How do local communities define themselves? How do news outlets define their audiences? And how do journalists know what’s important to their audiences and what niche they can fill? A recent report is a useful jumping off point for discussion of those questions. Join Amy Schmitz Weiss of San Diego State University, Jesse Hardman of the Listening Post Collective, and Madeleine Bair of El Timpano to continue the conversation.
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.
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.
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.
The Banyan Project develop a business model for community-scale online news co-ops that are designed to thrive in news deserts. Banyan is now setting out to proactively seed news co-ops throughout the U.S. and to provide them with quality support services so they succeed.
Drawn from a report by the Institute for Nonprofit News and Dot Connector Studio. The New England Center for Investigative Reporting held a series of community journalism hackathons focused on campaign contributions for four state ballot items. 65 people came to first hackathon, where they tested an app that allowed them to scour campaign contributions. The study of state contributions data revealed newsworthy nuggets, producing a series of stories for the NECIR’s The Eye and WGBH.
In preparation for a county commissioners meeting on Miami’s transit issues, The New Tropic asked its readers to share solution ideas using the Twitter hashtag #solveMIAtransit. The New Tropic then curated those tweets in a Storify gallery on its site, allowing visitors to see what other people were saying and to join the conversation on Twitter. It also hosted a happy-hour event to discuss transit issues, published opinion pieces by community members, and used the #solveMIAtransit hashtag to point readers to related conversations and additional information.
Launched by The New Tropic in collaboration with WLRN and The Miami Foundation, the Hurricane Irma Map is a crowd-sourced mapping tool that allows users to search for and add information about resources and impacts in their area. Before Hurricane Irma, the content primarily focused on storm preparation resources. During and after the hurricane, the tool refocused on reports of storm damage and environmental hazards, as well as where to find or participate in relief operations. Learn more in “The New Tropic teamed up with an NPR station to help Florida residents find shelter from Hurricane Irma (and survey the damage after)“ by Ren LaForme (Poynter; September 7, 2017).
Fresno Bee education reporter and Center for Health Journalism fellow Mackenzie Mays spent nine months producing a series entitled Too Young? The series covers teen pregnancy in Fresno, California, with a particular focus on how sex education is taught in the Fresno Unified School District. The series hasn’t been without incident. After she reported on a student’s story of facing discrimination from school administrators after becoming pregnant, she came under personal and professional attack from a high level school administrator, both on social media and in through interviews of the administrator conducted by other local media.
In 2016, the University of Minnesota Duluth launched One River, Many Stories, a collaborative storytelling project focused on the St. Louis River region. The project collected stories from a variety of sources and topics ranged greatly, from Native American heritage to land rights and water usage. The project collected 47 different stories from 20 different contributors from around the region. Stories collected by the project were published and marked on an interactive map of the region, as well as being shared and promoted across social media. Read more in their final report (PDF).
The Yarn Exchange Radio Program shares stories that cultivate a more cohesive community by drawing from its multigenerational and multicultural landscape. The ensemble cast, composed of community members, performs a monthly radio show on themes chosen by the cast.
The South Side Photo Walk, an annual workshop going on its ninth year held by Syracuse community newspaper The Stand, uses photography to bring people together and highlight a typical day in the South Side neighborhood of Syracuse, New York. Participants use photography to capture an aspect of the South Side community that is less frequently covered in the media.
