Story Doctor with Curious City

WBEZ’s Curious City team is available for 30-minute, one-on-one sessions on building engagement into your audio or multimedia work. Participants should bring a completed or ongoing story or project for evaluation. A Curious City team member will offer specific feedback and talk through strengthening the project or leveraging potential for engagement.

Please note that this workshop consists of 30-minute one-on-one sessions, and advance registration is required. To sign up, click here.

People-Powered Coverage of Immigrant Communities at a Time of Fear

Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates more and more ‘without shackles’ since the Trump administration unleashed a round of “zero-tolerance” enforcement. On the ground, that’s created fear in many communities. Policy changes or shifts in who is subject to arrest happen quickly and with little transparency.

Migratory Notes, a weekly newsletter providing a smart guide to immigration news and resources, will examine journalism projects that engage vulnerable communities in coverage.

Since we launched Migratory Notes the week of Trump’s inauguration and when the first travel band went into effect, we have observed as fear has grown in immigrant communities and the resulting challenges for reporting. We are interested in this context, efforts to crowdsource or use of digital tools to connect with immigrants to share their experiences.

Using Research to Engage Communities: Bridging the Gap Between Academics and Media

Designing engaged journalism projects can be daunting—particularly if you aren’t sure how community members actually want to engage. Universities may have students and resources to help connect with communities, and generate the kinds of data many funders require, but first you have to figure out how to create sustainable collaborations between academics and journalists.

This session will offer lessons learned from a year-long collaboration between Temple University, WHYY, and community stakeholders on a series of research-based engagement activities. This included a research study on community perceptions of trust in local media supported by Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. This was then followed by a workshop inviting residents, community organization representatives, and journalists to brainstorm project ideas, that are now being developed and piloted—including local knowledge hubs and media accountability forums. WHYY also worked with the research organizer to get input on their internal audit of source diversity, and to conduct a complementary independent research project on their efforts to build “cultural competency” in newsrooms, and to engage communities beyond. Finally, we will share experiences (successes and failures) from involving students in community engagement initiatives—using a range of strategies including the Listening Post, GroundSource, and Hearken.

In addition to discussing our experiences, we’ll review some resources on research methods and frameworks. We’ll talk about pitfalls and the importance of shared expectations in academic-media partnerships. And we’ll spend some time discussing and troubleshooting your ideas for using research to connect with communities and design engagement projects.

The Trust Gap: How Citizens Define Trust and How Journalists Can Earn It

We launched the 32 Percent Project in July 2017 to explore what drives and disrupts trust in American news organizations. We held a series of community conversations with diverse citizens across the country, conducted a qualitative analysis of those conversations and identified six critical factors that citizens themselves say must be present in order for them to trust a news organization.

We will present our findings in this presentation, alongside a deep, thoughtful discussion of those six factors and how they might play out in different news organizations. The session will be illuminating and interactive as we explore the dynamics of trust and, especially, the role engagement can play in fostering it.

Localore Live: Making Stories With and For the People

Everyone is trying to break into narrative in new ways. Why now? Where are the opportunities for sustainable collaboration and engagement? Join AIR (Association of Independents in Radio), and producers from its Localore Live production who will bring insights for how to push the boundaries toward live spaces while cultivating intentionally with people in all corners of local communities. How can a live event bring disparate parts of a community together in a new way? What happens when neighbors cross invisible divides to meet in real time, unmediated by social media or smartphones?

Reporting for America

Report for America is a service-based model for revitalizing local journalism in communities across the country. This session explores the program’s work in its pilot year and reflect critically on the implications of the Report for America model for the relationships between newsrooms and the communities they serve. Editors and corps members from the Chicago Sun-Times and Mississippi Today, along with Report for America co-founder Steve Waldman, will cover challenges and opportunities that corps members and newsrooms need to be mindful of in building partnerships and covering under-reported communities. What lessons can be drawn from Chicago and Mississippi about doing this work effectively and inclusively in both urban areas and in smaller communities and rural areas? How do programs that seek to strengthen local journalism avoid replicating the problem of “parachute” journalism? How are newsrooms already building trust?

Bring It In and Pay It Forward: Putting the Community’s Skills at the Heart of Reporting

Engaged journalism takes many forms. We might still struggle to find a common definition for it, and a common way of defining and measuring its impact, but one thing we can agree on is that genuinely engaged journalism can empower communities.

One way is by involving people outside traditional journalism teams in research and reporting and then paying it forward by open-sourcing the results of that work for the wider community. In the UK, the Bureau Local, a collaborative network of 700+ people interested in pursuing local accountability reporting through data and investigative techniques, has been doing this through one-day events in various cities across the country.

So far it has brought community members from various backgrounds and with different expertise together to help investigate voter power in the 2017 UK elections, and local budget proposals in 2018. The resulting datasets and resources have been made available to local newspapers the Bureau partners with, and also open-sourced to the wider public, alongside reporting recipes, on the Bureau Local website. The key to the Bureau’s innovation is accessibility of information, rather than technical whizzery.

