Experiments in Engagement: Participatory Media Projects in Chicago, LA, and NOLA
Ivy Room Main
9:30-10:10 AM
Shawn Allee
Editor, WBEZ’s Curious City
Bill Healy
Outreach Producer, WBEZ’s Curious City
Jesse Hardman
Creator, The Listening Post
Daniela Gerson
Community Engagement Editor, Los Angeles Times; Assistant Professor of Journalism, California State Northridge
Andrea Wenzel
PhD Candidate, USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism; Fellow, Tow Center for Digital Journalism
Who gets to tell a community’s story? This panel looks at several media initiatives that attempt to give residents a greater role in shaping the questions and narratives circulating about their community. It focuses on efforts that experiment with a combination of new technologies and old school pavement pounding outreach. Bringing together journalism practitioners with communication researchers, the panel puts engagement initiatives into conversation with communication infrastructure theory—and reflects critically on models for more inclusive storytelling.
We examine lessons learned from innovative projects like Curious City’s efforts to get residents of underrepresented communities in Chicago to ask questions that they want the news to answer. From New Orleans, we learn how the Listening Post invites residents to answer questions like “What do jails and prisons do?” Residents of South Los Angeles weigh in on a model for community-based “solutions journalism”, and we discuss Alhambra Source’s community contributor model in an ethnically diverse Los Angeles suburb. Throughout, we grapple with questions of participation, representation, gatekeeping, and the limitations of projects that often involve media makers who are outsiders seeking to facilitate meaningful community conversations.
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Engaging News Project: Making News Democratically and Commercially Beneficial
Ivy Room Downstairs
9:30-10:10 AM
Katie Steiner
Communication Associate, Engaging News Project
The Engaging News Project, based at the University of Texas at Austin, provides research-based techniques for engaging digital audiences in commercially viable and democratically beneficial ways. So what does that mean to you and your organization? In this session, we will share some of our techniques for improving engagement and explain how they can be used in your newsroom. We will also lead a discussion on some of the areas we’ve researched, such as improving comment sections, using quizzes instead of polls, rethinking homepage layout and the use of the “Like” button.
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Make Investigative Journalism New: Do It Out in the Open
Dining Room
9:30-10:10 AM
Terry Parris Jr.
Community Editor, ProPublica
Here’s an idea: Investigative journalism done out in the open and with the help of the crowd. That might scare some reporters. It’s kind of the opposite of what you might think investigative reporting looks like: Secretive, behind closed doors, tightlipped. But we’re doing it. So, I’m going to talk about when we do it, how we do it, what we’ve learned and how, hopefully, you can take these ideas back to your newsroom and do it yourself.
Generating Face-to-Face Interactions with Audio and Photography
Ivy Room Main
Time: 10:20-11:00 AM
Courtney Hurtt
Project Manager, WDET 101.9FM Detroit
WDET 101.9FM will talk about an audio-visual storytelling model that generates face-to-face interactions with diverse audiences and creates opportunities for local communities to see their own story validated and elevated through art and the media.
Over the past year, the public radio station has paired local photographers and storytellers to capture voices of ethnic and cultural communities throughout metro Detroit through “Framed by WDET.” The stories and images are then presented to the community (and beyond) through a series of traveling gallery exhibitions, on-air storytelling, and mobile listening sessions.
Project Manager Courtney Hurtt will share the lessons they have learned along the way. Then, she’ll turn it to you! We’ll put our brains together to discuss ways this form of audio-visual storytelling can be improved and modified to make sense at your organization.
Learn more at framedbywdet.org.
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How Do You Build Tools for Engagement?
Ivy Room Downstairs
10:20-11:00 AM
Andrew Losowsky
Project Lead, The Coral Project at Mozilla
The Coral Project was founded to create free software for journalists and audience engagement. From the beginning, it had an incredible series of resources: a multi-million dollar grant, two huge newsroom partners, and the expertise of the Mozilla Foundation. In this session, we’ll discuss what we decided to build, how we are approaching our work – and share plenty of lessons that you can apply to your projects, no matter what the size. You can also help us design what to build next.
