This Community Information Needs Assessment was built on extensive and careful listening. California Common Cause helped facilitate 12 focus groups in English, Spanish, Cantonese, and Tagalog, in partnership with community-based organizations, and had over a dozen conversations with community news publishers.
As a journalist, you’re bound to receive some complaints or criticism about your work and you can’t make everyone happy all the time. The key is how you respond — and it’s important to use humility and diplomacy while not being afraid to explain and defend your work.
Hardman discusses early experiences that shaped his approach, including the importance of deeply listening to communities and collaborating to meet their information needs. He outlines the development of the Listening Post Collective and its Civic Media Playbook, emphasizing strategies for establishing trust and engaging communities in creating media that reflects their voices and priorities.
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.
Rituals are the superglue of communities in most cultures. In a time when Journalism is reimagining its relationship with the communities it serves, rituals can be a useful referent.
Santa Cruz Local started Listening Sessions to create news that catered to the informational needs of Santa Cruz County residents. By listening to community feedback through online surveys and in-person listening sessions, they can report on issues that community members feel are most important to them.
During this Gather Lightning Workshop, attendees collaborated on a document that you can take back to your newsroom, including lessons learned from journalists who have incorporated texting as a regular part of their work.
Listen to and learn from the finalists of the 2022 OJA/Gather Award in Community-Centered Journalism, Medium/Large Newsroom category. Stefanie Ritoper of Southern California Public Radio and Jenny Stratton & Samantha Cabrera Friend of Catchlight share lessons from their community-engagement projects.
Listen to and learn from one of the finalists of the 2022 OJA/Gather Award in Community-Centered Journalism, Micro/Small Newsroom category. Adam Mahoney and John Thomason from the Grist share lessons from their community-engagement project.
Amplify Utah bolsters Utah’s diverse voices through partnerships with storytellers, journalists, media and nonprofit partners of the community. The organization prioritizes community storytelling and strives to gradually increase local readership amongst youth.
Decibel is an Austin PBS project working to engage underserved communities in central Texas. Each year, the staff chooses a new community to cover and work to bring the community into the story production process. They produce in-depth stories based on what the community tells them they care about at listening sessions.
The 2020 Election Roundtable was composed of twenty-four diverse voters from Pennsylvania. These individuals participated in a series of six open, virtual conversations about what is important to them. The prompt for each conversation was often inspired by the day’s news.