In this session, we will draw from the Bureau Local’s expertise to generate collaborative techniques and best practices for enabling and encouraging communities to contribute skills as part of a collaborative network.

Social Justice Stories Across Diasporas: Lessons from Reporting on Chicago and Puerto Rico

The session describes our journey from the intensive story that launched our focus on Chicago’s Puerto Rican communities – a groundbreaking investigation of Puerto Rican authorities sending drug users to unlicensed drug rehab centers in Chicago – to our current focus on post-hurricane evacuees from the island to Chicago and social justice issues on the island. We begin walking through SJNN Fellow Adriana Cardona-Maguigad’s aforementioned investigation, for This American Life and WBEZ. Adriana was walking around her Back of the Yards community, and talking to often overlooked homeless people and drug users, she uncovered a major story and injustice. This story led Adriana and our program to Puerto Rico, where the relationships we developed engendered three student trips and an ongoing focus that now includes environmental justice, education and other topics. We will describe how these topics are all inextricably linked to Chicago’s Puerto Rican community and indicative of the same social justice issues that affect many communities in Chicago and beyond. The panelists who include community leaders/ sources from Puerto Rico and Chicago’s Puerto Rican community along with the journalists (Adriana, Kari and a Medill student) who reported the stories will explain both how these stories and relationships developed and how these examples are symbolic of many other situations that link Chicago to other locations. After the panelists offer the background and discuss the relevant questions, we will use examples from the audience to specifically break down how our Puerto Rico experience applies to other stories and communities.

Two Mothers and a Podcast

Journalist Alison Flowers and Shapearl Wells will discuss their joint investigation into the murder of Courtney Copeland and the podcast chronicling the journey. They will give the story behind the story, discuss the confounding circumstances of Courtney’s death, talk about the challenges they faced in finding the truth, as well as the experience they shared as two mothers seeking justice.

Their podcast is a case study into social justice journalism, flipping the convention of putting investigative journalists at the center of the story and instead giving agency to the person most affected by the story to host and tell her own narrative — a bereaved mother of a slain 22-year-old man.

Tune In. Turn Up! Community-Building and Disruption of Mainstream Media

Tune In. Turn Up! will ask you to consider Internet radio as an alternative platform for community-building and disruption of mainstream media. Yollocalli Arts Reach and Lumpen Radio will share insights on community radio, including tools for radio production, youth development and alternative media production. Learn from youth who will share their personal experience producing radio out of the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. This session will be broadcasted live by youth radio producers (time slot and internet dependent). Yollocalli Arts Reach is a youth initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art located at the Little Village Boys & Girls Club. Lumpen Radio is the Low Power FM station of the Public Media Institute in the neighborhood of Bridgeport. Together they produce and broadcast Wattz Up a weekly youth radio show; and Pop Up Youth Radio a community event pop up radio program.

Strengthen Your Community and Your Journalism by Designing New Public Conversations

At Alaska Public Media, the statewide public media network for Alaska, and Your Voice Ohio, a consortium of 40+ local news organizations across Ohio, we’ve spent multiple years designing, testing, and refining new approaches to newsroom-led public conversations. These conversations center “ordinary” members of the public, rather than technical experts or public officials, at the forefront of discussion. These conversations lead to greater nuance in reporting on public policy issues; promote journalism that is more engaging to a larger audience; identify dozens or hundreds of new, engaged sources in only a few hours; and build new connections across community to broadly enhance civic life.

In this session, we’ll present briefly about the different conversational models we’ve used in Alaska and Ohio. We’ll spend most of our time leading attendees through a series of small group discussions to model facilitated conversations and help participants begin designing a public conversation for their own newsroom. We’ll focus on:

• Choosing a topic and engaging community partners
• Ensuring an appropriate cultural context, from hospitality to moderating style
• Creating a clear “charge” and desired outcomes, with structure to get there
• Ensuring outcomes are relevant and useful for both journalists and the public

When Engagement Goes Sideways: How USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Fellows Navigated Roadblocks

A partner withdraws their support. A politician targets your project. Commenters tear down participants online.

We often hear about what’s working in engaged journalism — but what about setbacks and tough moments? Journalists Michelle Levander (USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism), Mackenzie Mays (Fresno Bee) and Bob Ortega (CNN Investigations) will build our community of practice by presenting their advice on how to navigate those moments based on their experiences as USC Annenberg Center for Health Engagement Fellows. Each journalist will give a presentation by obstacle, solution and advice.

Rethink Your Comments

This session will help attendees rethink the strategy, setup, and goals of their comments sections, either for single projects or across their sites. Comments don’t have to be terrible – but it starts with the strategy, and a clear action plan.

Lessons from Gather, A Project and Platform to Support Community-MInded Journalists and Other Engagement Professionals

Gather launched last year at PPPC17. We’ll explore and share some of the lessons we’ve learned in the past year to support our community of practice of engaged journalism.

