In 2016, the University of Oregon student magazine FLUX hosted a community conversation on race and identity, inviting participants to help shape the student magazine’s spring issue. The event drew about 60 staff and community members, and spurred a lively conversation about racial issues.
Case Studies
How Alaska Public Media Uses Face-to-Face Public Conversations to Tackle Important Community Issues
Community in Unity, created by Alaska Public Media, invites residents of Alaska to sit down and participate in face-to-face discussions in order to tackle relevant community issues. Recorded for radio broadcast, the group conversations have included topics ranging from homelessness to race and identity with the hopes of getting people who wouldn’t normally meet together.
How National Trust for Local News aims to sustain community journalism
Newly established National Trust for Local News works “with communities to catalyze the capital, new ownership structures, and business model transformations needed for established local and community news organizations to thrive and remain deeply grounded in their communities.”
How KALW’s Hey Area Project Used Hearken to Listen to Listeners
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.
How the 2020 Election Roundtable Brought Together Voters For Open, Virtual Conversations
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.
How WNYC Created a Neighborhood Listening Station
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.
How the Jefferson Center Used Citizens Juries to Engage Audiences in Civic Participation
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.
How Reveal Discovered Issues with the 2020 Census on the Ground
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.
How Borderless Magazine’s Pathways Program is Changing the Media Ecosystem One Journalist At a Time
Pathways program addresses racial and ethnic gaps in the journalism industry by providing opportunities for journalists from immigrant and other marginalized communities to report on immigration and learn from professional journalists.
How the Banyan Project is Using a Co-op News Model to Tackle News Deserts
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.
How Ideastream Built Trust with the Woodhill Homes Community and Brought Awareness to a Larger Audience
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.
How The Listening Post Collective Identified Community Information Needs in Omaha
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.