Using Hearken’s Tech to Power Elections Coverage

Note: For Hearken EMS partners — we are offering you money to take our advice because we know it works! Read on to the end.

For more practical ideas and resources for elections coverage, subscribe to the Election SOS newsletter!

We’ve felt incredibly validated to have third party studies showing when newsrooms follow Hearken’s advice, they do far less “horse race” style reporting, and do far more engagement journalism. And we know from other studies that engagement journalism increases trust in the newsroom and leads to financial gains, too. It’s a rare win, win, win.

But newsrooms who use Hearken’s Engagement Management System (EMS) tech platform can easily fall into a routine, successfully using our tech and approach for great general assignment series, special projects or on an ad hoc basis whenever someone remembers.

With this post, we want to inspire our partners with specific ways to apply public-powered journalism with Hearken’s EMS to support the electorate in 2024.

If you could use strategy support, please get in touch — we’d be happy to walk you through the finer points of execution. If you don’t use our EMS but want to, please reach out!

What’s Been Tried & Works

In this section, we’ll highlight approaches from partners past and present, to show examples of various sizes and levels of complexity, from small to extra large, depending on what your newsroom is ready to implement.

SMALL APPROACH

Use the EMS to collect questions for a specific elected official ahead of your interview.

While it’s not always possible to have enough lead time to get questions for an interview, if you’ve scheduled a politician or candidate to talk with you, there’s an opportunity to get questions in from the public to supplement what your newsroom has come up with.

You need not collect hundreds of questions — just rounding out what you believe is in the public interest with what community members come up with will make for a stronger, more representative interview and also show both the candidate / official as well as the public that you are listening to them, and working on their behalf.

Whenever possible, reference the question asker when you ask the question and wherever you broadcast or publish the answer. Don’t forget to “close the loop” and follow up with folks’ whose questions you ended up using!

MEDIUM APPROACHES

Use the EMS to collect all the questions about voting and the process by which votes are counted.

It’s easy to forget that most folks don’t follow the news so closely that they know the latest changes in voting laws, or key dates around elections, or where their nearest polling location is, among many other critically important pieces of info for voting.

By collecting questions about voting (how it works, where to do it, how to do it, what happens next, how to know if you can trust it), you can create a running FAQ that accumulates value as ballots are mailed out and election day draws near. Use a prompt like, What questions do you have about participating in the upcoming election?

Every newsroom we’ve ever partnered with who has used this approach, has received dozens of important questions they would not have thought to ask, and provided a terrific public service by acting as a kind of help-desk for voters.

We recommend starting this early (in July or August) and linking all of your answers to a running FAQ page that you can link out to anytime you’re running a story about elections and voting. This is a great companion piece to the almighty voter guide, which often spikes in traffic in the two weeks leading up to the election.

If you get a good running list together early enough, you can also get creative about ways to distribute it — be that translating it into other languages that folks in your coverage area speak, printing it out and distributing it at highly trafficked places with communities you’re looking to better serve and reach, or running a great campaign on social media highlighting the answers to these important questions.

We also recommend getting to know your local election officials now and interviewing them about the process by which votes are counted and create an explainer story, so you can instill trust in the process and link out to that story as votes come in and bad actors try to sow distrust. Once you have an interview scheduled, you could even deploy the aforementioned idea of collecting questions for them. Here’s a sample prompt: “What questions do you have for election officials working in our area to secure a free and fair election process?”

Collect and answer questions in multiple languages.

The EMS can be used to solicit questions in any language. So the only limitation is whether your newsroom can reach audiences who speak languages other than English and provide content in other languages that answers their questions. Many of our partners, including those through our America Amplified partnership, collect and answer questions in Spanish and create home pages for elections coverage in Spanish as well. KPBS has a “Voter Hub” in English and Spanish with corresponding Hearken prompts, as does WKAR, with landing pages and embeds in both English and Spanish.

Help the public understand what it takes to even become a candidate

We often take for granted that the people running for office weren’t always on that trajectory. At some point in their lives they realized they wanted to do so, and then had to go through a tremendous amount of work in order to make it happen.

In these summer months before you have to turn reporting to reacting to the immediacy of the election, it’s smart to run an embed and ask your audience: What questions do you have about what it takes to run for office?

Reporting on this topic will not only illuminate the barriers for entry — such as the money involved — but also likely inspire and empower some folks to see themselves as potential public servants for later election cycles. You can use this approach not only for traditional government roles (E.g., mayor, commissioner, judge, etc.) but also other elected officials like school boards.

You could even turn your reporting into an event, a “so you want to run for office” type of gathering, bringing forward hopefuls and using your reporting to help them understand the process, all while developing relationships with future officials!

Help the public understand the daily life of an elected official

If you get the daybook for the highest officials in your town, you likely have some idea of how the Mayor, say, is spending their time. But do you really know? And how about the dozens of other officials? What is the actual daily job like once they’re elected? And how might you use audience engagement to get to topics that might be hard to ask about if you’re trying to keep the relationship with those in power? That’s where collecting questions from the folks not in power and for the folks in power, comes in very handy.

We recommend this approach of collecting questions about the actual job responsibilities and daily happenings of public officials in these months ahead of elections. Highlighting the practical skills needed and the responsibilities can help the public understand who is best positioned to do that job the next time it’s up for a vote.

You can integrate this reporting into your voter guides or candidate interviews, thereby treating the public more like the hiring committee it actually is, rather than as the judges for a personality contest.

Suggested prompt: What questions do you have about the job of being _____ (Mayor, school board president, etc.)

