Guides

Keep Responding

While reporting, Adriana tries to respond to everyone who is involved in the reporting process, even if they don’t end up in the story. She says it can be stressful for people who are waiting for a story to be published about them. As much as possible, she says to “give them back the thing that you’re building together,” by detailing how the story is coming together and letting them know when she’s talking to other people about similar things. Terry says it all goes back to responding and making sure your ability to respond is meeting the needs of the community, and not leaving them hanging in some way.

Do Your Work with Them in Mind

When you publish a piece about someone, they may or may not be your target audience, Natalie says, “Sometimes things are targeted towards the people who make the change rather than towards the people who are feeling the impact.” But you should still think of them as you craft your words and framing in a way that would not embarrass them. “If they had a criticism or concern, that should be relevant to you,” she says, and it’s a good idea to keep this in mind while you’re still writing, ensuring that you’ll be comfortable with them reading it after you’re done.

Own Up to Mistakes

Everyone’s going to make mistakes sometimes, and while it’s embarrassing to do so publicly as a journalist, sometimes owning up to your mistakes can build more trust than you had even before you made the mistake. Kavolshaia witnessed this at a TV station when they aired a story about a man who visited local hospitals dressed as Santa Claus. The story he told them was incredible but they immediately began getting comments from people who believed it was fake. The station didn’t shy away from their mistake, but kept investigating and openly reporting their findings. They ended up getting a lot of positive feedback for their transparency and their work to get to the bottom of what was really going on.

Follow The Evolution of Their Story

While you may not be able to follow a story or work with a community indefinitely, you might be able to check back in with certain people regularly. Kavolshaia says she asks to follow people on social media so they can keep up with each other and she’ll message them to check in on how they and their family are doing, or the work they’re doing. Sometimes this has led to other stories and opportunities to help amplify the work they’re doing.

Resources

• Gather did a case study on Vox’s ER bill database. Vox keeps the community in the loop every time they publish a new story related to the project! You can find this and other related resources on Gather under the Solutions Journalism topic.

* * Lightning Chat! * * Check out Alicia Bell’s talk on media reparations and Free Press’ Media 2070 project!

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Learn more about the journalists who contributed to this guide! 

Adriana Gallardo

Adriana joined ProPublica in 2016 as an engagement reporter. Since then, she’s collaborated across the newsroom on investigative series covering women’s health, immigration, and sexual violence. Her community-sourced reporting contributed to several awards including a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist series for explanatory reporting (Lost Mothers) and the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for public service (Lawless). Prior to ProPublica, she oversaw a national reporting series at 15 public media stations. She’s traveled the country with the StoryCorps mobile booth collecting hundreds of stories archived at the U.S. Library of Congress. In her hometown Chicago, she spent over a decade working as a journalist, media educator and radio producer.

Kavolshaia Howze

Kavolshaia is a Fairfield, Alabama native with fusions of the Bayou state after spending 10 years in Louisiana. She graduated from Grambling State University with a degree in Broadcast Journalism in 2008 and Northwestern State University of Louisiana with a master’s degree in Sports Administration in 2012. Since beginning her career in 2005, Kavolshaia has developed her skills in writing, filming and producing for television, radio, as well as digital platforms. Now she’s applying those skills as a video producer with Reckon South. Over the past year Kavolshaia has worked with Reckon South, she’s produced several video and editorial stories including Reckon South’s 19th Amendment 100th Anniversary coverage while serving as a moderator for Reckon’s social media digital community groups—Reckon | Women and the Black Magic Project.  

Terry Parris Jr.

Terry Parris Jr. is Engagement Director for THE CITY, an independent, non-profit news organization covering New York City. He leads THE CITY’s audience development and community engagement efforts — including crowdsourcing, engagement reporting, community events and social media. Projects include The Open Newsroom, an initiative in partnership with Brooklyn Public Library to make local news collaborative, and MISSING THEM, an ambitious collaborative journalism effort to track down every news yorker who died of COVID-19 and write a story about them. 

Prior to THE CITY, he was a Deputy Editor at ProPublica. He’s won multiple awards for this work in crowdsourcing and social media. He was also part of the team that was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting for the work they did on ProPublica’s Machine Bias project. Prior to ProPublica, he was digital editor at WDET 101.9 FM, NPR’s affiliate in Detroit. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Wayne State University in Detroit.

Natalie Yahr

Natalie Yahr is a reporter and podcast producer at the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. Her work has been published by Wisconsin Watch, the Center for Journalism Ethics, Columbia Journalism Review and the New York Times and Scalawag, and some know her for her “guide to less extractive reporting.” Before moving into journalism full-time in 2018, she worked for community engagement news outlet Listening Post New Orleans, trained as a Spanish-English interpreter and supported adult students working to earn their high school equivalencies.  

