Q&A with Jennifer Brandel, Co-Founder and CEO of Hearken
This week, The Idea caught up with Jennifer Brandel about public-powered journalism and what news will look like in 50 years. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and Hearken?
I am the co-founder of Hearken and have been running it for about five years. I wear a bunch of different hats, but I get the most energy from collaborations to push forward the depth and sophistication with which people engage with their stakeholders and audiences.
Can you elaborate on what Hearken does?
We work with all different kinds of news organizations — newspapers, television, podcasts, digital-only, and events-based. We help with the process of starting to listen to your audience and respond and collaborate to create stories.
There are tons of different ways of doing that. We have tech that’s really great for embedding in a story or directing people through social media to allow them to submit their questions, to vote on each other’s ideas, and to submit feedback. We also allow the public to give their zip code, so newsrooms and other partners can start to understand the geographic location of who’s engaging with them so that they can better target and serve the places that they’re maybe under-serving.
What we find is that a lot of times, the people who are asking questions aren’t otherwise in the newsroom ecosystem. 56% of the emails that are coming into newsrooms were not previously in that organization’s CRM, so they’re essentially new leads for membership or subscribers. So we’re really helping the newsroom not only capture great ideas for better, more relevant coverage, but also to expand their audiences and allow the members to support them financially.
We’re actually in the midst of an expansion of what we do. What we’ve noticed in the last few years is that the key to engagement is having the culture and the mindset be such that it supports engagement work. To us, that’s actually not accomplished through technology — it’s much more through consulting.
We offer a ton more consulting services than we used to so we can meet newsrooms wherever they’re at. A lot of it is just getting over some of the fear around what would happen if we let the public into our process. Typically, after a few cycles of trying this out, people start to become converts because they see it helps them achieve their journalistic mission: Reporters are getting more relevant, differentiated story ideas, their stories are performing better, they’re attracting more leads for revenue, more advertisers and sponsors. Our partners are getting 15 times more page views on public-initiated rather than reporter-initiated stories. One of our partners found that all Hearken-powered stories made it into the top 10 for engagement minutes every month. These are just some of the stats that our partners are sharing with us now.
The hard part is, of course, taking something from a project to becoming a practice and something that they do every day versus only when they’re giving special attention to it. That’s also where our kind of coaching, consulting and the tech comes into play to emphasize that this is actually a revenue driver rather than a loss.
To date, we’ve worked with 250 news organizations around the world, mostly in the U.S., but we do have a lot of partners in Europe as well. It’s not just journalism — we’re also working with member-based organizations, foundations, and higher education because our approach — this public-powered process — is really applicable to a lot of different domains.
Why do you think engaging audiences has such an impact?
Newsrooms are a closed ecosystem and only take inputs from the people who are within the newsroom. Most stories are decided, assigned, and pitched by members of the news organization. That is just such a lost opportunity because no matter how diverse your newsroom is, you’re not going to have the lived experience and questions and information needs that everyone you’re trying to serve has.
When you open up the top of the funnel to get story ideas from other people, you’re starting to really generate unique ideas that no other newsroom has and differentiate your content. Then, the more you actually partner with the person whose question you’re answering and the more you include them in the reporting process, you’re basically user-testing your story before it goes to market. By including that person and acknowledging them in the story, you’re creating an incredible marketing opportunity, because they’re going to want to tell everybody they know that they’re in the news for being really smart and having a great question.
We also hear all the time from our partners that the stories that come through the public-powered process are ones that would never have otherwise been assigned in the typical newsroom process. That’s because an editor would likely ask, “Why now, why this, who cares?” But when you have 3,000 people who voted to get it answered, that’s 3,000 more direct data points to argue for it than they have for other potential assignments.
Newsrooms curate what can be voted on, so it’s not a Boaty McBoatface situation. Our approach is not to just put up any old question and let the public vote. The newsroom curates the best questions that they think they can answer, and they let the public then decide.
Typically, where does resistance to including audiences in the journalistic process come from?
I think there’s a perception that the editors’ or journalists’ job is to know what others need to know, and if they ceded some of that job to other people, then they’re no longer as needed, or their authority is compromised in some way. It’s not a conscious thing necessarily, but I think it’s something that can lead to resistance.
It takes some people to start to question some of the foundations of the processes that they’ve inherited from bygone times. Newsrooms were built during the machine age in which they were optimized for speed, efficiency, and distribution. They had a hold on the information that the public got to know and they were competing against each other to try and get things out faster.
In a high-information environment like we’re in right now, where people are just overwhelmed with the amount of things to pay attention to, you can see a lot of people turning away from news because it’s just too much. Speed, efficiency and distribution are no longer the game you want to play — it’s not just about shooting out as many stories as you can and getting AI to write more stories for you. You need to play around relevance, trust, and relationships, which is a fundamentally different game in which the public needs to be involved.
What are your favorite examples of Hearken-powered journalism?
One of the things I love most about the public-powered model is the sheer variety of story types it leads to, from investigative to human interest and everything in between. The stories I get most excited about are ones that unleash possibility in the world, rather than just reporting on how things are or reinforcing an existing dynamic.
A great example of that is a question that WBEZ’s Curious City answered about why there are no statues of famous Chicago women in the city. It led to a great podcast about how statues even get made, and also a crowdsourced interactive about which great Chicago women people would love to see honored with statues. The question asker, Kate Hannigan, ended up getting so much interest from people who read about or heard the story, that she was inspired to start a non-profit to raise money to get statues made. And it also inspired The Chicago Foundation for Women and The Wing to collaborate on bringing this issue to life by hiring actors to play famous women statues around the city.
Every year we also publish the best-of Hearken-powered stories in our Champions of Curiosity competition, in which we bring in outside judges and allow newsrooms to nominate themselves. That’s a great collection of stories that have achieved something noteworthy with the model in all types of categories.
