Using the Power of the Porch
What we’ve learned about community listening
By Jennifer Larino and Sonam Vashi
For the last several decades, journalism hasn’t been listening to the people it serves. Our coverage can be disconnected from the everyday needs of our community members, especially people whom legacy media has never fully represented or prioritized, whether it’s community members who identify as Black, brown, immigrant, working-class, queer, youth, and more. That’s why we became John S. Knight Community Impact Fellows at Stanford University, in order to design more ways to build listening into the reporting process.
We’re reporters who have seen firsthand how extractive, disconnected reporting can erode community trust. We’ve even participated in it ourselves during our careers as reporters for traditional news outlets. That’s why we both believe in the importance of community listening and are experimenting with it in our projects.
Jen Larino has worked as a journalist covering local news in New Orleans for more than a decade, most recently at the Times-Picayune. She co-founded Lede New Orleans in 2020, a nonprofit journalism project that trains emerging BIPOC and LGBT voices in New Orleans to tell stories with and for their communities. Her work as a JSK Fellow focuses on developing as a nonprofit leader, and thinking about how Lede New Orleans can open access to and increase participation in local media through training and engagement.
Sonam Vashi is an award-winning journalist in metro Atlanta who has reported for the New York Times, Atlanta magazine, ProPublica, National Geographic and more. In 2020, she co-founded Canopy Atlanta, a community-powered nonprofit newsroom. During her JSK Fellowship, she’s partnering with Sophia Qureshi of 285 South to ask metro Atlanta’s working-class immigrants what information they need to thrive and become more connected to their communities.
Whether you’re at an innovative startup, solo, or in a traditional newsroom, here are our top five strategies for integrating listening back into your journalism process.
1. Pick a specific community to work in.
Sonam Vashi (SV): Defining a specific audience helps make your questions and materials as responsive as possible. At Canopy Atlanta, we do neighborhood-based listening and reporting through our Community Issues program, choosing communities without strong existing media coverage and underappreciated assets. In my JSK work, I’m specifically focusing on metro Atlanta’s working-class immigrant population. Defining this audience helps me ask questions that focus on the ways information is being shared in these communities, the strength of the community, and about the reasons why folks don’t want to (or can’t) participate in local government. For example, I’m experimenting with different outreach and questions tailored to immigrants without legal status who might distrust local government, and I’m using census data to pinpoint specific tracts or blocks where I might want to canvass.
Jen Larino (JL): Coming from a large metro newsroom at the Times-Picayune, I thought true listening work meant talking to lots of people from all neighborhoods and walks of life. Building Lede New Orleans and thinking through human-centered design as a JSK Fellow changed my thinking. Listening to a specific group or neighborhood can have more impact. Having that focus helps you to identify specific, immediate community needs, and be more responsive to those needs. Here in New Orleans, Black and brown youth in our network are talking more about local gaps in mental health care. We’re now designing a series of small listening events gathering local BIPOC youth, ages 16–25, for conversations on mental health care needs, as well as what information tools might be useful for meeting those gaps. That focus is helping us attract partners in the work, including youth-serving nonprofits, as well local hip-hop artists and athletes.
2. Have fewer, better conversations.
JL: At JSK we’re pushed to test big ideas through tiny experiments. Small is big when innovation is the goal. I’ve embraced this approach in thinking about how Lede New Orleans can embed listening into its journalism practice. One idea we tested this fall was focusing on having in-depth, one-on-one conversations with community members. We hired an alumni of Lede’s Community Reporting Fellowship program to talk with Black community members in her network. The conversations were long, casual and intimate. A pastor talked about watching TikTok videos to learn about local Black history that’s missing from local media. Another shared how Black female military veterans, like her, felt invisible. We were also able to dig deeper on how community members want to see complex topics like crime and poverty covered. Several of those one-on-one conversations turned to local crime coverage. We heard about the harm caused by coverage that centers individual criminals and harm done to Black bodies. Community members wanted to see more stories about why crime happens and local folks who are working on solutions. The conversations were raw and nuanced, and would have been impossible if we had taken a broader approach. To borrow a phrase from Sonam and the Canopy Atlanta team, “we learned the depth of listening matters as much as the breadth.”
3. Mix up your approach.
JL: It doesn’t take much to listen to people, so get creative. One of our favorite listening experiments at Lede New Orleans was pulled together last-minute in October 2020. A community organizer we met through our reporting invited us to a voting event. Local voters were gathering at the French Market in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter, then riding their bikes to City Hall to vote in local elections. We set up a plastic table on a sidewalk and offered snacks and face masks to participants in exchange for a few minutes of their time. We spent two hours gathering insight on where people accessed information on housing, food access, public safety and local culture, as well as what issues they cared about. It was a strong case for the power of figuring out where people are going and meeting them there.
