Journalists, whose feedback are you getting? And are you listening?

Here’s a question we love to ask journalists: How do you know what your community thinks of your work?

Journalists often feel they’re hearing plenty of feedback, of course. Just take a spin through inboxes and comment sections, and ask what snarky remarks are being thrown reporters’ way in the field these days.

But most of that isn’t particularly thoughtful, right? We’re more interested in good faith reflections on how well your local news is serving your community. Are you getting enough of that kind of feedback?

Twice, we at Trusting News have recruited journalists to talk one on one to people in their own audiences. We did it once in 2017 (what we learned) and once this year (what we learned).

Update: Jump to the bottom of this article to watch a replay of an event we hosted about outreach and listening, see examples of engagement efforts and ideas other news organizations have tried.

These conversations were designed to gather feedback on and reflections about the news. They were not for a story. They did not involve requests to subscribe or donate. They weren’t about defending or marketing the news. They were just about listening.

Two cool things happened both times.

One, the very busy journalists who carved out time to interview community members said (I think unanimously) that it was a beneficial, informative experience. Not only that, they said:

• It was worth their time.
• They wished they’d done it sooner.
• They wanted to do it more often.

Two, many of the people interviewed offered up how much they enjoyed having done it.

• They felt heard.
• They learned about journalism.
• They reported higher levels of trust in the news organization based on the outreach effort and desire to listen.

Journalists need this kind of learning

Our work at Trusting News is based on the idea that, to deliver an effective public service, local journalists need to understand what our community needs from us and what they think of us. We coach newsrooms through assessing feedback and striving for deeper insight.

Sometimes that insight CAN come from online interactions. Responding to comments, asking questions, seeking clarification … all can be part of an effective trust-building strategy. (We know that engagement takes time. This post has tips for being efficient and making the most of your efforts.)

Beyond that typical feedback loop, though, lies the potential for much richer interactions. We know plenty of people won’t speak up online or offer feedback if they’re not directly asked. And we know newsrooms are able to reach more people (and more diverse people) with more meaningful questions if they reach out with care and deliberation. Let’s talk about what that can look like.

Not everyone is suited for the work

A caveat: Not everyone in your community is worth engaging with. Not everyone will engage in good faith or trust that YOU will be engaging in good faith. Some people truly believe you want to lie to and manipulate them or that you don’t care about accuracy or doing good work. That’s not who we have in mind with this post.

Another caveat: Not all journalists are suitable for outreach and engagement work. Some might not be open to what they hear. Some might default to defensiveness in a way that makes people regret opening up. And some might just be too cranky. That’s okay — look elsewhere on your team for allies.

What do you want to know, and from who in your community?

With this year’s interview project, Re-engaging the Right, we made a list of questions that specifically addressed issues of perceived political bias and how well people who lean right felt their lives and values were reflected in local news. You can see the list of questions we asked here, and we invite you to try it for yourself! But you can come up with your own list, depending on what you want to know.

You might have a list of questions for a specific part of the community you aim to serve. Consider people of color or immigrants. Consider a specific part of town or age group (millennials, retirees, youth, etc.). How about parents? Business owners? People who make minimum wage, or close to it? What do you want to know about their life? Where they get information about what’s going on in town? What they wish people in the community knew more about? What journalists typically get wrong about people like them?

Or maybe you’re curious about a specific topic. How does your community feel about the way you cover schools? Politics? Business? The arts? Growth? Housing? You could come up with stakeholders for any topic and then look for ways to reach out to them.

Perhaps you have questions around a specific product. Consider what you might want to know from people who have just subscribed to a newsletter? What do they want from it? What do they think so far? What parts do they like or not like. And you could learn even more from someone who just UNSUBSCRIBED from the newsletter. What weren’t they getting? Where are they turning instead? Did something frustrate or anger them, or were they just not seeing any value from it?

Do you ask questions when people walk away? How about someone who calls to cancel their subscription, membership or recurring donation? What questions are they asked? And how do their responses help the newsroom make decisions? Is the person taking that phone call or answering that email equipped to answer questions about the news gathering effort?

How could you learn these things?

There are institutional ways to invest in listening. Community advisory boards can be effective. So can editor office hours and other larger scale efforts.

In our interview projects, we have guided newsrooms through publishing a survey and selecting people to sit down with one on one, for about an hour each. That’s a big (if worthwhile) investment.

