Caribbean Television Network (CTN) has been featured once again in the Spotlight on Community Media, the monthly publication of the Center for Community Media (CCM) at the City University of New York, this time as a leading example in a wide-ranging study of how community newsrooms convert public trust into lasting civic influence.
The feature, titled “Mainstage Excellence: How Community Newsrooms Turn Public Trust Into Sustainable Power,” argues that in an era of eroding confidence in civic institutions, a newsroom’s relationship with its audience has become its defining asset.
It opens with a notable figure: 80 percent of Americans say local news outlets are vital to their communities’ well-being, according to the Pew-Knight Initiative as cited by CCM. Philanthropy is responding in kind; the piece notes that, per Press Forward, nearly 70 percent of that coalition’s funders have raised their commitments to local news since joining.
Against that backdrop, CCM turned to the newsrooms recognized in the Community Engagement category at the 2026 LION Sustainability Awards in San Diego, CTN among them, to identify the practices that make engagement durable.
CTN won the Community Engagement Award in the Micro/Small Revenue Tier.
The Spotlight presents CTN as a case study in treating listening as permanent infrastructure rather than a periodic campaign.
Operating from Boston as an international reporting network that produces multilingual service journalism across seven countries, CTN has established audience engagement as a formal beat, managed by a dedicated Communications & Outreach Coordinator, according to CCM.
Inquiries and tips gathered through WhatsApp, newsletters, and standing sessions with local churches and civic groups feed directly into the newsroom’s weekly editorial agenda, from which reporting moves through a synchronized workflow that produces stories simultaneously in Haitian Creole, French, and English.
CTN’s founder and chief executive, Emmanuel “Manny” Paul, framed the discipline as a caution against building engagement around funding cycles. Lean newsrooms, he told CCM, should resist tying the work to a grant cycle or a one-time launch and treating it as a campaign with a start and end date; the more sustainable path, he said, is to make it modest and repeatable: “Build it small and permanent,” with a single touchpoint a small team can maintain outlasting any ambitious push it cannot.
The LION judging panel, as quoted in the piece, credited that operational rigor, noting that CTN’s listening workflows trace directly to specific community questions and that the newsroom goes as far as connecting residents to congressional offices to help resolve urgent immigration matters. CCM reports that CTN gauges its impact not in page views but in action, residents translating trilingual reporting into decisions at legal clinics and weekly immigration webinars with civic leaders.
CTN appears alongside a national cohort of community newsrooms the Spotlight profiles for the same discipline.
In North Carolina, Enlace Latino NC — the state’s first nonprofit digital newsroom published in Spanish — has dedicated a full-time journalist to its community messaging channels, serving more than 5,000 WhatsApp subscribers and turning recurring reader questions into civic guides, CCM reports. Its development director, Emily Bango, told CCM that engagement is not layered on top of the journalism but built into it; the newsroom’s guiding principle, she said, is “reporting for the communities we serve, not on the communities we serve.”
The Kansas City Defender, winner of the award’s Medium/Large tier, pairs reporting with permanent community institutions under what it calls a dual-power model. Its director of development and revenue, Khadijah Bland, drew the distinction that animates the whole feature: “Traffic tells you who saw a story,” she told CCM. “It doesn’t tell you whether anything changed.” CCM credits the Defender’s reporting with helping derail a proposed ICE detention-facility deal after the city’s port authority voted unanimously to sever ties with the project.
In Los Angeles, AfroLA founder Dana Amihere described earning trust in South L.A. by showing up consistently — learning neighbors’ names and concerns before ever asking for an interview. “Trust is hard to earn, but it’s easy to lose,” she told CCM. The piece credits an AfroLA investigation into the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power with prompting the utility to accelerate replacement of earthquake-resistant pipes.
Other featured newsrooms anchor their listening where audiences already gather.
Crosswinds News, a Native-owned outlet in Northeast Oklahoma with ties across ten tribal nations, gathers reporting at powwows and community meetings; “People know our faces, and they know what we’re about,” senior journalist Brittany Harlow told CCM. And Miami’s Impact. Edition builds engagement into story ideation through public “Live Reading Picnics” in parks and gardens, where, founder Yulia Strokova told CCM, the newsroom asks of each story, “Where could this story live beyond the page?”
The through-line, CCM concludes, is that community engagement is neither an experiment nor an accidental byproduct of proximity, but a demanding operational discipline built on dedicated staffing, physical presence, and mutual accountability. For CTN, the recognition affirms a model the newsroom has pursued since its founding: serving the Haitian and Caribbean diaspora in its own languages and measuring success by what its audience can do with the journalism.
AI Use Policy:
Some of CTN’s journalists are not native English speakers and draft their work in French or Haitian Creole. We then use AI-assisted translation software to produce the English versions, and traces of machine-generated phrasing may occasionally remain. Every article, in any language, is written, reviewed, and edited by CTN’s staff writers and editors, who remain responsible for its accuracy. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
Click the link below to read the full piece.
https://ctninfo.com/?p=44701&preview=true
https://go.journalism.cuny.edu/webmail/930393/765326973/bbdd91fd00720381f9e87db2e70b2a2bfac1ff1a7b01e790e00375a1014db74b
