Following a surge of populist movements in Europe, the need to engage with the public felt acute. German news organization ZEIT Online wondered, “Could someone develop a dating platform for political debates?” To find out, ZEIT Online launched a project called Germany Talks.
In 2015, The Seattle Globalist launched Your City. Your Story. Your Voice., a community media workshop series that served as a deconstructed journalism school for Seattle’s international communities. While it has always been their mission to elevate diverse voices, the daily online publication provided a formal orientation and introductory training to new writers and visual journalists.
Open:Housing is a platform, a network, and a set of strategies aimed at strengthening the information ecosystem that supports civic engagement around housing issues. Journalists, housing advocates and experts, and Portland residents came together with a shared interest: to create inclusive, informed public conversations that drive solutions to the Portland region’s housing crisis.
After the 2016 election, Colorado Public Radio (CPR) reporters wanted to know how they could help bridge conversation across party lines in an increasingly polarized political climate. So in May, CPR brought together a politically and ethnically diverse group of listeners to share a meal and engage in conversation. The dinner series, now dubbed Breaking Bread.
A day after the funeral of Freddie Gray and the subsequent escalation of protest violence, and in response to the narrowly focused reporting of national and local news outlets on the Baltimore Uprising, Wide Angle Youth Media (WAYM) students and staff felt compelled to use their documentary skills to collect positive images of Baltimore youth.
Civil Beat’s Civil Café series convenes influencers and knowledge experts to debate and discuss important Hawaii issues in front of an active and engaged audience. Most discussions are moderated by a Civil Beat editor or reporter, and cover timely and topical issues complementary to Civil Beat reporting like climate change, legislative issues, and economic welfare.
The New Mexico Local News Fund brings news organizations across the state together to harness their collective reporting and fundraising power and tell regional or statewide stories that one outlet could not fully cover on its own. The organization is building on a collaborative mindset already in place among New Mexico’s journalists and providing them with resources and training to enhance their reporting.
Eyes on Oakland was a collaborative project launched in 2015 by The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and the Mobile Arts Platform in Oakland, California. The project used a mobile van retrofitted with a portable recording studio and a screen-printing station to engage with the public on the topic of surveillance in the city.
Injustice Watch launched Check Your Judges to make quality research and information about judicial candidates freely and readily available to voters.
In its first year, the Great Salt Lake Collaborative has collected stories—print, video, and audio—from newsrooms about the lake, funded more in-depth investigations, hosted in-person events like library panels and archaeological tours, and engaged its audience with Q&A surveys and a creative anthology.
Capital Public Radio’s The View From Here uses a documentary unit as a capacity building project for reporters in a radio newsroom. The documentaries are each an hour long and tell the stories of three unique people or families, woven together to show how different people deal with a similar social justice issue.
The reporters at Block Club Chicago spent endless weeks covering COVID-19 stories and answering an influx of questions sent to the newsroom by worried readers, many of which had already been covered in their previous news stories.
