WFAE’s 2015 transformation aimed to adapt to the digital landscape and have its staff and audience reflect the diversity of the area. Since then, WFAE doubled its content staff, increased its digital traffic seven-fold, attracted new members and grew its general revenues. It developed new habits around audience engagement, publishing frequency, hiring and mentoring, and more.
Founded in 2015, City Bureau is a nonprofit civic journalism lab based on the South Side of Chicago. Their programs mainly focus on training and equipping people with little or no journalism experience to lead community conversations, provide oversight of public meetings, and conduct investigations into local sociopolitical issues.
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.
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.
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.
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?