It doesn’t have to take that long, though. It could be more informal — something any staffer could take on. You could …

• Ask a former source if they have 20–30 minutes for a conversation not related to a specific story.
• Pose the same question to someone you know casually (as long as they don’t know you well enough to have an insider’s view of the news).
• Reach out a frequent commenter or emailer.

Could you …

• Create a list of questions in the newsroom that you’d love to have asked of people who unsubscribe or call to complain? And share that with whoever takes those calls?
• Commit to reaching out to one new (or former) subscriber to a newsletter each week?
• On your own beat, make a list of questions you have for specific stakeholders, and make it a habit to reach out to one each week?

But you’re so busy. How do you fit this in?

We are fully aware that everything we ask journalists to do can feel like piling yet more tasks onto an already overstuffed list. Only you can figure out how to prioritize.

We also know that you have to see value in something in order to make time for it. We invite you to picture what it could look like to spend 30 minutes a week talking to a community member about how you could better serve them and what they think (or misassume) about journalism. With a bit of time upfront setting up a system and a list of questions, it really could just be 30 minutes a week.

If you work 40 hours, that’s 1/80th of your weekly time.

At the end of a year, you would have connected with dozens of new people. And our bet is that having those conversations in mind while you decide what to cover, what questions to ask and what to explain about your work would make the work richer and more relevant to the people you aim to serve.

Can you contribute your ideas to our work?

Join us at 2 pm on Thursday, Sept. 30, if you want to brainstorm ideas for what these strategies could look like. Two people who have influenced how we think about outreach and listening will help us shape the conversation: Ju-Don Marshall of WFAE and Fiona Morgan, a consultant and researcher who specializes in this topic.

This conversation is part of our new initiative called A Road to Pluralism. Previous events have focused on these topics:

• The value and challenges of local and national news (Watch the conversation)
• Generalizations and polarization (Watch the conversation)
• Perceptions of stories’ fairness (Watch the conversation)
• Bias in the newsroom (Watch the conversation)
• Sept. 30: Outreach and listening (Register here)

We’re gathering together local newsrooms interested in bridging divides, fostering productive conversations and fueling open-mindedness in their communities. If that might be you, apply to join our Pluralism Network.

Thanks for reading.

UPDATE: Highlights from our event on outreach and listening

Many newsrooms who attended shared a lot of great examples of engagement efforts and ideas your news organizations have tried — from running community surveys and popups at the public library to utilizing free tools like Google Forms and Google Voice. Some of those ideas and links were:

• Ju-Don Marshall’s team at WFAE has done a lot of cool engagement efforts (we wrote about some of them here) including using Google Voice to get audience responses and hosting popups (another idea to steal — the station created a wheel and put questions on it that they had answered through their podcast to help draw people in at a popup.)
• Fiona Morgan mentioned printed collateral, which we’re also a big fan of, like a one-page printed flyer that you can share at live events, leave at the library, or ask community organizations to have on hand. Here’s an example from The Gazette in Iowa.
• KPCC’s reporter mission statements are a great example of how you can introduce journalists and their mission to users.
• KPRC’s reporter bio page is another good example of how you can introduce staff to your audiences.
• WUSF used a Google Form callout at the end of its environmental reporter’s stories to get more diversity in their reporting. The form helped lead to lots of new sources, specifically around environmental justice and injustice.
• This guide from API is helpful if you’re looking to form community advisory boards.
• The Kansas City Journal approached covering vaccine hesitancy by sending a reporter to an area with the lowest vaccination rates in the state to ask questions and get curious. (We also recently wrote about how reporters can earn trust when covering hot-button issues.)

One question we’re brainstorming (and a question we’re trying to answer through experiments in our Pluralism Network) is what strategies can we employ for reaching people in our communities who maybe DON’T trust us and who are not inclined to think you’re worth making an effort for or giving feedback to? We’re also interested in working with newsrooms on ways to build more outreach into day-to-day routines. If you want to help continue the conversation and start experimenting and finding solutions, apply to the network here.

Trusting News is designed to demystify the issue of trust in journalism. We research how people decide what news is credible, then turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We’re co-hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the American Press Institute. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our Trust Tips newsletter. Read more about our work at TrustingNews.org.