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Shaping the Community-to-Mainstream Media Pipeline in Chicago
Dining Room
10:20-11:00 AM
Jennifer Choi
Democracy Program Officer, Robert R. McCormick Foundation
Darryl Holliday
Editorial Director, City Bureau
City Bureau staff will join Chicago news editors for a round-table discussion on how City Bureau’s nonprofit, independent and civic-oriented model partners with mainstream media outlets to produce collaborative coverage. McCormick Foundation program officer Jenny Choi will moderate the public event on shaping and supporting the community-to-mainstream media pipeline in Chicago—including practical (#realtalk) on what has and has not worked. Audience participation is heavily encouraged.
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There’s No Such Thing As an Audience
Ivy Room Main
11:00-11:50 AM
Jennifer Brandel
CEO and Co-founder, Hearken
Ellen Mayer
Community Manager, Hearken
Categorizing people into broad groups is a natural human tendency (Millennials! Red-heads! Spanish speakers!). But this tendency has its consequences. It washes over the nuance and diminishes the power of treating people as dynamic individuals. At the end of the day, we are each just one person who may identify with various groups, but we are not strictly defined by them.
So what’s a journalist or newsroom to do when audience engagement is all the rage, but there’s no actual definable mass that is “the audience?” In this session, we’ll debunk the myth of “the audience” and explore how journalism can radically change with a few simple, but profound perspective shifts.
We’ll discuss how the Hearken model engages audience members as individuals, the business case for learning more deeply from individuals, and how to combat the tendency to treat groups as less than the sum of their parts. We’ll also leave lots of time to discuss and brainstorm around new ways to see beyond the audience groups the world might place you in.
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Audience Engagement Fellow session: Global Nation Exchange
Ivy Room Downstairs
11:10-11:50 AM
Angilee Shah
Digital Editor, Global Nation
Luis A. Marentes
Associate Professor, Spanish & Portuguese, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Contributor, Latino Rebels; Global Nation Exchange power member
The Global Nation Exchange group on Facebook already helps PRI to tell stories about immigration. Now, we are offering mini-fellowships for group members to become closer collaborators. Four group leaders over the course of one year will help grow the group, deepen the discussion and pursue the subjects they feel are most important. They will also have the opportunities to learn new storytelling skills and make deeper connections with others in the group.
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Philly to KC – Telling Everybody’s Stories: New Avenues for Authentic Engagement
Dining Room
11:10-11:50 AM
Steven Mencher
CEO, Mensch Media
Michelle Freeman
Publisher, Flying Kite Media
What’s the connective tissue in a community? And is it the role of journalists to observe and report about those ties, or can we stimulate and facilitate conversations that build and strengthen community while still keeping our traditional values of fairness, balance and accuracy?
How can we find and hone the stories that are everywhere around us, without appropriating them, or shaping them beyond recognition?
Through a recent nine-month stint in Kansas City as part of Localore: Finding America, Steve Mencher found the beating heart of the city in its spiritual life and discovered that people were solving problems through their faith communities. The PBS station in town, KCPT, realized the value of being at the center of this dialogue, and so in dozens of articles and videos, a pair of town hall meetings and an in-depth documentary, the Beyond Belief project connected faith to key issues like inequity, racism and immigration—approaching the faith community as partners, while inviting nonbelievers to join a conversation they’d long felt excluded from.
In Philadelphia, through a program called On the Ground, Michelle Freeman, publisher of the online magazine Flying Kite, aimed to dive deep into changing neighborhoods, uncovering places and businesses that contribute to their vitality. Her team members embed themselves in a neighborhood for a period of 90 days, bringing a currently vacant space alive by creating a temporary media hub that hosts activities like open office hours, programs, meetings, events and art exhibitions. Neighborhood news coverage and feature stories run in Flying Kite weekly.
Join co-presenters Steve and Michelle for an interactive session and discussion about how journalism can drive engagement and social justice, and how programs like theirs can be scaled and replicated.
