This work of rhetorical analysis interrogates the understanding of journalism as a deliberative instrument in democracy. With 42 in-depth interviews and hundreds of pages of text from websites, social media, and trade press articles, we find a major shift occurring in the United States between more traditional reporters and a growing class often calling themselves “engagement specialists.” These engagement-oriented journalists assert a responsibility to relationally engage with citizens in person and online, making space for them in the news production process. These emerging routines of trust-building are informing a new rhetoric around what it means to “do journalism.”

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This essay examines the dynamics of diverse youth public formation through analysis of the 20 student speeches delivered at the 2018 March For Our Lives rally. I argue that the collective identification as youth survivors of gun violence trauma functions to constitute this diverse youth public. I trace how the speakers’ shared gun violence trauma enabled them to form a racially integrated coalition while not discrediting their differently positioned identities and disparate gun violence experiences. In doing so, I forward a conceptualization of how youth publics negotiate gun violence trauma, asserting that youth publics are characterized by both present constraints and a future-oriented agency, members of youth publics must account for tensions across racial differences in their gun violence prevention advocacy, and gun violence trauma functions as a shared basis for political participation. My analysis of the students’ gun violence prevention discourse complicates this framework to reveal how gun violence trauma as a shared basis for youth public membership threatens their source of empowerment: ownership over their futures. Contributing to scholarship on the formation of publics, this essay demonstrates the significance of youth publics at the intersections of race, trauma, and gun violence.

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