How I Used Hearken to Teach Seniors to FaceTime
Over the course of my first semester as a Social Journalist at the CUNY J-School, my classmates and I were given the unique opportunity to use Hearken when working with our specific communities. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this new and innovative tool, Hearken is an audience-driven platform that enables journalists to partner with the public to create relevant stories.
For my community, I am focusing on providing intergenerational tech meetups for seniors and young professionals in an effort to provide a two-way wisdom exchange. By using Hearken to generate questions directly from my community, I learned that many of the senior citizens attending our events want to learn how to use FaceTime. With this information, I decided to create a video demonstrating seniors learning to FaceTime for the first time. I included some of the seniors throughout the process and produced a video while also including a list of steps with advice on how someone could best help a senior in their life with FaceTime. The story can be found here.
As part of this process, we were asked to reflect on our experience:
What went particularly well?
I think what was most successful about this experience was having the opportunity to not only share the fear that seniors have with technology, but to actually teach some seniors how to use FaceTime throughout the process of creating the video and the story. By using Hearken as a tool to find out what questions my community had about technology, I was able to recognize that many people wanted to learn how to FaceTime in order to interact with their family and friends.
What would you do differently next time?
If I were to repeat this process again (and I likely will as I continue to learn more about my community), I think that I would work harder to include more members of my community in the process. While I felt as though there were three or four seniors and young professionals who were intimately a part of the process, I wish I could have included more and as a result taught more seniors how to use FaceTime.
How did having a tool help you in the process?
Having a tool like Hearken allowed me to give my audience a voice and to carry them through my process as a storyteller and as a part of their community. Because I am working with two generations — one that is very digitally connected and one that is not — it was a bit more challenging to use an online tool for every step of this process. However, I think it taught me the value of including your community from start to finish.
How could you imagine using Hearken going forward in your work?
Because I am working to build a non-profit organization that’s primary mission is not to share news, I am a bit of an outlier. With that being said, I think Hearken could be an incredibly powerful tool for me in terms of being a creative way to allow seniors and young professionals the opportunity to submit questions prior to each event. By allowing this process to occur, I think we would ultimately host more efficient and successful events.
How do you think stories driven by your communities questions are different from those you might have come up with if you were working in a newsroom and using a more traditional process of coming up with story ideas?
I think Hearken is an incredible approach to writing stories about our communities because it acts as a tool for us to ask our audience to tell us what they want to know more about. There is a need for community-driven journalism at the local level, and I think a tool like Hearken allows communities to feel more connected by being involved in the stories that directly effect them.
While I find the more traditional process of coming up with story ideas beneficial as well, I think the process Hearken gives to journalists is essential for best understanding the needs of their community and for serving them.
How did the community respond at all stages of the process, including to the finished story?
I loved watching this process unfold because it allowed me to really get to know my community and, similarly, my community was able to learn more about me. I could tell that people were genuinely interested in my project because they knew that I had asked what they wanted to learn more about. When I asked for volunteers to approach me if they wanted to learn how to FaceTime, I was pleasantly surprised that at least 10 out of the 25 seniors at the event were interested in learning more.
