What if you based your election coverage on what your community has told you they actually want candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes? Join our hosts, Brittany Schock from Richland Source, Bridget Thoreson from Hearken, and Joy Mayer from Trusting News as they talk about what that process actually looks like and what they hope it achieves. Read more about The Citizens Agenda.
Lightning Chats
OJA Finalists (USA TODAY Florida and Vox)
Join this special hour-long chat with two finalists in the first-ever ONA Gather Award for Engaged Journalism! We’ve got Eve Samples and Leah Voss from USA TODAY Florida to talk about their nominated project, “Florida Voices,” and Lauren Katz will share more about Vox’s nominated project, “Hospitals Kept ER Fees Secret. We Worked with Patients to Uncover Them.”
OJA Finalists (City Bureau + Bureau Local)
Join this special hour-long chat with two finalists in the first-ever ONA Gather Award for Engaged Journalism! Darryl Holliday will talk about City Bureau’s nominated project, and Megan Lucero will share more about Bureau Local’s engagement work nominated under the “Portfolio” category.
OJA Finalists (SCPR + WITF)
Join this special hour-long chat with two finalists in the first-ever ONA Gather Award for Engaged Journalism! Ashley Alvarado will talk about Southern California Public Radio’s engagement work nominated under the “Portfolio” category, and Cara Williams Fry and Lisa Wardle will dive into WITF’s nominated project, “Three Mile Island Accident’s 40th Anniversary.”
Why Would Someone Come to Your Event?
Before hosting an event, ask what your community will get out of it. This chat will focus on how to design an event with your potential participants in mind with hosts Tiney Ricciardi of The Dallas Morning News, and Kristin Walters of Illinois Newsroom
Engagement Workflow
What are the biggest challenges specific to engagement work — both for internal communication on an engagement team and for communication with the rest of the organization? What about engagement work and about audience + community relationships and interactions most need to be communicated? What tools and strategies are helpful? Join Kim Bui and Emma Carew Grovum to find out.
Strategies for Facebook Groups
As a news organization, when should you consider creating a Facebook group, and what could the focus of the group be? Once you have one, how do you recruit and admit members? How (and how much) should you moderate conversation? And how will you measure the success of your efforts? Join Lauren Katz of Vox, Penny Riordan of GateHouse Media, and Hannah Wise of Dallas Morning News to find out.
Finding Your Social Media Voice
How can you find the right voice or tone to use on your organization’s social media accounts? How can you show personality but also be appropriate when discussing different types of content? And how can you keep your voice consistent when multiple team members are posting and responding? Join Brandon Echter from Science Friday and Brian Manzullo from the Detroit Free Press to find out.
SEO Best Practices
What are best practices for newsrooms around SEO concepts these days? And what should you do if you’re charged with sharing them with the rest of your newsroom? Join Nicole Barton of KQED (and previously of YouTube), Adriana Lacy of the LA Times, and Jessica Lee Martin of CityLab to find out.
Online Participation
Engaged journalists know there’s value to good participation in and moderation of online comments. But what does that actually look like? In this 30-minute video chat with Teddy Amenabar of The Washington Post, Elizabeth Dunbar of Minnesota Public Radio, and Andrew Losowsky of The Coral Project, we’ll talk about some benefits of investing in comments. Then we’ll look at specific comment threads and do some live brainstorming about how journalists could/should/might participate in them.
Community Advisory Boards
How can advisory boards help newsrooms stay in touch with what matters most to their communities? And what are some best practices for setting them up, recruiting members and making the time useful? Join Elizabeth Stephens of Columbia Missourian, jesikah maria ross (JMR) of Capital Public Radio, and Kim Bode of News Deeply to find out.
Kickstarter for Engagement Projects
Let’s talk about the pros and cons, and the when and why, to using crowdfunding for your media project with hosts Courtney Hurtt of WDET and Madeleine Poore of WAMU.