KOSU has recognized the need for sharing our human experience during unstable times like these throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Communities are coming together now more than ever, and this is the quintessential time to gather safely and digitally to listen to each other’s stories.
Important Stories (iStories) share their knowledge, techniques, skills, code and the apps we use for stories. For Russian-speaking journalists.
Free Press’ News Voices team created a guide to help their community reach out to five folks and ask them a series of questions about what information they need to stay safe, healthy, and connected. The News Voices also relayed these findings to local journalists to help inform media coverage, raise questions to pose to decision-makers, and suggest how to frame stories in a way that will provide value to communities. More on FP’s response to COVID-19.
Documented Weekly includes a summary of the most important immigration news of the week in their weekly, Spanish newsletter. Subscribers are able to contact Documented reporters to ask questions and make suggestions about what news is of greatest interest to Spanish-speaking New Yorkers. They’ve recently done Q&As regarding health care access, tenants’ rights, immigration procedures, labor rights, and fake news (with Univision). More from API.
Justin Auciello collaborated with Internews to produce an information ecosystem assessment for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. This paved the way for Information as Aid, a Facebook group dedicated to disseminating crucial news, aid requests, and lost/found people reports. Learn more about the Recovery in post-Maria Puerto Rico. (Collaboration: Internews/NetHope/Auciello).
Throughout 2016, the Center for Michigan’s engagement team led in-person discussions and phone polls about public trust in state government as part of their public engagement campaign, Fractured Trust: Lost Faith in State Government, and How to Restore It. More than 5,000 Michigan residents participated, and the report was distributed to every state legislator and member of the governor’s team. Learn more here, here, here, and here.
Bitch Media tested whether engagement platform Hearken improved engagement and/or increased membership among users. During the “Turning Readers Into Funders” experiment, Bitch Media found that Hearken-prompted content was 125% more engaging than non-Hearken prompted content. Learn more from Hearken’s project review and their ONA17 session.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) launched the G20 Street Level project to cover the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto. The CBC invited its audience to document and report on the summit itself and surrounding events. Communities could report on what they found important and the CBC had quicker response times and wider coverage. Contributors were trained in basic reporting skills and supported throughout the process. Learn more about this project from CBC’s reflections and MediaShift.
Story Map is a mapping tool that uses in-story geocode integration to highlight the direct geographic relevance of news coverage. The Austin Monitor aimed to use the tool to increase site traffic and turn readers into subscribers. Though subscribers didn’t increase, visitors spent significantly more time on the site. Learn more about this project from INN and NiemanLabs.
In 2014, Carolina Public Press launched News Exchange, a series of free public meetings to invite communities to provide direct feedback on their local reporting efforts. Community members made suggestions for improvements, pitched story ideas, and allowed community members to discuss important issues with each other. Since its launch, the News Exchange has hosted dozens of events in several North Carolina counties. Learn more at Mountain Xpress and MediaShift.
The Off/Page Project, a collaboration between the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and Youth Speaks, combines investigative reporting and youth poetry. Journalists from CIR share details of their investigations with youth storytellers and collaborate to write poetry that is both profound performance art and factually accurate reporting. The resulting poetry is then performed publicly, either in-person or through multimedia packages. Learn more about this project from Mashable and Youth Radio.
City Limits, an investigative hyperlocal news source in NYC, created the Art at the Limits series, which actively engaged readers by encouraging them to submit their own stories and artwork highlighting their city experiences. In addition to collecting readers’ art and stories and featuring them on social media, City Limits also created a map of outer borough art galleries where readers could submit their favorite hidden gems.