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Audience Engagement Fellow session: Reciprocal Podcasting: Choose Your Own Audio Adventure
Location: Ivy Room Main
12:00-12:40 PM
Jordan Wirfs-Brock
Data Journalist, Inside Energy/Rocky Mountain PBS
What if you could talk back to a podcast or radio story, and it could talk back to you? Learn about an ongoing experiment with interactive audio as both listener and storyteller. First, we’ll hear a demo of a podcast that reacts to you. Then, we’ll brainstorm how you might turn an existing radio or podcast story into an interactive one. (If you are a podcaster or radio reporter, bring a sample of your own. Otherwise, we’ll have some on hand.) What happens when you reframe storytelling as a conversation? Whether or not you work with audio in your day-to-day life, this session will give you a new perspective on how you can approach storytelling more interactively.
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News Voices: An Organizing Approach to Local News Engagement
Ivy Room Downstairs
Time: 12:00-12:40 PM
Fiona Morgan
Journalism Program Director, Free Press
Mike Rispoli
Press Freedom Campaign Director, Free Press
The tools and tactics of organizing can be reworked for the newsroom context in ways that help supercharge community engagement efforts.
Engagement is stronger when newsrooms move beyond digital platforms, meet with neglected parts of the community, listen to their concerns, identify shared interests and convene face-to-face meetings between residents and journalists. Journalists can apply great ideas from organizing to strengthen their reporting and rebuild trust.
News Voices: New Jersey is an experimental project from Free Press that uses an organizing approach to find ways newsrooms and communities can support one another.
Our workshop will address the three main concerns we hear in our work: Community members, especially communities of color, think local media isn’t on their side; journalists are unsure on how to do community outreach and follow-up that adheres to their principles; and both parties wonder how to create a meaningful conversation during a public forum.
Participants in this workshop will practice techniques we’re using to uncover untold stories and facilitate meaningful conversations and lay the groundwork for collaborative projects with the community. We’ll facilitate a discussion of best practices for adapting community organizing tactics into the newsroom for community engagement.
News Voices will share our toolkit for engagement, including take-away resources for organizing and facilitation, guidelines for community outreach, event-planning checklists, and sample prompts for event discussions. We’ll also use this opportunity to gather input on these tools to inform our work as we continue to develop this resource.
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Building a Community of Practice Platform for Engaged Journalism
Dining Room
1:30-2:10 PM
Andrew de Vigal
Chair in Journalism and Civic Engagement, UO-SOJC’s Agora Journalism Center
Looking for a recipe book of engagement techniques? We have your back. We want to help journalists purposefully put the public at the center of what they do and bring together people who accurately represent diverse voices, authentically listen, and deliberately connect conversations to tell the whole story. In early September, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced that they are making an investment to support a digital gathering space for people passionate about journalism and civic engagement. This platform will deepen collaboration among journalists, help establish emerging values and norms for community engagement, and strengthen the civic information ecosystem.
We’ll share the latest update on the project and gather the intelligence of the group to co-design the next steps for the platform that will support the community of practice of engaged journalism.
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Community Engagement is our Superpower!
Ivy Room Main
1:30-2:10 PM
jesikah maria ross
Senior Community Engagement Strategist, Capital Public Radio
Community engagement is transforming Capital Public Radio, the NPR affiliate in Sacramento, California. It’s turning us into a better news organization by diversifying the voices and stories we air and are having more impact on the ground. It’s also connecting us with people who don’t know who we are or trust us.
At CapRadio, community engagement is a wraparound approach to more respectful, participatory and transformative storytelling. It runs parallel to our long form reporting and doesn’t end when the story airs. It manifests in broadcasts, online media and public events where everyone—our team, the subjects of our stories, project partners and audiences—come together to learn, understand and act.
In this session, I’ll tell the story of the game changing pilot project that got station leadership to embrace community engaged journalism. The View From Here: Hidden Hunger is a multiplatform documentary project that tells the stories of people coping with food insecurity and those working to alleviate hunger.
As part of the talk, I’ll highlight key lessons learned through Hidden Hunger and unpack how collaboration, reciprocity, and power-sharing were incorporated into the year-long project. After a Q&A, we’ll dig into tough questions like: Can these principles and practices be applied effectively to daily news? Should they? What would have to change in how stories are selected, framed and reported?
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Digital Engagement Across Language Barriers
Ivy Room Downstairs
1:30-2:10 PM
Daniela Gerson
Community Engagement Editor, Los Angeles Times
An Xiao Mina
Director of Product, Meedan
How do you reach an online audience that speaks another language? How do you engage with them and learn from them? How do you report on real-time news in other languages? This panel will look at different approaches to using social media across linguistic divides and will provide practical techniques to implementing them.
