Announcing Free 2024 Election Resources for Journalists
Back in 2019, Hearken created Election SOS to support journalists in responding to critical election information needs. Since then, there have been dozens more journalism support organizations and civic organizations jumping in to support this space — which is thrilling!
Journalists and news organizations need all the help they can get in this moment of industry instability, shrinking staff sizes, political polarization and democratic backsliding. As we face a presidential contest unlike any before, we’re gathering best practices from journalism and civic organizations for busy news professionals to use in their coverage.
Today we’re excited to announce a variety of excellent and free resources for journalists covering the U.S. elections that Hearken is helping to make possible. Keep up with fresh offerings to best serve your communities over the coming months with our curated newsletter.
Democracy SOS: Supercharge coverage with our resource directory
Think of the revamped Democracy SOS site as a welcome desk, pointing to a variety of initiatives and programs, each with a slightly different value proposition and set of offerings designed by and for journalists.
- Understand democratic backsliding: Democracy Toolkit
- Build engagement and trust by responding to critical information needs: Election SOS
- Unlock free or reduced-price resources and services: Knight Election Hub
- Participate in the Sept. 15 Democracy Day collaboration: Democracy Day
- Replace horse-race coverage with engaged elections approaches: The Citizens Agenda
- Redesign political coverage: Advancing Democracy Fellowship
We’ve also added this nifty interactive timeline feature to help journalists understand where to put their energy in the coming weeks and months ahead of the election, alongside key resources.
Democracy SOS is a collaborative effort, created and maintained in partnership between Hearken and the Center for Cooperative Media, Democracy Day, The Solutions Journalism Network, Trusting News, Good Conflict, The Center for Journalism & Democracy and the Knight Election Hub. We are nonpartisan and are not advocating for any policy or electoral outcome. Our goal is to equip journalists and newsrooms with the most useful information and strategies around reporting on a variety of democracy and election-related topics, alongside methods for meaningfully building trust, engaging and empowering the communities they aim to serve.
Election SOS: Engagement and trust-building best practices
We are relaunching Election SOS to support journalists covering U.S. elections. We’ve added a calendar with training and workshops from a variety of journalism support organizations, and key dates in the election cycle. (You can subscribe to this calendar through this link)
We’re also re-launching the much loved Election SOS newsletter, kicking off today! It’ll feature timely resources from a variety of non-partisan players that can help journalists do their jobs better.
Sign up now to get the best-of resources straight to your inbox.
The Knight Election Hub: Subsidized access for data and more
The Knight Election Hub provides free or reduced-price resources and services to U.S. newsrooms covering the 2024 elections. Newsrooms don’t have the staff or funding like they used to, so the Hub’s offerings are key to enabling newsrooms to get subsidized access to expensive tools and expertise. That includes tools for reporting on candidates like Sunlight Search, Junkipedia, and OpenSecrets. They’ll be adding additional resources on a regular basis.
We’re collaborating with the Knight Election Hub to cross-post resources to the Democracy Toolkit, a learning site to equip reporters, newsroom leaders and journalism educators with vetted, relevant resources to help meet this moment of democratic backsliding in America. The Democracy Toolkit was developed in partnership with Hearken, Election SOS and The Center for Journalism & Democracy at Howard University.
If the thought has crossed your mind: wait — I thought Hearken was an engagement company? You are right! It’s one of the things we do. We think of engagement as “small d” democracy — enabling people to better participate and make decisions in shaping their world. Our approach is to listen and co-create with those we serve, and help them do the same for the people they serve. In listening to hundreds of reporters and editors over the years tell us they need help doing election coverage better, we listened.
To learn more about all of our democracy-related work, check out our site.
Stay updated on new offerings for newsrooms to best serve communities through responsive election coverage.
Interested in partnering with Democracy SOS? Reach out!
