How community listening can help shape election-year coverage

API’s discusses the significant impact of community listening on shaping election-year coverage. It highlights the importance of engaging with the community to understand their information needs, concerns, and the political stories that resonate with them. By conducting listening projects, newsrooms can set their coverage agenda based on real community priorities rather than politicians’ narratives, discover gaps in public understanding, and build trust with their audience.

Forming a community advisory board for your newsroom

Community editorial boards or advisory boards are one way to start your journalism from a place of listening. Depending on the board’s makeup and recruitment processes, they can point you toward stories that have gone uncovered and people whose information needs are not being met. And they can help you repair relationships with groups that are often marginalized or misrepresented by the news media.

Better News

Better News is an interactive database of industry tools, tips, best practices, and tactics for newsrooms in general and legacy newspapers in particular. Content is curated by industry experts and comes from a variety of sources, including from newsrooms participating in the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative. Related articles are NiemanLab and API.

How to Engage Readers with Digital Longform Journalism

Major enterprise stories—stories that take deep dives and attempt to inform readers in substantive ways or to elicit impact—these are the types of stories that encourage readers to move beyond binary and dogmatic thinking about local, national and world events. However, these enterprise stories require considerable resources: time and effort from reporters and a financial investment from the news organization. And once the story is published, the potential audience is limited … So how can journalists get readers to complete these long pieces