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Guide and illustration produced by Maia Laperle. This guide was last updated in January 2021.

This guide provides suggestions and best practices for how to ethically collaborate with communities while ethically seeking participation and feedback from them.

Tips On Listening

Tailor Your Interview Style to Different People

When Adriana was interviewing survivors of sexual assault, she made sure to check in with other reporters who had experience working with this population and they were able to share important tips that helped her be prepared. She says she learned that “folks don’t remember things linearly, like, they might talk about the end first, or they might call you back because something else came to mind that didn’t at all surface when you were talking to them.” So she made sure to give extra time and “air to breathe” during interviews, saying things like, “Hey, you don’t have to tell me everything in this conversation, I’m happy to call you again,” and reminding people to share in however much detail they were comfortable with.

Don’t Overdirect Things

Natalie says to “Ask a question and just don’t immediately rephrase because the person hasn’t immediately started speaking. I value the blank space while they perhaps collect their thoughts and the little bit of a gap at the end.” While Natalie was an adult education teacher, she remembers being trained on the ideal wait time after asking a question. She says the average teacher’s wait time is about 2 seconds, while the ideal wait time is 10 seconds.

Record Your Interviews

Listening well is a big enough job on its own, along with being ready to respond. Natalie says she always records her interview so she won’t have to worry if she caught everything.

Use Repetition and Follow Up Questions

“When it comes to listening to establish trust, for me, it’s always about repetition,” says Kavolshaia, “even just repeating their name.” She says you should be sure to go off-script from your pre-packaged questions to ask follow up questions about what they’re actually saying. She’s seen how follow up questions help people become more engaged in a conversation and drop their guard a bit.

Kavolshaia says follow up questions can also be crucial when you need a soundbite for an audio or video piece, because you’re more likely to have a few different phrases to choose from.

Listen by responding

Terry says if you’re not responding, you’re not listening, “So that is the quantification of listening is your ability to respond.” That means responding to emails and answering questions, but it also means recognizing things like when people show up to your meetings regularly, and telling them, “Hey, thank you for showing up regularly.”

Keep it Casual to Build a Connection

Kavolshaia  usually starts out an interview  by just talking about weather or something. “Sometimes, if I have to go to either their place of business or their house I’ll just look around and see if I can find something in common or just something that is just as a talking point, and just go from there. Oh, they have a Faberge egg, and you say, ‘Oh my grandma used to collect those growing up,’ or whatever. Something that little can go a long way establishing trust and making that person more relaxed to talk to you.”

Being Yourself — Not Your Organization

Kavolshaia says sometimes you have to distinguish yourself as a journalist from the station you work for, and explain that you’re dedicated to each story and telling it in the correct way—more than you’re dedicated to trying to impress a boss. 

Be Clear About Expectations and Options

When Natalie reaches out to someone who might be nervous about speaking to a reporter, or have some reason that they might need anonymity she tries to mention that from the very start, because she knows the outlet she works with will usually allow that. She also lets people know that if they’re not comfortable answering or don’t know an answer to a question to just let her know and they can move on. She says, “These are generally not people I’m trying to like, hold accountable for something and ask them, you know, the hard answers to all of my grilling questions.” 

Legitimize Their Expertise

“I think we’re very used to the ‘How Awful It Was’ story. And I think the stories that I like to build, they’re like, yeah, look how awful this was—and look how far she came. What kept her from dying versus the other case? Something was done better to save her life.” Adriana says the people who she interviews have specific expertise in the thing they’ve lived through, even when it’s unwanted expertise, and they often have insights that no one else could have.

Use Social Media

Kavolshaia says she starts her day with social media to get a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in the community. Watching over community Facebook groups, Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok can give you a better idea of what people are talking about and who has something to say about it. Adriana uses call out forms to find the specific people she still needs for a story who are also ready to volunteer to tell that story, and she shares these forms widely in Facebook groups. “[At] every step of the reporting process, you’re zeroing in on the reporting gap. And when you fill one, there’s probably a new one that shows up.” She says building a really good form is key, because it can give you a much clearer picture of what people are dealing with even before you meet them.

Connect with existing organizations

Terry has heard great stories about reporters who go around exploring in a new community and eventually they find some well-known spot where everyone hangs out to talk about the issues they care about. He thinks that while you might get lucky sometimes being in the right place at the right time, it’s been more efficient for him to identify and try to work with local organizations.

Natalie shares that once she’s been in touch with more “official” type sources, she makes sure to find the people who are directly impacted by an issue early on.