In early 2016, San Francisco public radio station KALW started using the engagement tool Hearken to interact with its audience and create relevant stories. The collaborative reporting project, called Hey Area, has yielded about 15 long and 15 short stories so far — all based on ideas generated by audience members.
The 2020 Election Roundtable was composed of twenty-four diverse voters from Pennsylvania. These individuals participated in a series of six open, virtual conversations about what is important to them. The prompt for each conversation was often inspired by the day’s news.
TalkBox is an old pay phone that New York Public Radio (WNYC) retrofitted as a neighborhood listening station. It launched in 2015, one year after Eric Garner died in the chokehold of a NYPD officer on Staten Island, New York. WNYC placed TalkBox inside the St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island and invited the community to share thoughts about Garner’s death.
Under the banner of Informed Citizen Akron/Your Vote Ohio, The Jefferson Center organized three, three-day deliberative events that were part of a broader effort to improve election narratives in Ohio. That effort included conducting four statewide polls to determine residents’ top policy concerns.
In early 2020, Reveal launched Seeing 2020, a national collaborative reporting initiative to help newsrooms around the country find ways to improve their coverage of the 2020 Census.
The Banyan Project develop a business model for community-scale online news co-ops that are designed to thrive in news deserts. Banyan is now setting out to proactively seed news co-ops throughout the U.S. and to provide them with quality support services so they succeed.
To increase awareness and understanding of Woodhill, create feelings of empowerment and “voice” among its residents, and create social connections between them, Ideastream Public Media launched Inside the Bricks: Woodhill Homes.
In 2017, The Listening Post Collective, with support from an Omaha based foundation, conducted an Information Ecosystem Assessment in north Omaha, Nebraska. The resulting assessment maps the existing media and information ecosystem and offers examples and suggestions of steps that may improve access to information and news coverage of north Omaha.
The Dallas Morning News’ Curious Texas is an engagement project that allows readers to ask questions and for reporters to answer them
The Times wanted to know how the pandemic was affecting Americans financially. The reporting team set out to collect a large enough sample of bills that they would be able to spot meaningful patterns in the types of charges and billing codes used for COVID-19.
The Arizona Republic / azcentral.com in Phoenix launched The Storytellers Project in 2011 as a series of live storytelling nights. The 90-minute events, emceed by journalists, are now in 21 cities from Fort Collins, Colorado to Nashville, Tennessee. The nights blend the authenticity and discipline of first-person storytelling with the truthfulness, community-building and empowerment of great journalism.
La Nacion launched Stranded Abroad collecting information and sharing stories from those trapped in foreign countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
