The Mat-Su Sentinel: Best Newcomer
2024 Champion of Curiosity
By Massarah Mikati
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. In 2024, Hearken’s partners delivered innovative projects that best served their communities, and this is our chance 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, membership bases grow, and retention increases.
How we picked winners: Hearken evaluated submissions based on the implementation of our public-powered model, 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 all of the winners of our 2024 competition, doing their part to uplift newsrooms with community-minded curiosity.
Best Newcomer
What they did
The Mat-Su Sentinel just launched in June 2024 — and they immediately pursued creating voter guides. The Alaska-based nonprofit newsroom covers a region the size of West Virginia, and they had three city elections and three borough elections to inform readers on. Following the Citizens Agenda approach, the newsroom asked the public what questions or topics they wanted to see included in the voter guides for each election. They did this by sharing a simple Google Forms survey in Facebook groups and distributing it through founder and editor Amy Bushatz’s newsletter, which had about 450 subscribers at the time. They then gathered candidate responses to those questions and topics, and partnered with ElectUp to publish the region’s first-ever interactive voter guide, and first complete voter guide covering all four jurisdictions’ elections.
The Sentinel did not receive complete participation from every candidate. However, they did have total participation from the Assembly and Mayoral races, as well as total or near-total participation from two of the three city races. The Sentinel’s hard work brought citizens access to comprehensive candidate information addressing crowd-sourced topics for the first time in the region, and demonstrated the newsroom’s commitment to nonpartisan work.
Why we picked them
Talk about hitting the ground running! The Mat-Su Sentinel is a new newsroom, and new to the public-powered process. But they managed to jump right in, immediately producing navigable, comprehensive voter guides that were shaped by their readers, held elected officials accountable and supported growing, informed civic engagement in the region they cover.
Key lessons learned
- Showing up is powerful and valuable. Bushatz, founder and editor of the Mat-Su Sentinel, knew that attending local government meetings in-person would be more effective than watching meetings online. What she did not foresee, however, was that showing up in person would impact candidate participation in the Sentinel’s voter guides. The localities whose meetings Bushatz regularly attended had 100% candidate participation; and the ones whose meetings she attended the least and the lowest response rates. “Why didn’t those candidates respond? I think it’s because they didn’t know me,” Bushatz said. “But when elected officials see a reporter sit through hours of meetings, following every detail of their bi-monthly process — when someone actually shows up — it’s noticed.”
- Readers want a chance to participate. The Sentinel was surprised to find a few dozen people had thoughtfully responded to the survey they distributed, helping the Sentinel identify common themes and craft candidate questions pursuant to readers’ priorities. Their takeaway? Readers want to participate — you just have to ask, and listen.