Supercharge Your Collaborations: How Multi-Newsroom Partnerships and Community Engagement Can Enhance One Another

In 2017, Resolve Philadelphia produced the Reentry Project, a year-long reporting initiative among 13 local newsrooms focused on the challenges of—and solutions to—prisoner reentry. The project produced over 200 unique articles and broadcasts and was deeply rooted in engagement with the formerly incarcerated, receiving the 2018 APME award for excellence in community engagement.

This year, Resolve launched Broke in Philly: collaborative reporting on economic justice, looking at how poorest big city in American grapples with the vexing problem of economic insecurity. The group has grown to 21 newsrooms, including large general interest outlets, to niche and digital first brands, to ethnic media and community media. Every step of the way, community feedback and perspective has guided this project: from the choice of this central theme to the stories that get reported, from the language used to the goal of focusing reporting not just “about” people experiencing economic hardship but for them.

This panel will look at the intersection between collaborative reporting and community engagement, answering questions such as: How can a collaborative be leveraged to better respond to the information needs of communities? How does baked-in, sustained engagement enhance a topic-oriented longterm city-wide reporting initiative? What’s worked and what hasn’t when it comes to collective engagement work?

Looking at “Engaged” Journalism as Just Good Journalism

The Listening Post Collective of Internews shares examples of journalism projects they helped develop in North Omaha and post-Maria Puerto Rico that are built on assessments of community information needs, and seek to both provide crucial information in communities that lack it, and produce reporting that’s reflective of life in those communities. Join us as we hear from residents of North Omaha, Nebraska and Puerto Rico who have helped build these initiatives from the ground up.

Why You Need to Be There, Part 2

Resources are getting tight, the newsroom’s traditional role is changing and digital storytelling is the news organization’s future. But the community’s struggles persist, or maybe are getting worse. The Journal Star has faced all these issues and continues to make its community outreach a priority. Why? And should you? And if so, what questions do you need to ask your newsroom, your management and the community before you reach out to your underserved audience?

Out in the Field: Connecting with Rural Audiences

Journalists looking to be more inclusive in their coverage can easily forget that those who live just outside town are one of the most under-represented constituency in the media. Rural audiences can be particularly difficult to reach and can be deeply distrustful of journalists coming from organizations based in the core of urban centers. Journalists working in rural communities in Illinois share strategies for reaching constituencies that frequently have low engagement online and are so spread out geographically it can present challenges to connecting in person as well.

While this session will be particularly useful for reporters who cover or work in rural areas, we’ll share lessons and strategies that are relevant for any journalist trying to connect with hard-to-reach communities.

When the “Audience” and the “Public” Differ, Which Should Journalists Pursue?

As news organizations increasingly pursue efforts to improve their relationships with their audiences, they are confronted with difficult questions: Who specifically should these efforts focus on? Who might be left out as a result? This session examines the way that journalists reckon with these issues by drawing on research collected from Milwaukee Public Radio in the fall of 2017. MPR’s journalists have embraced a variety of strategies intended to make their relationship with the audience stronger and more collaborative. They use Hearken for their reporting, they produce segments live in the community, and they organize “listening sessions” where community members are encouraged to share their stories and experiences with journalists without worrying that those stories will get published. My interview and observational data reveal that as journalists have pursued these initiatives, they have become more explicitly aware that the audiences they report to and the community members they report on are not necessarily the same. This distinction presents challenges. Until now, an assumption within journalism has been that by informing the audience, news serves the public. These findings indicate that journalists within public media who are trying to build more reciprocal relationships with their communities are increasingly aware that the people they are reporting on are not necessarily the audiences they are reporting for. What journalists do with this information has implications for the way they attempt to  cultivate closer ties within their communities, for the news they ultimately produce, and for the community members themselves.

Work With Your Audience Members for Fun and Profit

A debate is taking place about the value of engagement journalism. Is it worth the time it takes to do especially when resources and time are in short supply? What is the actual benefit to “end users”? And, most importantly, what is the financial effect for the organisation? Is there a correlation between engagement and revenue, churn and other business imperatives?

This session presents a working framework to empower news organizations of all kinds to make better decisions about the time and effort they spend engaging readers. It will draw on marketing conversion funnel principles which have long placed a value audience engagement and apply those to a newsroom that might be looking to serve the public better in order to attract more people to read more articles, come back more frequently, grow newsletter subscribers, fill in a survey, answer a poll or drive people to leave their opinions in comments under an article. It will also account for the many variables that differentiate news sites, including sources of revenue (advertising, metered, membership, subscription), types of coverage (news, lifestyle, satirical) and strategic goals (page views, scroll depth, dwell time, unique readers) to provide a ready-made engagement canvas that newsrooms can pick up and use.

Fake News, Real People: Community Engagement at the Intersection of Theater and Journalism

Details coming soon.