Meet the team: Stefanie Ritoper on the newsroom experiment of engaging parents and caregivers
I joined KPCC in February as an engagement producer on the early childhood beat.
This job is new to me, and it’s also new to KPCC. The position emerges from an intensive human-centered design process to help KPCC rethink its approach to early childhood education coverage. It’s a major newsroom experiment in engaging parents and caregivers using a high-touch, low-tech approach.
Why this work is important
Early childhood is one of the most important times in a person’s life, with fundamental brain development occurring before the age of 5. However, many young children in California who need early childhood education or care do not receive it, either unable to afford it or stuck on a waitlist until they age out. What’s more, the field of early childhood education and development is a complicated maze of funding streams, multiple government agencies, and private childcare providers. As a public media institution, KPCC thinks it’s important that critical information reaches Southern Californian parents and caregivers so they can make informed decisions in the early years of their children’s lives.
Over the first six years that KPCC covered early childhood education, the newsroom’s reporting elevated issues of early childhood in Southern California, including preschool air quality, bilingual learning, and black infant mortality. In her coverage, KPCC’s senior early childhood reporter Priska Neely bridges academic and policy-level conversations with the everyday lives of parents, caregivers, and educators in L.A. County.
My role builds upon this work. I will deepen relationships with community and expand avenues to collaborate with parents, caregivers, and educators. My focus will be on those who could benefit from KPCC’s service yet are traditionally underserved by public media: low- and middle-income parents and caregivers. Over the course of this project, we plan to prototype a series of ideas that emerged from our research.
Lessons and values I bring to this role
This is my first time working in a newsroom. So what do I bring to this effort?
For over a decade, I’ve been working on community engagement through media. I’ve worked as a community-based videographer and trainer, a researcher, and a marketing/communications strategist. I focused my graduate research on how digital media tools have (and haven’t) transformed how people can participate in their communities.
In all these roles I’ve had the great privilege to bear witness to people telling their stories. Often people told these stories at great personal risk, because they knew how important it was to share their experiences. I saw how much trust and relationship building is necessary for people without connections and resources to participate in public processes.
As I dive into my work at KPCC, these key lessons and core values will guide my work:
- Begin with humility. Aside from raising a toddler of my own, I am new to the world of early childhood. My first task is to learn from Neely and our networks about the landscape of early childhood education. As I grow, I plan to continue to operate from a place of humility. I know from experience that it’s important for KPCC to build upon work already happening on the ground and use our strategic position as a media organization provide a unique contribution to the field.
- Meet people where they are. Many parents, caregivers, and educators we hope to reach are not listening to KPCC or reading LAist.com. To reach them, we need to go to where people are already engaging and accessing information. We need to deepen relationships with trusted entities, like community-based organizations, service providers, and other informal distribution networks. This also means finding ways to incorporate outreach into spaces where people already meet regularly.
- Let community voices — particularly traditionally unheard voices — shape the conversation. To me, it’s important for this engagement work to center parents, caregivers, and educators who have likely been traditionally underserved by media. By creating access points for those who are most disengaged in the journalism process, we make it easier for everyone to participate.
- Build genuine, sustained relationships. Building trust takes time. It means genuinely listening and responding to the needs of community members. It means making sure that the work we do is relational, not transactional. In doing so, we prepare not just for an event or conversation happening next week, but also the one happening five years from now.
- Get creative! Make it fun. Some of the most fruitful projects I’ve worked on arose from thinking outside of the box. I’ve run meetings where people spent more time talking in small groups and writing on walls than listening to one person at the front of a room. I’ve incorporated art, photography, music, and even humor into events that address serious topics. I’ve found it’s important to create opportunities for people to break from their routine, connect, and offer new ideas.
How will we know this work is successful?
A big part of my role is to continuously gauge how things are going. We are committed to stick with it when things are working and to shift tactics when they are not.
We’ll be looking out for some key things. We want to see people engaging in our work in growing numbers and having a meaningful experience doing so. We hope to see more parents and caregivers participating in a sustained way, and hope that they invite their friends, colleagues, and family members to do so as well. And we will be looking to see if our prototypes help KPCC’s coverage become more responsive, both in subject matter and in diversity of sources.
We will share our learnings back with you as we go. As more people see themselves and their experiences reflected in the work, our hope is that they will be motivated to engage in their neighborhoods and communities.
Learn more about KPCC’s human-centered design process and its use of non-traditional outreach to reach new audiences around its reporting on black infant mortality. And let us know what you think! Write me at sritoper@scpr.org
