The Times wanted to know how the pandemic was affecting Americans financially. The reporting team set out to collect a large enough sample of bills that they would be able to spot meaningful patterns in the types of charges and billing codes used for COVID-19.
In 2015, The Seattle Globalist launched Your City. Your Story. Your Voice., a community media workshop series that served as a deconstructed journalism school for Seattle’s international communities. While it has always been their mission to elevate diverse voices, the daily online publication provided a formal orientation and introductory training to new writers and visual journalists.
Community in Unity, created by Alaska Public Media, invites residents of Alaska to sit down and participate in face-to-face discussions in order to tackle relevant community issues. Recorded for radio broadcast, the group conversations have included topics ranging from homelessness to race and identity with the hopes of getting people who wouldn’t normally meet together.
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.
In October 2017, Vox launched a year-long crowdsourcing project to collect readers’ emergency room bills and bring more transparency to these costs. At the time of producing this case study, Vox has collected more than 1,500 bills since launching the project and produced multiple stories.
Cittadini Reattivi is an online Italian crowd-sourced civic journalism project focused on health, the environment, and judicial issues. The project serves those who live in areas affected by pollution. Since founder and editor Rosy Battaglia launched the project in 2013, she has been able to gather user-generated story ideas, some of which led to new journalistic investigations.
Eyes on Oakland was a collaborative project launched in 2015 by The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and the Mobile Arts Platform in Oakland, California. The project used a mobile van retrofitted with a portable recording studio and a screen-printing station to engage with the public on the topic of surveillance in the city.
A day after the funeral of Freddie Gray and the subsequent escalation of protest violence, and in response to the narrowly focused reporting of national and local news outlets on the Baltimore Uprising, Wide Angle Youth Media (WAYM) students and staff felt compelled to use their documentary skills to collect positive images of Baltimore youth.
Verify debuted in 2016 in response to a challenge from WFAA’s corporate parent, TEGNA, to find ways to “truth-test” the news. For Verify, reporter David Schechter and producer/photographer Chance Horner select a topic of public interest (e.g. homeless camps, fracking, the death penalty) and invite a citizen reporter to join them on a “road trip” throughout the reporting process.
In 2017, Southern California Public Radio (KPCC) piloted Unheard LA, a community-driven live storytelling series that featured people’s first-person accounts of real-life experiences. KPCC’s events and engagement arm, KPCC In Person, reached beyond the station’s existing audience by using the P.I.N., GroundSource, and other engagement tools to solicit story pitches and promote the event.
Public Radio International (PRI) launched the reporting project Global Nation in 2012 to cover the “real-world stories of immigrants in the United States—their challenges, successes and how uneven US immigration laws affect their lives.” PRI then created the Global Nation Exchange to foster discussion between immigrants and help ground editorial decisions in what was most important to them.
