Hearken: A Reflection

The world of Hearken and crowd-powered journalism can be an invaluable tool in finding out just what your community/beat want to know, what they need, and how you can best serve them.

For me, and the hundreds of African American travel lovers out there, it was a mixed bag. The tool works best when a certain number of technological realities align.

First, you will need to have an ready-made platform where you can share you link to the question-sourcing.

Next, you’ll have to find a way to best explain what the tool is to your community, which can be particularly difficult say, if you focus on elderly people attempting to learn how to use iPhones and the internet for the first time, or in my case, with relatively close-knit, but technologically limited communities on Facebook and Meetup.com, who are much more used to acquiring all of their needed information and engagement within the social platforms just mentioned.

Also, Hearken lacks an intuitive way to add pictures and graphics with the links, that could pop up in Facebook or Twitter and give an added visual element/explainer.

With that said, some of my community members where curious enough to click the blind, after getting to know me a little better, and send over their questions.

Most of my responses essentially came from me posing the prompts directly into Facebook and then listening to the questions being cultivated in my communities forums. I then placed those questions into the Hearken module myself.

I felt this process to be much more labored than useful.

But the best thing about Hearken was being able to form statements with the goal to elicit questions, and not necessarily answers to my own predilections. This is the difference between helicopter journalism happening in a newsroom and that being crafted with your community.

The response have been favorable to my finished story and it seems to have provided resources for those interested in traveling abroad.