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.
Generative Dialogue Framework (GDF) and explores its potential as a pedagogical intervention. By bringing design-thinking practices, creativity, and deep-listening modalities into play, GDF could help reimagine the future of engaged journalism.
In a follow-up to this Ecosystems Toolkit, the author Fiona Morgan shares lessons from how she and others undertook aspects of news ecosystem assessments during the pandemic, and how this listening was itself an investment in communities. Via: How to listen during a pandemic and other lessons from recent local news ecosystem research.
The seven members, one for each Oakland district, will be reading the organization’s stories and giving feedback to ensure they stay true to their founding values. This paid group of community advisors is the heart of The Oaklandside’s Mission Metric initiative.
The Discourse is building a new kind of journalism from the ground up: community-powered journalism that genuinely reflects all of us. But what does that actually mean? These 10 principles guide their editorial and business decisions.
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.
Local Voices Network hosted dozens of small group community conversations utilizing Zoom working with news organizations across the country to host larger town hall meetings and more focused topical small group conversations. This guide helps to think through these digital gatherings, from the more significant philosophical questions to the nitty-gritty of the tech.
