Journalists are paid to be more connected and tuned in than the average person. A paradox of the modern news business is that, whether by accident or design, journalists are a highly cloistered bunch.

In the interests of objectivity, we have put ourselves at a remove from the communities in which we live--choosing instead to work the phones and computers from cubicles in newsrooms, and to head out to the streets when we have information to gather. There are many exceptions to this. But in my experience, this is how it is in most newsrooms.

At a distance, our audience becomes an abstraction. We unwittingly design our coverage for our fellow editors and reporters, not for an audience whose unmet information needs we should know intimately and seek to fill.

So it was in Detroit, when I found myself cruising the streets of Mexicantown in a 1980's burgundy Crown Victoria with a woozy suspension--crammed in with a few community residents, activists and local journalists; distributing flyers encouraging local residents to record license plate numbers of semi trucks being (illegally?) routed through residential neighborhoods--that I was forced to reconsider the role of journalist.

I was in Detroit to meet with more than 40 journalists, community members and public media managers and executives--with funding from the Knight Foundation. Our mission: in one day, prototype six different campaigns for engaging residents of Mexicantown (a.k.a. Southwest Detroit) in covering the issues of their community via MobileCommons text messaging platform and the Public Insight Network. In traditional planning mode, we might have noodled over the idea for months, creating detailed strategic plans, meeting occasionally to iron things out. On this day, we had just hours to learn enough about Mexicantown to brainstorm workable ideas, and then to test them in the community in the afternoon.

The process was a kind of "lite" version of Design Thinking, a method of human-centered rapid prototyping and product testing popularized by the strategic design firm IDEO and taught at the Stanford Institute of Design, or d.school. Journalists and John S. Professional Journalism Fellows at Stanford Krissy Clark and Justin Arenstein had visited Mexicantown six weeks prior to develop an intimate profile of area residents that served as a starting point for our prototyping. WNYC Executive Producer John Keefe served as the day's impresario.

My team was made up Mexicantown residents and community activists, myself and employees of WDET The Detroit public radio station) and Public Radio International. In brainstorming mode, we listed a couple dozen ideas for engaging the local community in covering issues significant to Mexicantown. Drilling down, one issue quickly surfaced: semi trucks were being routed down residential streets in Mexicantown, spewing diesel smoke that local residents blame for high rates of child asthma and causing a range of other issues including noise pollution, safety hazards, increased traffic and wear and tear on local streets. (You can see a map of the route here).

We hatched a plan to encourage residents to record license plate numbers of semis on their streets and text them to us. (Here's how it worked: We asked people to text "truck" to 69866. They then got a message asking them to text their location. If they did, they would get a text back asking them to record license plate numbers, prompting a thank you note.) In turn, we would track which trucks were traveling down which streets when, and down the line, planned to run reports to see what companies owned the trucks, when they were last inspected, etc.

It seemed like an issue that residents could quickly rally around, and we could use the accumulated data to drive investigative reporting. The problem was that we only had two hours to make it happen. We mocked up flyers, translated them into Spanish, printed out 400 and then piled in to the Crown Vic as a sort of ragtag community journalism SWAT team.

By 4:30 p.m. we had gotten approval to place stacks of flyers at a local grocery's checkout, convinced a local priest to include a note about the truckspotting project in the Sunday bulletin, set up a web page on WDET's site, and talked to many community residents about the trucks (most didn't know the trucks shouldn't be on their streets). By the end of the day, we received only a few text messages from community members. But it was clear from our conversations with residents that we had struck a nerve, and that this project had potential.

The other five teams developed a range of campaigns to engage Mexicantown residents via texting. One asked residents to text in a six-word message telling us why they love Mexicantown (one read: "it's (half) full of interesting people"), offering a free cup of coffee as a reward. Another asked residents to text message locations to include on a tour of Mexicantown homes and businesses.

In our collective rush to hit our deadline, we didn't pause to ask a key question: Were we crossing the line between journalism and community activism? Was our team encouraging Mexicantown residents to spot semis on their streets, or to stop them? WDET journalists said they were unaware of the trucking issue, and it seemed rather clear that without community activists in the room, it wouldn't have come up--and without the benefit of the activists' community trust, would have had a difficult time getting community residents interested in engaging.

But at the same time, we were knocking on doors with activists pushing for a particular outcome, and perhaps operating without all of the facts. Was this, in fact, an illegal trucking route? if so, why were there no signs? Was Matty Moroun, the man who reportedly owns the trucking companies, the arch-nemesis residents painted him to be? We didn't have time to lock down every fact. We had to move, and move fast.

New tools are making possible a new kind of reporting that combines the best of shoe leather journalism with powerful network effects. The potential is enormous, and largely untapped. But it also raises new questions. Where should we draw the line between activism and journalism if we are to stay close to the ground with our reporting? Does our mission include social justice? Or are we meant to remain at arm's length, secreted in our newsrooms, distanced from the fray?

These are all questions that our industry (the very notion of journalism as an "industry" seems to belie the problem) is grappling with as we speak. Engagement is the centerpiece of many new news efforts, including the soon-to-launch Bay Citizen, ProPublica, WNYC's The Takeaway, the St. Louis Beacon and others. And it's raison d'etre of the Public Insight Network, which is already being used in more than dozen newsrooms. But, to my mind, the risks of engagement are less problematic than the risks of disconnecting in the name of objectivity. We've seen where that's gotten us.

This was an experiment that we're going to be building on later this month in Miami, where we'll be replicating the Detroit project with Miami public radio station WLRN, WNYC's The Takeaway, and the Miami Herald. It has also compelled us at American Public Media to think about how we can conduct similar exercises in our backyard. More on that soon.

This post was originally published on the Future of News blog.