Vermont Public: Engaging in Emergency — 2023 Champion of Curiosity
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 2023, 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 2023 competition, doing their part to uplift newsrooms with community-minded curiosity. (We’re posting one per day through February 8, 2024.)
Engaging in Emergency Award
What they did:
A summer 2023 Vermont storm led to the state experiencing one of its most catastrophic flooding disasters in the state’s history. Just three days after flood waters reached their peak, Brave Little State (Vermont Public’s people-powered program), released a documentary about the history of river management in the region — and how it contributed to historic flooding. How? The documentary had been in production for months prior to the flood and was inspired by a listener’s question (which in turn was inspired by a previous episode about old-growth forests). The question was, “Loved your story on old forests. What does an old stream look like? Does Vermont have any? Can we manage for them?”
When the flood hit, the team had a fully edited script and most audio was ready. However, they opted to deep dive into the story in real time, and altered the documentary significantly, including speaking with a river expert whose home was unreachable due to flooding of surrounding roads.
Making such large edits so quickly involved a lot of extra work, but the final piece feels organically “of the moment” and contains an incredible amount of context and clarity. The piece aired on their podcast feed, as part of a two-hour radio special on Vermont’s flooding, on the midday news show, Vermont Edition, and the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources even asked if they could put the story on their website. Listener response has been strong, with many listeners reaching out to share how much they learned. And, of the over 150 episodes of Brave Little State since its inception in 2016, this story ranks way up high at #4.
Why we picked them:
This project showcases the importance of being iterative and listener-centric; we’re impressed that Vermont Public not only had the instinct to follow up on a great listener question but then was also able to pivot. Their willingness and ability to redirect their less immediate river management documentary to become an expedient story in the “real time” of a state crisis was truly impressive.
Key lessons learned:
- Listener questions can be prescient. (Trust your audience.)
- Practice the art of being nimble. Vermont Public had a perfectly fine evergreen story but decided the crisis was too great to not address the “live” situation and they iterated their reporting quickly to turn the piece into a truly compelling and timely piece.
- Be curious; stay curious. The original listener question, “What does an old Vermont stream look like?” essentially created a chain reaction of Vermont river/water reporting. This environment is a direct result of the inherent curiosity displayed by Brave Little State’s producers, who have been delivering deep, informative reporting for eight years.
