Hearken: Listening to Someone Means You Value Them
I am one of the cohort on here posting from CUNY J-School’s new Social Journalism Master’s program. Maybe you’ve seen us dropping science about getting into our communities or answering NJ publishers’ questions about Facebook Instant Articles. I have personally tried to write inspired by and about class on here in a way that’s relevant to whoever might stumble onto it. I doubt that always succeeded, but on the bright side, it doesn’t seem like anyone cared anyway!
While no one caring might lower the stakes for a class assignment, it doesn’t much help a news organization. Just as much as people distrust news now, they still care tremendously what the news reports. Fortunately, news organizations and startups are trying to figure out ways to connect with audiences that are both trustworthy and genuinely engaging. For our class, we used a number or methods including GroundSource (which I love) and good old-fashioned “going out and listening”. One of the most promising methods is Hearken, created from the audience engagement efforts of WBEZ’s “Curious City” and Jennifer Brandel.
The crux of our program is that everyone must choose a community to serve with journalism. For me anyway, that was the most appealing aspect: how might we serve communities? What other question is even worth asking? As usual, I made things hard on myself. My gut told me to work with the formerly incarcerated and try to understand the cyclical psychological, emotional, and economic effects mass incarceration has on communities. Here we are.
It’s been incredibly rewarding so far (and it’s just getting started), but — and I can only speak for myself — I am battling understandably negative perceptions of journalists that are magnified in vulnerable communities. People don’t want to lose control of their stories or be harmed further by some writer’s desperate grab at a byline. Nevertheless, listening is not only possible but necessary. Still there are two problems. First, we need to do that in a way that is transparent. Second, how can journalists (or anyone really) serve a community if we don’t (or can’t) listen?
This is where Hearken comes in. Hearken allows newsrooms to embed what they call “curiosity modules” on webpages. People are then invited to submit questions that the newsroom can vet and decide to answer. The key to this is that if one person is pondering a question, odds are other people are too. This means we are not relying on insular editorial judgement to decide what to publish. People are telling you what to publish by asking you things they want to know.
As I mentioned, the goal is to serve our communities — not just in our program, but I would argue in our lives. The formerly incarcerated suffer from a major problem here: there is not a ton of information sharing among them, particularly on the internet. There are forums here and there, but largely it is done in person. Not exactly ideal for Hearken. We also published our Hearken modules weeks ago, when I was much less familiar with the specifics of the community. Hearken also is built for people who have platforms and audiences. The people in our class who got the most responses fall into that category.
I decided to go about it another way. Returning citizens (and organizations working with them) keep telling me that we need to remove the “invisibility”. Often people return home from prison and that is their focus — home, the place they’ve missed for months or years or decades. It is hard enough surviving with the massive disenfranchisement a record brings. Advocating and activism is often not even on the radar. While there are many notable formerly incarcerated activists, they are a small percentage of the more than five million formerly incarcerated people in the United States right now. Despite my initial skepticism about the power of “awareness”, I kept hearing that this was a needed step.
We read a while back about the Alabama prison investigations, and they brought up a huge point: journalists often want to cover the injustices of the justice system, but readers don’t always care. Well, how might we solve that? This is where I put Hearken to use. I decided to ask people what they want to know about the formerly incarcerated and the process of reentry. Maybe I could begin — in a tiny way for now — closing this empathy gap by understanding what people don’t know.
I received seven questions from five respondents. Each made me think about something I hadn’t thought of before. The question I ended up choosing was
Are there any programs out there that help build the trust and relationship between newly released family members and their nuclear family?
This actually led me to reach out to a number of groups and individuals, brought up new questions, and expanded my sources tremendously. I got more people involved in the conversation, on the journalist side and the reader side. (Other questions included: What is it like to be reunited with people on the outside? Do you feel like your incarceration was justified, or an overreaction? While in prison, were you used as free labor for an outside company? How are you doing?)
Since my focus wasn’t on using Hearken in my community as such, I decided to connect more with the people who submitted. I kept them updated on my process and progress and, when it was all done, I sent them copies of the article. This is also a key to Hearken and engagement in general: how can we let our audience know that we actually value them? Well, first we have to actually value them. Sorry to split my infinitive, but this is important. Second, we have to engage them in unique ways that incentivize their participation, break down the wall between journalists and communities, and restructure how we listen in a very earnest way.
Since then, I have started a publication on this here site called Greylined. It is an ongoing and evolving space where I hope to use my skills and resources to create a space for others to tell their own stories about incarceration’s effects around NYC. From the city’s most incarcerated neighborhoods to reentry stories to organizations serving returning citizens or fighting overpolicing, my hope is that the space will be a counternarrative to “official quotes” and a corrective to reader hostility.
With that in mind, I should probably ask you a question. What do you want to know about returning citizens in New York City? What would you like to know about the reentry process? What should Greylined cover? My Hearken query is below. Please submit and, believe me, I will be in touch.
