BUILDING A “LISTENING COOPERATIVE” FOR 2020
It has been a long time since we could say with real meaning and sincerity that the people of America have been listened to by the media of America. Yes, efforts have been made and a multitude of initiatives have been launched but as we approach the 2020 election cycle at full speed we have an unprecedented opportunity ahead of us to try something new, to try something big and to try something that could create a new and equal transaction between voters and the media.
Trust is not competitive. Trust in media benefits us all — from voters to editors, from media owners to platform owners. We have to earn that trust but we don’t have to build it alone and it doesn’t have to be a one way transaction.
Designing 2020
In April 2019 Pop-Up Newsroom assembled a group of prominent journalists, editors, innovators, educators, technologists and funders in Washington DC. The aim was to explore how news organisations might collaborate to innovate around the coverage of the 2020 elections. We absolutely did not gather to design a misinformation fighting initiative — that would be way too 2018 of us. Instead, this would be about how we might collaborate to form a trusted reporting initiative with the fight against misinformation baked in at the foundation. How could we explore new ways to get stories from America’s news deserts, its heartlands and from the people who haven’t been given a voice for a long time, if ever at all?
Pop-Up Newsroom’s method brings stakeholders together to work through a version of co-design in order to start with a blank slate and fully explore where the challenges lie and what the possible solutions could be. There were absolutely no preconceived ideas of what we would come out with. But we did come up with something.
“A collaboration of journalists, technologists, education institutions and communities to establish a transparent information gathering and sharing system based on civic engagement and listening to empower informed participation in democracy…”
…or to keep it simple. We created the outline of a concept for a new Listening Cooperative.
Challenges & Priorities
Using processes to map stakeholders and challenges the group — over a significant period of time — were able to frame the most important challenges regarding the coverage of the 2020 election cycle and allowing US voters to make free and fair choices.
A process of prioritisation then helped determine what would be an essential to a large media collaboration. The below prioritisation bullseye reflects the consensus of the assembled and diverse group.
Putting listening at the heart of collaboration
We had a clear set of priorities to serve American voters and media. Any collaboration must:
- Reach underserved communities across America — and tackling this in the widest sense possible
- Create a shared and efficient actionable database of content and information from the election cycle that can help inform the electorate — containing anything and everything from political claims, memes and fact-checks to stump speeches, ads and untold stories.
- Avoid amplifying misinformation — not a misinformation project but one that uses everything we know about the spread of misinformation to stop it at the earliest possible opportunity it its lifecycle.
- Create an equal transaction with audiences — simply, if we want something from our audiences, we have to give them something back of equal or greater value.
Creating an equal transaction between media and audiences
For the media:
Listening to people in a way that they feel heard can’t be done at scale with technology and can’t be done as an academic exercise that is analysed way beyond the time when people head to the polls.
To listen to people we have to be where they are. We have to be accessible. The media has to have a face and that face needs to show that it is hearing.
We are not reinventing the wheel here. Local news reporters are doing this all day, every day - but what we haven’t been able to do before is work together to unearth the questions and concerns that ordinary voters have at any given time on any given day. A national collaboration will help local media scale in a way that hasn’t been possible before to give us data that can generate new types of stories, data and national insight.
For Americans:
A large-scale journalistic collaboration has the power to both listen to and serve content to our audiences at the same time. A listening cooperative can combine the latest storytelling techniques with the latest personalised on-demand delivery technology to serve branded, trust-optimised content to those who ask for it. At the most basic level they should be able to ask “is this true?” and be served with a response in a reasonable amount of time.
This also means giving them an opportunity to interact with the media. By mobilising our future journalists through an unprecedented collaboration with the country’s J-Schools we can get more of us out there to hear those untold stories and give the media a face. Such an operation would have the implicit aim of expanding the newsgathering and storytelling power of those journalists who are already out there with their boots on the ground.
What it looks like
How we do this
We will be working with news organisations, educators, start-ups, platforms and funders to develop this further and make it a reality. Nobody who attended the workshop was asked to commit to anything beyond that, although we are pleased to say that many have already said they are in!
If this is something you and your organisation or institution want to be a part of then please reach out and we will set up a time to speak and work out how you can be involved. This is a live process that will adapt to all inputs. We want you to help shape this. Please email 2020@popup.news
Likewise, if you are working on something similar and there are ways we can combine efforts instead of duplicate then let’s talk!
We plan to start building this as soon as possible and are already planning a workshop that will help us build the infrastructure for the community collaboration element.
We hope that you will join us on this journey!
The “Designing 2020” workshop was supported by the Facebook Journalism Project, Google News Initiative and the Knight Foundation.
Thank you also to AJ+ for hosting us.
The author of this article is British (sorry) which is why British English has been used and it has not been translated into the local dialect.
