At its core, engaged journalism is representative of the shift that newsrooms are making in the ways they interact with the people in the community/communities they’re reporting on. The “Pathways to Engagement: Understanding How Newsrooms are Working with Communities” suggests a variety of different ways that this shift can be implemented in any newsroom — our newsroom.

One way this handbook recommends user engagement is through community crowdsourcing, which is information that relies completely on the users and readers engaging with newsroom to create the content. This is one of our class assignments, however the specifics of how we crowdsource is up to us as students. The handbook gives case studies and examples of ways crowdsourcing has been used at other publications that I feel we can draw from as a class to help us hone in how exactly we plan to crowdsource for this project.

One example I found interesting, and one I feel as though we can draw from as a class, is the “Ghost Boat” project published by Medium. Ghost Boat is a 10-part crowdsourced, investigative piece that dissected what happened to a boat carrying 243 people that went missing. The piece includes words from many individual contributors. In our class, I feel we can use this tactic in a different, but similar, way. Instead of using our crowdsourcing to *investigate* addiction in the city, we can use our crowdsourcing to see exactly *how* people want to see addiction covered in their neighborhood and city. With this information, we can tailor our reporting to what issues people in the community want reported on, and help create solutions for those issues.