Engagement reporting at ProPublica is about giving you a place to share that kind of information. Our job is about connecting with, mobilizing and marshaling communities who have information that becomes more powerful when it’s all put together. We operate as kind of journalistic community organizers, both online and off.
In 2015 the business website 24/7 Wall St. released a report that ranked Peoria, Illinois, as one of the 10 worst cities to live in for African Americans in the United States. Following the report, the Journal Star newsroom of Peoria launched City of Disparity, a year-long reporting project that examined the city’s disparities.
We’ve been thinking a great deal about participation design and examples of successful practices for community members to be involved in news reporting, production, and site growth. We’ve been interrogating what modern member participation looks like and who’s doing it well. We detail 25 ways that you can invite members to create journalism with you, using examples of live and recent experiments.
In order to take a different route in covering climate change and agriculture, MPR News, the news service of Minnesota Public Radio, launched Feeding the Future, an engagement journalism project set on informing its audience members and identifying solutions to a rapidly changing climate.
In light of the media industry’s growing focus on audience engagement, this article explores how online and offline forms of engagement unfold within journalism, based on a comparative case study of two American public media newsrooms.
You might use Nextdoor to keep up with neighborhood crime, gossip and lost pets. But have you used it as part of your journalism? In this video chat hosted by Beth O’Malley of St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Joe Lanane of Community Impact Newspaper, we’ll talk about how journalists are using Nextdoor and what they can learn by experimenting on platforms that are new to them.
We produced The View From Here: Place And Privilege, a 10-part podcast, hourlong radio documentary and online community voice platform. To carry the conversation deeper into the community, CapRadio collaborated with community partners to co-host a series of Story Circles.
Justin Auciello collaborated with Internews to produce an information ecosystem assessment for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. This paved the way for Information as Aid, a Facebook group dedicated to disseminating crucial news, aid requests, and lost/found people reports. Learn more about the Recovery in post-Maria Puerto Rico. (Collaboration: Internews/NetHope/Auciello).
Bitch Media tested whether engagement platform Hearken improved engagement and/or increased membership among users. During the “Turning Readers Into Funders” experiment, Bitch Media found that Hearken-prompted content was 125% more engaging than non-Hearken prompted content. Learn more from Hearken’s project review and their ONA17 session.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) launched the G20 Street Level project to cover the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto. The CBC invited its audience to document and report on the summit itself and surrounding events. Communities could report on what they found important and the CBC had quicker response times and wider coverage. Contributors were trained in basic reporting skills and supported throughout the process. Learn more about this project from CBC’s reflections and MediaShift.
The Off/Page Project, a collaboration between the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and Youth Speaks, combines investigative reporting and youth poetry. Journalists from CIR share details of their investigations with youth storytellers and collaborate to write poetry that is both profound performance art and factually accurate reporting. The resulting poetry is then performed publicly, either in-person or through multimedia packages. Learn more about this project from Mashable and Youth Radio.
ZoneIn is a City Limits initiative designed to cover the de Blasio City Limits, an investigative hyperlocal news source in NYC, created the public information and civic engagement project ZoneIn in YEAR to cover the de Blasio administration’s proposed re-zoning plan. ZoneIn has since grown into the special project Mapping the Future.
