Want to collect data about a community that is breaking the law? Ask me how
Many tools can help us journalists connect with society’s invisibles. Here is how I tested two such tools to find out about green-card marriages and document fraud in the Latino community in New York
This is an introduction to my experiments with Hearken and Groundsource, two engagement platforms that open newsroom doors to public-powered journalism. The link to the experiments are in the end of this post
I will start with a little background about myself: I am a graduate student in the social journalism program at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY (short for City University of New York). We focus our reporting on an underserved community in a way that also promotes beneficial change for that commuity. Most journalists spend a couple of weeks immersed in a community to write a feature; we are spending the 18 months of the program.
In a previous post, I came up with a pretty good metaphor to describe what we do in social journalism:
Instead of coming with a plow and a shovel, we bring a gardening kit and some seeds. We plant them and wait patiently for something to surface. The process takes longer, of course, but can turn it into a flourishing field.
It sounds great in theory, but until that flourishing field comes together, boy, do you have to work on your garden.
The first step in entering a community is building trust; after all, you need its members to trust you fully with details of their lives to report accurately on issues and dig out what hasn’t been said yet. In our program, it is essential to come up with ideas that will be relevant and help the community resolve actual issues they help us spot. For t hat reason, some even call what we do “solutions journalism.” The bottom line is, you actually have to have relevant data to identify needs or develop services.
During our Community Engagement course, we were given access to two platforms designed for public-powered journalism in newsrooms: Hearken and Groundsource.
According to their website, Hearken is a custom platform that “enables the public to submit questions or vote on questions they would like journalists to investigate and report.” It also helps newsrooms “harness the curiosity and identify information gaps of their audience so they can better serve their needs.”
Groundsource helps organizations reach audiences and communities on their phones, creating a conversation via text message that leads to a solid two-way relationship through mobile messaging and voice.
This is how I used Hearken and Groundsource to gather information about a vulnerable community in New York City: Latinos involved in immigration fraud.
