Measuring People Power In 2020+

In the most exhaustive study of its kind to date, MobLab and 13 other organisations heard from more than 500 social change practitioners and leaders across the global non-profit world. How can organisations measure the depth and value of people’s engagement and participation? What indicators can you use to assess grassroots power building, organising, and volunteer initiatives? Through research, consultations, and a global survey, the resulting report offers a baseline for how organisations are measuring people power today, and reveals where more attention is needed to accurately reflect the power of people coming together for change.

2020 Edelman Trust Barometer

The 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that despite a strong global economy and near full employment, none of the four societal institutions that the study measures—government, business, NGOs and media—is trusted. The cause of this paradox can be found in people’s fears about the future and their role in it, which are a wake-up call for our institutions to embrace a new way of effectively building trust: balancing competence with ethical behavior.

Civic Media Practice

In a context of increasing distrust in institutions, including government, media and news, there is need to understand how civic innovators are using media and technology to counter these trends. Based on over 40 interviews with practitioners, this report identifies “civic media practice” as media and technology used to facilitate democratic process. It focuses specifically on those practitioners using media tools to form relationships and build trust – a practice that sometimes runs counter to the apparent needs of organizations to enhance efficiency through technology. This report identifies civic media practice as a direct response to the crisis of distrust and describes the negotiation of values that takes place as media is designed and deployed in organizations.

Towards a Useful Typology of Engaged Journalism

What does engaged journalism mean to journalists? What are the common practices that can be thought of as engaged journalism? What is engaged journalism? We — the News Integrity Initiative and Impact Architects — attempted to surface some answers with a survey administered among journalists in August and September 2018. The survey results, when taken together with results from a survey conducted by Hearken and research done by EJC, provide insights into the what, the why, the who, and the how of engaged journalism.

Preventing Suicide, One Conversation At a Time

This project started with a small seed of an idea, planted by CapRadio Managing Editor Linnea Edmeier, who has lived in Sutter Creek for most of her life. She had noticed people dying by suicide often, but had never heard anyone discuss it at length. She proposed a project to find out if people who live in Amador County are at heightened risk for suicide, and whether leaders there were do anything to solve it.

Disrupting Traditional News Routines Through Community Engagement

Abstract: This research examines the impact of One River, Many Stories, a community storytelling project designed to disrupt relationships between news organizations and their audiences. Community engagement methods were used to study this two-year storytelling project. Ripple Effects Mapping methods measured its impact. Findings reveal that traditional news media deviated little from established journalism routines while citizen participation was diverse and expansive.

Engaging Buttons Plugin

The Engaging Buttons Plugin is a WordPress plugin that allows WordPress admins to add a variety of reaction buttons to their content, from the traditional “Like” to options like “Respect” and more. This plugin was developed because researchers at the Engaging News Project found that people were far more likely to interact with content, particularly important but not positive content, if they had more options available to them than just “Liking” something.

Why Journalists Should Engage with Their Readers: A View from Slovakia

What happens when journalists join in the discussion in the often-frightening comments section below their articles? That’s one of the questions I sought to answer in my book, Discussing the News: the uneasy alliance of participatory journalists and the critical public, published earlier this year. In traditional newspaper culture, journalists do not often engage with their readers. So, as a researcher I jumped at the chance of witnessing an attempt to foster a more conversational relationship between journalists and the public at the newly-founded Slovak daily, Denník N.

Life at Small-Market Newspapers: A Survey of Over 400 Journalists

We set out to answer these questions by asking local journalists at daily and weekly newspapers with circulations under 50,000 to tell us directly about their working lives. Of the 7,071 newspapers regularly published in the United States (daily and weekly), 6,851 have circulations smaller than this number … Through an online survey completed by 420 respondents across the United States we discovered a cohort, which describes itself as hardworking, optimistic about the future of its industry, and eager to know more about emerging digital tools for journalistic storytelling.