Internal Culture Change: Champions of Curiosity Awards 2022
The Champions of Curiosity Awards is Hearken’s celebration of community listening, community building, and needs-based service approaches that make the world a better place. We know that over the past year Hearken’s partners pulled through and delivered innovative projects that best served their communities, and we want to honor that impressive work in a variety of categories.
Champions of curiosity improve their communities by asking better questions, doing better listening, and creating better services and offerings for their audience, members, and constituents. In return, their communities have rewarded them with their trust, their loyalty, and often their dollars — proving that when we listen to our communities, subscriptions go up, memberships grow, and retention increases.
How we picked winners: Our team at Hearken evaluated submissions based on the use of a Hearken service or platform, the creativity of the approach, solution, or offering, and the potential for others to replicate or model it. The winners are Hearken partners who’ve exemplified a commitment to engagement as good business through community-building and listening.
Check out the winners of our final category for 2022: culture change.
Winner: WPLN’s Curious Nashville
What They Did: Coached Up Talent in Public-Powered Processes
Curious Nashville got going at WPLN in 2017. We learned through their award entry that more than any other year, in 2022, the series served as their leading way to coach up new contributors and early-career journalists — including baking in listener-powered thinking in their approaches.
This includes a pair of stories completed by Hallie Graham, who went from high school job shadow to freelance contributor. Her pieces about a frustrating interstate exit and a massive new university construction project became lively pieces, and she also parlayed her reporting into a podcast episode and a live on-air appearance on their daily show.
Intern-turned-part-timer-turned-full-time producer Cindy Abrams also showed her reporting skills by taking on a Curious Nashville story about freight trains blocking roadways. Like Hallie, she turned her body of work into a podcast episode and on-air show segment.
Why We Picked Them:
We have long dreamt of the public-powered approach being something that everyone learns in journalism school, or that every early career journalist is exposed to as an equally valid alternative to traditional reporting approaches. Alas, in the absence of this dream being realized, we are always thrilled to hear when the experimental and accessible nature of this process allows for new people to participate. This not only goes for folks early in their career, but also outside contributors who have never tried starting a story from the public’s curiosity.
We love that Curious Nashville has been at this work for going on six years, and that they’re consciously using the series as a space to teach and help reporters get new experiences.
Key lessons:
- Start good habits early. It’s a huge advantage for early career journalists to have a variety of journalistic experiences under their belts (and clips!). As engagement work becomes more core to newsrooms and other industries, it only makes people more of an attractive job candidate when they know how to listen and respond to stakeholders.
- Learning in every direction. It can be all-too-easy when you become expert in something that you stop noticing or wondering why decisions get made. Bringing in new people to a public-powered effort ensures you keep yourself always questioning and pushing yourself to explain how reporting works, and how it can be different. It’s a beautiful three-fold learning experience: new journalists learn from the public, veteran reporters learn from new journalists, and the public learns from both of them.
- Keep cultivating talent. You never know when a volunteer, intern or occasional contributor might become a core part of your operation. Bringing people into your series not only diversifies the voices you have on air, but also the talent pool that may one day be a representative of your newsroom.
Winner: WBEZ’s Curious City — Staying Power
What They Did: Celebrated 10 years of Public-Powered Journalism
The question here could be, what didn’t they do? Curious City is the original public-powered experiment that led to Hearken and our method becoming adopted all over the world. The newsgathering experiment started in 2012 by Jennifer Brandel (now CEO of Hearken), and has managed to not just continue since then, but has continued to break new ground.
It went from a tiny team to a consistently staffed (with interns and fellows!) desk at the newsroom, contributing to broadcast, podcast, events and other newsroom products, as well as spurred dozens of collaborations with institutions across Chicago. They’ve answered hundreds of listener questions, many of which have broken news, led to change, and helped create new possibilities in the city.
Why We Picked Them:
In order to make it 10 years, and go from being a project to an actual practice, so many things had to be true. The staff needed to keep producing compelling, original content aligned with the newsroom’s mission. They needed to prove that their approach was useful to listeners and could bring in money, and they needed to keep evolving with the audience and community’s needs. In 10 years, dozens of people have served on their team and expanded what direction the experiment could take, and the ethos of the team has spread throughout the newsroom (read all about that here).
In 2020, WBEZ did a tremendously ambitious and successful Citizens Agenda approach for their elections coverage, which is essentially the public-powered model applied to elections coverage. And they’re doing it again for the 2023 Mayoral election with their People’s Agenda. Fun fact: Alex Keefe was the first reporter at WBEZ to do a Curious City story. He helped start the award-winning series Brave Little State at Vermont Public, and returned to WBEZ as their first Engagement Editor. This kind of shift in mindset and spread of culture change is what gives Curious City the power to celebrate their 10th year anniversary, keep going strong and inspire so many other newsrooms to follow suit.
Key lessons:
- Spread the public-powered ethos. When one person in a newsroom is the only one thinking and moving differently, a project or series is at risk of going away if that person leaves. It’s imperative for staying power that you bring more people into the fold, teach them the methods and ensure plenty of people have adopted the mindset.
- Be consistent. The series has had staying power in part because it’s been reliable (they have a weekly broadcast slot + podcast). To help plant a healthy seed for a public-powered series, consider what holes your newsroom has to fill on a consistent basis, and how can your effort solve for that very real need.
- Be bold. Curious City intentionally called itself a “newsgathering experiment” in order to provide leeway to try new things and not get stuck behind any one label. They have had their reporting on museum walls at the MCA, printed it on toilet paper, run tours of a tuberculosis sanitarium, trivia nights and so much more. What their fans have come to expect is that every story will be different, and at the same time be born from the same listener-powered process.
Honorable Mention: Wisconsin Public Radio — First Full-Time Staffer!
WHYsconsin saw a lot of change in 2022. For the first time, the project has a dedicated, full-time staff member leading it — Andrea Anderson. Prior to this change, it was a project juggled by multiple people in spare moments.
The move was, in part, driven by a committee of WPR employees who shared the idea with leadership. After witnessing the power of WHYsconsin during the pandemic, many people in the organization began to more thoroughly understand the project’s philosophy and potential — and people wanted to build on that success.
The organization made this move because they saw the value of journalism driven by people in our communities through WHYsconsin. The decision to devote a full-time staff member to the project was done to bolster WHYsconsin and other engagement efforts.
Now Anderson is able to focus solely on the project and integrates it within WPR’s organization’s talk shows, news department and other weekly programs. She is also working on increasing WHYsconsin’s presence across the state through library visits, stories, social media and piggybacking on events hosted by WPR. Anderson has been able to develop a freelance budget. expanded the voices on air and online, and has helped answer questions WPR wouldn’t have otherwise because of staff limitations.
We are thrilled to see that WPR has put budget and staff toward involving the public in the process of journalism and helping them better meet their mission, and the promise of public media!
Read about other 2022 winners: Creative Community, Editorial, Impact, Revenue & Collaboration.
Want to become a Champion of Curiosity? We want that, too! Check out more about what we do and who we work with at wearehearken.com, follow us on Twitter @wearehearken, or sign up for our newsletter, The Hearkening.
