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.
Source: Hearken
The Journalism Industry Knows Engagement is Necessary to Survive
What are the barriers? Why is it so dang hard to just “do engagement already?” We had our hunches, but we commissioned a study to really find out. We spoke with 100 people who are already bought in — who desperately want to spend their time doing better engagement — to learn what (and who) stands in their way. Engagement is a process, not a product. The solution must start with mindset and culture change, not software
Audience-Focused Election Coverage
Does your election coverage provide what your community needs? How do you know? Fresh off their ONA talk on this topic, Ashley Alvarado of Southern California Public Radio and Julia Haslanger of Hearken will bring tools and strategies to help your newsroom better serve your audience.
Creating Newsroom Change
Let’s have a chat on how to create change in newsrooms. Doing engagement work often involves getting colleagues (and bosses) to try new things — even to be *excited* about trying new things. Some newsrooms do that well. What do they have in common? Join the discussion with Kristen Hare of Poynter Institute, Julia Haslanger of Hearken, and Joy Mayer of Trusting News and Gather’s community manager.
How to copy our great hiring process, step by step
The Hearken team is proud to have developed a transparent, collaborative, and well-defined system for hiring that attracted a diverse pool of strong applicants. We learned a lot from others out here on the Internet about best practices when recruiting and hiring, so we wanted to give back and share what we learned. Related resources Dodge Foundation, Poynter, and Open News.
Hiring for Engagement
We chatted with Terry Parris Jr. of ProPublica, Summer Fields of Hearken, and Julia Haslanger of Hearken about hiring for engagement. What should you look for in job candidates? What questions should you ask them? How is hiring for these jobs different from other journalism gigs?
How to Introduce Engagement Efforts to Your Newsroom
This 10-step guide offers practical tips and exercises to create the optimal conditions in your newsroom for meaningful engagement efforts to take root and thrive. This guide will help cultivate lasting culture change in your newsroom that results in producing more relevant content in a more authentic manner.
What We Mean When We Talk About “Engagement”
When uttered outside of journalism circles, the word “engagement” means something fairly specific involving rings, love, wedding bells, commitment, and the like. If there’s no pathway for input from your audience to shape the content decisions your newsroom is making, then it’s not audience engagement. Engagement happens when members of the public are responsive to newsrooms, and newsrooms are in turn responsive to members of the public.
Hearken
Hearken is a consulting and technology company that “help organizations create relevant services and build resilient networks through community engagement.” Hearken began as a public Q&A technology platform and now focuses on processes of change that are enabled by their tech offerings.