For a long time, legacy publishers have looked down on social media influencers and Patreon-style creators, if indeed they think of them at all.

Meanwhile, thousands of successful influencers and content creators have been building real and valuable relationships with their communities, who now trust them more than traditional journalism — and sometimes pay for subscriptions in numbers that rival far more expensive media organizations.

The most successful influencers and creators have certain strategies in common, empowered by their platforms, which build tools around key activities.

These include:

• Building ongoing, two-way relationships with their audiences through community-led experiences like live Q&As, community Discords, and listening/watching parties
• Recognizing and rewarding loyalty on an ongoing basis
• Reacting and adapting to community needs and situations
• Making it seamless and easy to sign up as a member/fan at various tiers
• Providing real value through engaging content that’s easy to access

We don’t have to become influencers ourselves, but we can learn vital lessons from those who have elevated community-centered content to an art form.

Lessons such as: people are looking for valuable information via human connections and community, not anonymous opinions written by editorial boards. Loyalty should be consistently rewarded, not taken for granted. Gathering people around our work isn’t an afterthought, it’s a core part of the creation process. We need to inspire and delight and entertain as well as inform. Being part of a community means responding quickly to what the community needs.

In summary, we urgently need to rethink the roles of the audience in our mission, and of the journalist in our communities.

Journalism has to rebuild itself around the real needs of our communities. To do this effectively, we first need to show up for them. We need to be more approachable and present, to ask and answer ongoing questions, to encourage and engage in discussions around what and how we cover, to show up for our communities in good times as well as bad, to reward and encourage loyalty, to create near-seamless access to our work, and to provide real, demonstrable value with everything we make. In other words, learn from influencers through the lens of engaged journalism.

This will not be a straightforward shift. To be effective, many organizations will need to remodel their journalistic processes, redesigning editorial planning and strategy around their communities at every stage, instead of viewing community engagement as a luxury, the role of an underpaid junior staff member, or post-publication marketing.

This also means that journalism needs to be much more responsive to people’s needs in times of crisis. If an urgent situation is happening within our communities, how can we react in a way that supports those most in need, instead of simply swarming them with reporters to write about it for those who are doing just fine? If we actually show up to help people in their worst times, they might just show up for us in ours. That’s how a strong community grows.

This type of engagement isn’t easy. It creates a lot of stressors and requires new workflows — we can’t just put it on already-exhausted teams. Also, many influencers and content creators burn out through unsustainable demands and processes, so we’ll need to set realistic expectations from our community and our teams around the new ways of working.

The good news is that others have already pioneered a lot of the skills and approaches to publishing work that’s directly responsive to community needs, engendering trust and building ongoing relationships that reward everyone involved.

It’s high time we let them influence us.