The Austin Monitor, an innovative nonprofit newsroom that covers municipal matters in detail, sought ways to engage readers on the most mundane issues. It has found success by hosting Budget Game Nights that challenge citizens to come up with their own solutions for the city’s budget, an interactive approach that the Monitor and its project partner, Glasshouse Policy.
As part of a pilot for Challenge for Change, a national media project in Canada, Discourse Media reporter Brielle Morgan organized a series of listening events to discuss the child welfare system in B.C. Morgan highlighted the challenges faced by Indigenous children, but also needed to acknowledge and tackle the community’s deep distrust of the media.
Sarah Alvarez launched Outlier Media in 2017 to serve the needs of low-income news consumers in Detroit. Using SMS and Facebook messenger, Detroit residents can input any address in the city and receive free rental information about the home, including its most recent inspection data, any back taxes owed, and the name of the owner.
In 2016, Chicago-based civic journalism lab City Bureau started its Documenters program, which pays and equips community members to document public meetings and civic events in the city. As the program grew, they teamed up with ProPublica Illinois and volunteer coders to “scrape” the web for public meeting listings and populate an events calendar usable by journalists and citizens alike.
Based on detailed, in-depth interviews with 12 editors, reporters, and a leading communications scholar based in the region, this paper shines a spotlight on the practice of local journalism in the Pacific Northwest.
Newsletter expert Jacqueline Boltik, who helped develop projects such as Ann Friedman’s Weekly and the LA Times’ newsletters and journalism professor Daniela Gerson, who recently created Migratory Notes, break down what you need to know to make your newsletter take off. In this course, you’ll learn best practices to grow your newsletter, design basics, and how to report and measure the data from your email campaigns.
