How Digital Community Conversations Inform Elections 2020 Reporting
There’s less than three weeks until the 2020 elections. While the presidential campaigns prepare for competing town hall events, in Meadowview, a Sacramento, CA neighborhood, community members are gathered on a zoom call comparing notes on ballot initiatives and workshopping questions they would ask City Council candidates and the Mayor. This community event, hosted by jesikah maria ross and a team of dedicated reporters from NPR affiliate CapRadio and the Sacramento Observer, is part of the Meadowview Counts project. CapRadio invited people who “ live, work and worship in one South Sacramento neighborhood — Meadowview — to share their questions and concerns to guide our election reporting.” These conversations are recorded, transcribed and made searchable to journalists and community members to bring transparency into the reporting process and to build trust between community members and the news outlets on the Local Voices Network platform.
For the past several months, from California to Oklahoma, Alabama to Idaho, Wisconsin to New York, the Local Voices Network (LVN) has supported public radio stations, startup nonprofit newsrooms and print journalists in facilitating, recording and archiving digital community conversations. These conversations inform and guide election coverage while providing an opportunity for building relationships with new listeners or readers on the path towards membership (for more on how to use Zoom for community engagement, read this guide we produced). Live events, prioritizing the experiences and questions of community members, bring context and nuance to the issues that bring people to the polls. When election night becomes election week or election season, your community of readers and listeners will be looking for space to connect with their neighbors to find trustworthy information. These case studies, inspired by Hearken and Jay Rosen’s Citizens Agenda, show how journalists at publications that range from the hyperlocal to the national facilitate digital community conversations to inform their elections coverage.
Santa Cruz Local
Santa Cruz Local is a local news podcast, newsletter and website that launched in 2019 in Santa Cruz, CA. Prior to the pandemic, the team, led by Kara Meyberg Guzman, convened community members for in-person events to inform their primary coverage. Santa Cruz Local knew that they wanted to continue hearing from community members and that events were a great way to identify new listeners and members, but facilitating conversations online was something new. The Local Voices Network trained Santa Cruz Local staff in online conversation facilitation and we co-created a conversation guide that reporters could use to surface community strengths, concerns and questions.
Tip: Start your conversations with an asset-based lens by asking what strengths your community members have noticed during the pandemic, or what makes them proud to live in the community. Many public events can get right to the problems, but when you’re building trust among strangers, identifying those shared assets can help ground a conversation in shared values and hopes for the community.
Santa Cruz Local hosted four digital community conversation events targeting different cities in Santa Cruz county. Three of those conversations were in English and one was hosted in Spanish with live-interpretation. Community members were asked about their concerns for their community and what questions they would prioritize for candidates for local office. Many of the participants were not regular readers or listeners to the podcast and the events served as an opportunity to invite people into the audience funnel.
Tip: Zoom’s interpretation function can create separate audio tracks for multilingual community conversations. In-person interpretation can be difficult for smaller group conversations, digitally it’s much easier.
Santa Cruz Local mined the conversation recordings for stories, questions and themes and wove them into pre-election podcast episodes.
The Cap Times People’s Agenda
Madison, WI is the birthplace of the Local Voices Network. In 2019, we launched our community conversation network in partnership with the Madison Public Library and the Cap Times to surface community concerns prior to a contentious Spring Election (read more about the launch of LVN here). In 2020, the Cap Times announced a new project, the People’s Agenda, supported by Hearken and the Solutions Journalism Network. Led by Katie Dean and Natalie Yahr, the People’s Agenda prioritizes the questions and concerns of community members in pre and post-election reporting. To complement a web form, LVN and the Cap Times created a conversation guide and hosted a series of public and targeted conversations in English and Spanish.
Tip: Not everyone in your community will feel invited or welcome to a broad call-out. Take the time to make sure you’re tracking who is missing. Create custom conversation events in partnership with community organizations to meet people where they already gather.
Natalie and LVN-Wisconsin Community Builder Mathias Lemos Castillo were invited to a Spanish language radio program, La Movida, to invite Latinx community participation. The LVN team transcribed and hosted the Spanish language conversations for further reporting. One community conversation, featuring high school students, resulted in questions that were brought directly to a candidates forum the following week.
Tip: If you record your community conversations, you can bring the voices of community members into your candidate forums or Q and As and show community participants how their participation led to reporting.
Student reporters from UW-Madison, guided by Professor Sue Robinson, are hosting community conversations across Dane County and producing journalism that addresses community questions and concerns raised in the People’s Agenda.
America Amplified
America Amplified is a national public radio collaboration funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “to put people, not preconceived ideas, at the center of its reporting process.” Eight public radio collaborations, supported by a central team at KCUR in Kansas City, center audience engagement in their Election 2020 and COVID-19 coverage. Four news partners teamed up with the Local Voices Network to host community conversations, generating local reporting and feeding into a national talk show.
Tip: Check out the amazing collection of resources from the Center for Cooperative Media if you are interested in starting out a collaborative newsroom project (https://centerforcooperativemedia.org).
Reporters from the partner newsrooms experimented with several outreach methods to invite participation from community members who were not normal public radio listeners. KOSU reporters Kateleigh Mills and Seth Bodine invited rural Oklahoma farmers and agriculture advocates from four counties at the edge of their broadcast range to join in a conversation. Mountain West News Bureau reporter Nate Hegyi biked 900 miles across the Mountain West and hosted a digital conversation with community members and fans of the series. Conecta Arizona’s Maritza Felix held space for Spanish speakers in her community to discuss challenges they were facing in Arizona.
All of these conversations link into the national talk show that America Amplified is producing. Airing across numerous public radio markets, the talk show weaves together themes from local conversations at the member stations and national listening sessions facilitated by reporters around the themes of mental health, the American dream and the future of our communities.
Rather than halting community engagement, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced reporters to innovate to make sure their reporting is reaching the community members who need it most. Many of the tools developed during the pandemic can become a regular part of a journalist’s toolkit to invite community members who were never able to participate in community events before the pandemic. We’ll continue, after the election, to hold space for community members to connect, share resources and identify gaps in information. If you are interested in bringing LVN to your newsroom or community, please reach out!
A recent Nieman Lab article highlighted a study showing the mental health toll experienced by journalists during the pandemic. The Local Voices Network is offering two sessions for reporters to participate in LVN conversations: sign up here
