I see engagement as all about making sure people feel heard and included (and of course, actually listening to and including them),” Schmidt told me. And if readers feel listened to and included, then maybe they will be more likely to get out their checkbooks: Simon Galperin, of GroundSource, which offers media companies a text-messaging platform for connecting with readers, said that research shows engaged audiences are three times as likely to become donors or subscribers to the sites with which they engage.

Here’s more on engagement, trust, and journalism:

Part of the newsroom : Hanna Ingber, editorial director of the New York Times ’ Reader Center, said in her Galley interview that the center isn’t a replacement for the public editor, a position the Times shut down in 2017. “The major difference is that the public editor sat outside the newsroom,” she explained, whereas “we are part of the newsroom.” Ingber said she tries to use the center as a way of showing readers that they’re being heard. “Sometimes we see that many readers have the same question, and it leads us to write an article or explainer on the topic,” she told me. That happened recently, when the Times noticed that many people were asking why a president asking another country for help ahead of an election was such a big deal; the DC bureau worked up an explainer.

Solving the puzzle : Ariel Zirulnick of the Membership Puzzle Project, a public research initiative, gave me some examples of her partnerships: the Akron Devil Strip ’ s conversion into a member-owned cooperative; the Colorado Media Project, which is exploring a statewide media membership program for a number of different outlets; and efforts abroad, including in India, where MPP gave a grant to a news organization that is addressing health misinformation by working with doctors across the region as fact checkers.

Scale and community : A new paper published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism looks at digital-first media entities and their approaches to community engagement. The research — by Julie Posetti of the Reuters Institute, Felix Simon of the Oxford Internet Institute, and Nabeelah Shabbir, conversation editor at The Correspondent — finds that news organizations are increasingly focused on forging relationships with their audiences, “emphasizing physical encounters, investment in niche audiences over empty reach, and moving communities to action.”

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Mathew Ingram is CJR’s chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.