SV: I love y’all’s innovation there, Jen. For me, I’ve used, and my Canopy Atlanta colleagues have used, a variety of methods: cold calling residents found on social media or public records, or who’ve been suggested by community ambassadors; or canvassing and being at city parks and places that people are at. To me, it’s really about tailoring your approach to meet people where they are, plugging into the spaces — both digital (hello, Facebook groups!) and physical — that the community’s already using. For my current work with immigrant communities, that’s doubly true; I can’t only post on social media to do outreach. I’m looking to the work of many other organizations inside and outside of journalism — Outlier Media’s use of texting and United Way 211 data, for example. Other questions I’m asking myself: What comes up in the neighborhood meetings, the democratic public processes? Are we also present in the community and doing the things that take longer?
4. Remember to be flexible.
SV: Just as Canopy Atlanta was set to launch, the pandemic hit. Like everyone else, we had to scrap the events and gatherings we had planned as part of our listening work in West End, our first Community Issue neighborhood and a historic, majority Black part of southwest Atlanta. Everyone was so afraid to gather, still afraid of touching the mail — what were we going to do? We had to take a breath, look around, and see the ways folks were still in community. West End is a “front porch” neighborhood, with all these beautiful older homes, and we saw the power of the porch. It’s an outward-facing space where neighbors would still chat; everyone was on the front porch during a nice evening. So, we went porch-to-porch canvassing in West End and met folks that way.
JL: Similarly, Lede New Orleans launched its Community Reporting Fellowship in March 2020, days before nationwide shutdowns. The fellowship trains local BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people, age 18–25, to tell stories with and for overlooked communities in and around New Orleans. We took a week to regroup, redesigned for a remote program through Zoom, and coached our first cohort through telling stories about the pandemic and its impact on their communities. We also coordinated virtual meetups gathering journalists and community members to talk about pandemic challenges, what journalists do and how local communities are covered. We learned that creating connections is a lot different online, but not impossible. Virtual meetings allow you to gather people who might not otherwise show up for an in-person event, but require a different approach for engaging people. We learned it’s important to make space for people to talk and bounce questions off one another as opposed to sticking to rigid agendas and programming. We learned visualization tools like Google JamBoard or Mural can keep people engaged in generating ideas. We also had some success tabling in outdoor common areas like the young voter event I mentioned earlier and at local parks. We offered items like hand sanitizer, branded masks and bottled water, and let folks come and chat with us, rather than pursuing people like we might for an interview for a story.
5. Keep a sustained presence in the community.
SV: Having a sustained presence is so crucial when reporting in immigrant communities like the ones I come from. Showing the community, especially vulnerable populations like immigrants without legal status, that you’ll spend time on the ground, that you’ll answer their calls, that you’ll be there. But that takes time, especially when these communities have tried to get issues addressed before and been ignored by other local media. After you’ve done that first story, the hope is that people are more willing to come to you. I think that’s how you create a cycle of trust.
At Canopy Atlanta, we created this process that we would first listen; then train people in the community to report alongside experienced journalists; and, finally, publish a series of stories and host live events — done. Previously, we’ve designed that process as a straight line. Now, we’ve been prioritizing how to sustain these relationships and the capacity-building work, creating a cycle that continues to generate stories, trainings, and other work that furthers our mission to equip metro Atlantans to tell stories and access information. It’s about making that straight line into a circle, something I see others like Documented thinking about.
JL: I couldn’t agree more with what Sonam is saying. Listening is a long-term investment. You have to be in it for the long-haul. That doesn’t have to mean building out a months-long listening project. One of the simplest ways we’ve been able to sustain our local presence and keep listening has been through our fact checking process. Part of our process is calling sources on the phone to review facts and information in our stories before publishing. Those calls are a perfect window to engage in more listening. After checking the accuracy of names, dates and other details with community sources, we share what we’re doing with them and ask a few questions about issues that need covering, neighborhoods that are being overlooked, and the best places to share information with community members. It’s a perfect confluence of listening power: you’re demonstrating that you’re present and invested in getting their story right, and that you want to keep hearing their thoughts beyond the context of a story. We also follow up with a quick Google Form survey where sources can share their demographic info and help us ensure our sourcing reflects the communities we serve.