What’s an exciting project you’re working on right now?
I’m really excited about the work we’re doing around engaged elections. We partnered with The Membership Puzzle Project and Trusting News to create guides for a different approach to elections coverage. This Citizens Agenda model puts voters and communities in power to decide the topics the candidates are talking about, as opposed to the candidates and the press. It’s a needed flip. We’ve had a ton of interest from newsrooms to try this out, but they need more support and coaching to do it. Right now, we’re trying to fundraise to help subsidize this alternative approach.
You’ve spoken about the limitations of our current metrics for audience engagement — what would your ideal metric capture?
Right now, we’re limited to consumption metrics, which are pretty unimaginative. When I was a reporter at WBEZ, we jokingly but seriously counted our metrics for Curious City by how many handwritten thank you cards we got from the people whose questions we tried to answer. We had a whole table full of thank you cards, and to us that was the ultimate proof that there was a relationship created and value exchanged. I know no newsroom is going to have a thank you card counter before their board meeting, but wouldn’t that be nice?
If we were to go far out in my dreamland, Professor Eric Gordon, who’s at Emerson College, has described the purpose of journalism as distributing the responsibility of care. Journalists think that by putting out stories that showcase injustice, people will run with it and make the change. We know that’s not happening. People are overwhelmed. They’re not given the tools to understand how power flows in the system.
I think journalism would have to fundamentally change its metrics. How do you know that the community is caring about what you’re doing? Have they become more civically engaged in this topic? What additional questions do they have? How can that newsroom become the go-to place on this subject matter and become an expert in the community?
You imagine what journalism looks like in 2073 in your piece for Nieman Lab Predictions for 2020, and hypothesize about an infodistrict tax bill that gives all communities access to information. Can you elaborate on what infodistricts are?
Infodistricts, I think, are the most compelling and thought-out way to create information equity because it would basically create the ability for any population in any area to have the money to create its own information system. So, if there were a hundred people in a small town, there would be taxing the amount necessary to staff a couple of people to do that work. We wouldn’t experience news deserts if that could be applied liberally across the country. Paywalls, I don’t think, are going to lead to information equity. I understand why newsrooms are desperate and doing it, but I don’t think it’s going to lead to a society where people are able to vote and make decisions with the information that would most help them do so.
You also hypothesize in that piece about new forms/formats for journalism, like power maps and sensory journalism. How do you imagine the ways that journalism is produced and delivered changing?
Fundamentally, we’ve taken some of the categories that we’ve learned in school, like science or politics or math, into professional settings. At this moment in history, however, there are interconnected, complex issues that you can’t just put in a single bucket in order to solve them. You need a breadth of understanding about power and how it flows in broader systems.
With regards to power maps, I’m actually in touch with some feminist cartographers to start white-boarding what that could look like. I do think there are different patterns that are flowing through every system that affect our lives and that if we had a visual lexicon for it, there would be an immediate or much quicker understanding for where the leverage points were and how we could make a difference. That, to me, is also part of distributing the responsibility for care.
There’s also just the idea that journalism, as it stands, is locked in an article or broadcast format that is really limited in its efficacy when I think people are really yearning to be with each other and in person. I think a lot of the transformation that everyone’s hoping for in terms of becoming less divisive and seeing the good in everyone and being able to function together will come down to people being together in real life. That might mean more community events. There are newsrooms who’ve done standup comedy shows about toxic remediation and newsrooms that have done community theater projects. I think really getting people in a room together to talk about these things can also help distribute the responsibility for care and also help people just not feel so alone and isolated and alienated.
The future of news is not so much the newsroom. It’s about how to create a civic information ecosystem in which people are able to share and create the information that helps people every step of their lives. I know this sounds somewhat radical, but, I think it’s just the inevitability if news is going to be useful. It’s got to start thinking about adjacent industries and how it can collaborate and be a node in a larger network.
Who do you look to for inspiration?
Most of the people I look to for inspiration are outside of the industry. I’m really inspired by Nora Bateson, who runs the Warm Data Lab, which aims to understand the real heart of data beyond the quantitative. I’m really inspired by Jennifer Armbrust, who runs Feminist Business School and talks about different values to create business around. I am inspired by all the people in another community I helped found, called Zebras Unite, which helps underrepresented founders who want to build companies with a different value set than just a purely capitalistic, colonialist, shareholder-value-trumps-all-else approach. I’m really inspired by Vanessa Roanhorse, who runs, in collaboration with many other women, a group called Native Women Lead, and they’re taking indigenous practices and applying them to business environments and helping organizations return to less extractive and more fair and equitable ways of distributing power. Edgar Villanueva, who wrote Decolonizing Wealth, is also someone I’m really inspired by.
Rapid Fire Questions
What is your first read in the morning?
My husband reads the New York Times headlines to me in the morning, right when we wake up. I have my eyes closed and then say DoubleClick if I want him to read a story. He’s my personal podcast.
What is last podcast book or movie or any kind of media that you consumed?
I’ve been bingeing The View From Somewhere, which is by Louis Raven Wallace and Ramona Martinez. [The podcast “features stories of marginalized and oppressed people who have shaped journalism in the U.S.”].
What would you be doing if you weren’t doing what you do?
I learned recently that there is this newfound “organ” in the human body called the interstitial and it’s the fluid that connects all the other organs. I would love to find a way to be an interstitium worker where I could work within a cross section of industries and sectors and fields of study. I would have to figure out how to get paid, because I wouldn’t be working for one organization and their singular mission, but instead cross-pollinating between them. I don’t think that job exists, but if anyone reading this knows of them, let me know.
This Q&A was originally published in the January 27th edition of The Idea, and has been edited for length and clarity. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.
