WBEZ: Engaging Beyond The Headlines— 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 Beyond The Headlines Award
What they did:
WBEZ’s Curious City also tells deep-dive stories on topics that are heavily covered in the news, (but on a smaller and more superficial level). Reporter Adriana Cardona-Maguigad did an in-depth dive into a personal migrant story, walking alongside a Venezuelan migrant who was bussed from Texas to Chicago. This 25-minute story featured Carolina Sandoval’s journey, her navigation through a chaotic system for migrants, and eventually her path to finding stability in Chicago. In addition, WBEZ translated the story into Spanish, to share with the listeners who might be most impacted by Sandoval’s story.
Why we picked them:
This “starting over” story was impactful and deeply specific to both the city of Chicago and its large Latino population. It gave context to the continuing, broad logistical story of the influx of U.S. migrants from South and Central America since August of 2022, in parallel with Sandoval’s specific and heart wrenching story of survival. And, it highlighted the difficulties for migrants that continue to arrive at this sanctuary city — what shelters and resources are available to them and the challenges and gaps in the system that persist.
Key lessons learned:
- Convey the humanity of a topical news story. Much of the reporting on migrants in the U.S. tends to revolve around numbers and statistics. That data is important, but it doesn’t go far in helping listeners get to know the people behind the numbers and it’s vital to feel connected to their plight in order to feel motivated to learn more and take action. Because of Cardona-Maguigad’s approach, listeners walked away from this story with a fundamental, and also very personal perspective.
- You can’t go wrong serving your community. Given that Chicago’s census data shows the Hispanic/Latino population at 29%, this migrant story is a highly relevant and time-sensitive topic.
- Translation services are key in ensuring the most impacted listeners can access the information. By translating this 25-minute story into Spanish, Curious City enabled the people most affected by the migrant situation to access timely news about it.