In a Los Angeles suburb with a majority Asian population, the police chief learned how to use Weibo (a Twitter-like Chinese social media platform) and transformed his relationship to his immigrant constituents. The Los Angeles Times created its first database in Spanish, working toward not only translating content but also providing tools. Al Dia, in Dallas, is experimenting with training immigrants in libraries on how to develop digital skills and contribute story ideas. Last year Reported.ly launched an international newsroom across continents that facilitates conversation and uses social media for real-time reporting across languages. And this year, Meedan, a team building digital tools for global journalism and translation, is launching Bridge, an app to facilitate these connections for journalists, researchers and their communities in real time. They draw from their team’s collective experience translating social media from movements in Egypt and China.
This panel will look at their experiences of connecting people across linguistic divides via social media on local and international levels. It will also look at what producers can do to extend their reach, with emerging software, social media platforms, and growth opportunities.
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Moderation Work and Emotional Labor
Dining Room
1:30-2:10 PM
Anika Gupta
Graduate Student, Media & Technology, MIT
The goal of this session is to explore the ways in which audience engagement work (and moderation labor generally!) matches existing definitions of emotional labor. Through this lens, we’ll look at what it means for a news institution to create, engage and empower a strong moderation team on a practical and strategic level. We’ll talk about our experiences of what does and doesn’t work. Key questions: how do you plan for online abuse and targeting? How do you approach inclusivity when some people are more likely to be abused online than others? How do news organizations – as institutions – better support the emotional demands of moderation and engagement work?
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Workshop: Engagement “911”
Ivy Room Main
2:20-3:00 PM
Jennifer Brandel
CEO and Co-founder, Hearken
Andrew Haeg
Flag-bearer, Groundsource
Terry Parris Jr.
Community Editor, ProPublica
A hands-on workshop where you can share your thorniest engagement challenges, and get some expert advice on how to solve them.
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Journalism in the Streets: Blending News, Art and Public Space
Ivy Room Downstairs
2:20-3:00 PM
Cole Goins
Senior Manager, Engagement and Community Collaborations, The Center for Investigative Reporting
Beyond our websites, broadcasts and newspapers, what could journalism look like if it was threaded into our physical communities? How could we leverage our streets and public spaces as interactive publishing platforms, developing creative ways for citizens to experience and engage with the news using the tools of art, design and participatory reporting?
This session will explore the successes, challenges and politics of experiments to build interactive, inclusive portals for local journalism: from roving newsrooms, to responsive sculptures, scavenger hunts and beyond.
Drawing from projects like The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Eyes on Oakland initiative and other community collaborations, this session will explore how newsrooms can learn from social practice artists and pursue journalistic projects that center on relationships, co-creation and social exchange. As a group, we’ll brainstorm ideas for how journalists can work in public space and discuss opportunities and best practices for art-based partnerships.
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AirGo: Amplifying the Chicago Renaissance
Dining Room
2:20-3:00 PM
Daniel Kisslinger
Co-Host and Co-Executive Producer, AirGo, WHPK
Damon Williams
Co-Host and Co-Executive Producer, AirGo
Co-Chair, Black Youth Project-100 Chicago Branch
In the midst of Chicago’s current cultural and sociopolitical renaissance, it is particularly important for its strong young voices to document their own stories in resistance to a dominant narrative seeking to reduce the vibrancy, power, and significance of this cultural moment in the city. At the intersection of artistic creation and political movement, participant documentarians can create space both for folks to fully realize their own stories and for their voices to actually be heard, galvanizing both audience and the subjects themselves to further engage with each other and continue building a sustainable movement. AirGo uses the accessibility of traditional radio, podcasting, and community-based performance to showcase the strong young voices reshaping the culture of our city and country. The session will explore the unique potential of this model, the potential pitfalls in documenting social movements, and some of the remarkable celebration of Chicago’s young people that has already taken place over the first nine months of AirGo. It will also feature two or three AirGo alumni, who will perform a piece and discuss their experience on the show.
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