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As JournalismUK enters into a new era, community building and engagement will play a much more central role. Increasingly, we find ourselves inspired by the clever news publishers who have very much figured out how to form deeper bonds with their communities.

Of course, like a lot of things in recent years, the word 'community' has become a buzzword. It's often used interchangeably with 'audiences', but a community signals something a lot more participatory and involved. And community engagement has within itself come a long way in recent years.

Community engagement projects often rely on quizzing people about their needs or news habits, and then delivering on those findings. But this may be an outdated approach, says Anita Li, founder of The Green Line, a hyperlocal solutions journalism outlet based in Toronto, Canada.

In what she calls "community engagement 2.0", the end goal is not more page views or subscribers. It is about improving the lives of people within that community and being able to take more meaningful action. There are too many barriers between the reader and the product, so news must take a more direct approach. Help them engage with the world around them instead.

Every month, The Green Line tackles one systemic issue facing the city. There is a four-step, four-week newsgathering process:

Resources are also provided to solve any immediate problems. On the back of discussions about the urgent housing crisis in Toronto, for instance, Li produced practical tools like a cost-of-living calculator and various guides from fighting eviction notices to catching up with unpaid rent.

Communities are complex and the reality is that many people associate with communities for different reasons. They consist of different stakeholders and so the needs can vary greatly. It is not so simple to serve a community in a single broad-stroke way. There are also different types of communities.

Li provides three useful categories:

Look a little closer, and it is easy to imagine how many of these can blur together. A racial community within a town. As........

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