What if poverty coverage was more personal? Instead of throwing abstract numbers and figures around, what if stories showed people living under the poverty line? People clearly had stories to tell during such uncertain times. Thus began an engaged journalism project.
Unheard, published by ProPublica and Anchorage Daily News, is an engagement project that creates space for victims of sexual abuse in Alaska to share their stories and recovery journeys. The project focused on the collaboration between the writers and the community members that this issue directly affects.
The efforts of the America Amplified initiative culminated in a six-part, national radio talk show, America Amplified: Election 2020, which explored the social challenges facing Americans before and after the November national election.
In early 2020, Reveal launched Seeing 2020, a national collaborative reporting initiative to help newsrooms around the country find ways to improve their coverage of the 2020 Census.
CapRadio spent a year listening and learning about Sacramento’s Meadowview neighborhood which came to prominence as the place where police shot and killed Stephon Clark.
Vox launched Open Sourced Reporting Network to collaboratively investigate and learn about the “new frontiers of data, privacy, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.”
In 2015, The Seattle Globalist launched Your City. Your Story. Your Voice., a community media workshop series that served as a deconstructed journalism school for Seattle’s international communities. While it has always been their mission to elevate diverse voices, the daily online publication provided a formal orientation and introductory training to new writers and visual journalists.
Cittadini Reattivi is an online Italian crowd-sourced civic journalism project focused on health, the environment, and judicial issues. The project serves those who live in areas affected by pollution. Since founder and editor Rosy Battaglia launched the project in 2013, she has been able to gather user-generated story ideas, some of which led to new journalistic investigations.
In 2015, Free Press launched News Voices after recognizing that community members aren’t often included in the discussions around how communities get news or how journalists could better serve the communities they work in. The program started in New Jersey with World Cafe style listening forums where community members could share their concerns with journalists.
In 2017, The Listening Post Collective, with support from an Omaha based foundation, conducted an Information Ecosystem Assessment in north Omaha, Nebraska. The resulting assessment maps the existing media and information ecosystem and offers examples and suggestions of steps that may improve access to information and news coverage of north Omaha.
The Wichita Eagle newspaper created a reading challenge through a closed Facebook group. Participants in the virtual book club can track their progress in the challenge, share book reviews, make recommendations, provide links to book-related stories and events. It’s managed by books columnist and education reporter, Suzanne Tobias.
Verify debuted in 2016 in response to a challenge from WFAA’s corporate parent, TEGNA, to find ways to “truth-test” the news. For Verify, reporter David Schechter and producer/photographer Chance Horner select a topic of public interest (e.g. homeless camps, fracking, the death penalty) and invite a citizen reporter to join them on a “road trip” throughout the reporting process.
