COMMUNITY ISN’T AN AUDIENCE; IT’S A RELATIONSHIP

Morgan McCarraher

The Advocate

Community is a word used often but rarely examined. It appears in mission statements, donor appeals and analytics reports, usually as a vague abstraction—an audience to reach, a group to engage or a set of numbers to grow. But community is not a metric. It’s a relationship built on trust, care and continuity. 

A community isn’t simply a group of people living near one another. It’s a network of shared concerns, histories and responsibilities, built slowly through repetition and recognition. People come to know a place not by its slogans but by what it argues about, celebrates, mourns and quietly tolerates. Community lives in those patterns. 

This distinction matters. When community is treated as an audience, the dynamic shifts. An audience is something you perform for; a relationship is something you participate in. Audiences are counted. Relationships are maintained. One is transactional; the other is mutual. 

Local journalism lives in the space between these ideas. At its best, it doesn’t speak to a community but with it. It listens, reflects and responds. It pays attention not only to the loudest voices but to the slow, ongoing realities of daily life—school board meetings, zoning decisions, student achievements, and local failures. These may not be glamorous stories, but they are the threads that weave communal understanding. 

When journalism treats readers as an audience to capture rather than neighbors to inform, something breaks. Coverage becomes selective in harmful ways. Complexity is flattened. People stop seeing themselves reflected accurately. Trust erodes—not because of a single mistake, but because of growing distance. 

Community requires being seen. It requires knowing someone is paying attention even when there’s no spectacle involved. That attention is a form of respect. It signals that people’s lives, decisions and disagreements matter enough to be recorded with care. 

This is especially true in small or local contexts, where institutions are close, consequences immediate and anonymity rare. A local paper isn’t reporting on an abstract population—it’s reporting on people who share grocery stores, graduations, roads and weather. That proximity raises the ethical stakes. Accuracy is not just professional; it’s personal. 

Shared understanding grows over time. Journalism preserves that memory, recording not just what happened but how a place arrived where it is. Without that record, every controversy feels unprecedented, every disagreement isolated and every generation forced to relearn the same lessons. 

A newsroom that sees itself as part of a relationship, not a broadcast channel, shifts its priorities. The goal becomes fostering understanding instead of provoking reaction, earning trust instead of chasing attention, listening longer instead of speaking loudest. 

Community is not passive. It responds. It pushes back. It corrects. Healthy relationships allow for friction. Journalism that respects its community doesn’t fear disagreement; it recognizes it as engagement. 

A community is not something to talk at. It is something to show up for—consistently, even when it is inconvenient or quiet. Practiced with care, journalism becomes a way a community recognizes itself and decides what it wants to be. 

Community is not an audience waiting to be impressed. It’s a relationship waiting to be honored.