Community Journalism

The Dublin Inquirer has established a strong bond with its community through collaborative projects, a hallmark of its approach in recent years:

1. Council Tracker: Developed with community web developers, this tool provides insights into local councillors' votes, making information accessible that was previously buried in PDF documents.

2. Active Travel Collision Tracker: Created in partnership with the community, this tracker gathers data on road collisions involving bicycles. Experts in transport and road safety, along with major bike activist and climate groups, collaborated to develop the tool. Readers were invited to review early versions and provide feedback. Now, data for the tracker is crowdsourced from the community, with individuals reporting collisions they were involved in or witnessed.

3. Local Election Guide: Developed using the Citizen's Agenda approach by Jay Rosen, the Inquirer involved the community in submitting questions for candidates via a survey. The editorial team then selected the most pressing issues and asked candidates about them on behalf of the community. The resulting answers were published as a local election guide.

Events also hold significance for the Inquirer, serving to retain and attract subscribers. Ranging from pub quizzes to live journalism events, these gatherings feature reporters discussing investigations onstage, alongside music, comedy, or performance art. The Inquirer also organises meetups for specific sub-communities, such as a migrant meetup following anti-migrant riots in Dublin in November 2023.

Surveys occasionally engage the audience, allowing them to decide on new beats for the editorial team to cover. However, Kapila notes that community engagement efforts lack a refined strategy, primarily due to the absence of a team member dedicated to community engagement or subscriber support.

Regarding community engagement, Kapila emphasises that the Inquirer doesn't draw a strict line between audience and community. While there's a wider audience primarily engaged in reading articles, there's also a more involved core group attending events regularly, participating in surveys, or engaging on social media.