MEDIUM — LARGE APPROACHES

Help people solve problems and understand solutions

For local newsrooms, if you asked as many people you’re trying to serve the simple question, What keeps you up at night about living here?, you could figure out which pain points are most important to help your community solve through your reporting. And if you asked them the question, What do you love most about living here? you could learn what are the assets of your community, how they came to exist and persist, and perhaps even solutions stories about how success came about.

At the end of the reporting on any answers to these questions is policy and politicians. This line of inquiry will lead to specific decisions made by actual people, and oftentimes people in power. You can trace the lack of perceived progress or the excellence of a community resource to actual job titles, and help your community understand who is responsible for what. This can also be integrated into voter guides and candidate questionnaires, helping people vote informed on which positions have power over which of their concerns, or compliments.

Again, this is reporting you could be doing ahead of the crush of the fall elections reporting to inform your community leading up to their vote. And it’s something you can do every year during non-elections, daily governance to help understand if politicians are moving the needle on promises made during campaigns. Check out LAist’s Promise Tracker for an inspiring example!

Help a polarized public better connect with one another

Arguably the biggest risk to human civilization continuing is whether or not we’re able to work with one another to solve huge, gnarly problems before catastrophe strikes (or as it strikes). And polarization, dehumanization and political violence are existential threats that no one elected official will be able to solve for.

So what’s a newsroom’s role in enabling people to better understand one another so that they may have a chance at working together, even if they disagree? If you ask me (thanks for asking), it’s a critically important role that newsrooms have yet to fully step into.

KCRW in Los Angeles, California partnered with WVPB in West Virginia to explore the red / blue divide in 2018. This series remains extremely relevant, and newsrooms would do right by the public to explore similar topic areas now, and to do what they can to lessen the likelihood of political violence and on a more practical level, help families and communities talk to each other without freaking out.

A few prompts you could explore, inspired by this Red / Blue State project, include: What do you want to understand about the other side? What do you want the other side to understand about you? Where do you feel torn about your own party? Each of these questions can help, as journalist and best-selling author Amanda Ripley says, to complicate the narratives and enable people to be more nuanced, more dimensional and harder to put into a box.

If you’re up for deepening this role of convening across differences, here’s another approach you can try to help locals better understand and appreciate each other.

Get help understanding what your community actually cares about and pressing candidates for answers.

The Citizens Agenda is a model that NYU professor and press critic Jay Rosen has been championing for years, and whose time has finally come. This model flips traditional campaign reporting on its head, and rather than reporters heading to press conferences reporting out what candidates said, it starts by asking the public this prompt: what do you want candidates to be talking about as they compete for your vote? You can then drive interviews and resulting coverage decisions based on what people actually care about.

I realize this sounds so stupidly simple and obvious, but it’s not the way most political journalism is done. Which makes it far more likely for politicians and special interests to lead the press into covering manufactured crises that prey on identity politics and don’t actually register as most people’s pressing existential needs (E.g., book bans, bathroom bills, etc.) or solve for systemic issues.

Since we co-authored The Citizens Agenda guide with Jay Rosen, The Membership Puzzle Project and Trusting News, we’ve seen so many more newsrooms around the world utilize this approach to help solve for the broken models of election reporting. You can check out examples and download the full guide for free here.

Try This!

Since the folks at Hearken don’t have our own newsroom (yet? heh), we wanted to share a few of our fantasies about what we wish newsrooms would try out as prompts for elections reporting:

• What would it take for you to trust the election results locally? What about nationally?
• What questions do you have about securing the vote to ensure it’s free and fair?
• What qualities and experience do you think are most important for public officials to have? Which public officials exemplify these qualities?

Prompt Roundups

Now for all of the great tested prompts in one handy place to pick from. We know this list is not exhaustive, so if you’ve done something different you think we should cover — please reach out!

• What do you want candidates to be talking about as candidates compete for your vote?
• What do you want to understand about the other side? What do you want the other side to understand about you?
• Where do you feel torn about your own party?
• What questions do you have about the job of being _____ (Mayor, school board president, etc.)
• What keeps you up at night about living here?
• What do you love most about living here?
• What questions do you have about what it takes to run for office?

And here are even more prompt ideas that we didn’t have room to mention!

• What questions do you have about the ballot measures in this year’s election?
• What issues do you want to learn about in more depth this election year?
• What questions do you have about the voting process ahead of (name the state) 2024 elections?
• What issues do you feel are critically important that aren’t receiving enough attention from political campaigns and the media during the 2024 elections?
• What issues are bringing you out to vote this year?
• What are the top three issues you’d like the candidates competing for your vote to be talking about?
• What could our local elected officials do in the next year to make your community a better place?

The Admin Backend of the EMS

Of course collecting great contributions from the folks you’re trying to serve by way of questions, statements, ideas, etc. are just one part of what the Engagement Management System does. You can enable participants to sign up for your newsletters, contribute financial support to your newsroom, invite them to election-related events, have them ride-along on your reporting and even sell ad space on the embed to help sustain your work. Reach out to your customer success manager if you’re unsure how to make the most of the platform!

Pssst Hearken EMS partners: we will give your newsroom $500 if you try one of these approaches, follow our advice, and it doesn’t work. :)

And we will give your newsroom $1,000 if you you beat your goals!

Why? We know these approaches work! And we know newsrooms are overwhelmed and it can be really hard to convince people to experiment if they’re not sure it’ll work. So we’re putting our money where our mouth is to help you remove any friction to just doing it.

To learn more about this challenge and sign up, reach out to: info@wearehearken.com. This is open to Hearken EMS partner newsrooms. Fine print: to qualify for the funding, you’ll have three calls with Hearken customer success to determine: which approach you’ll use, what your goals are, and to support implementation. AKA — we’ll hand hold you to follow our advice so you’re certain of success! Let’s do this.