WBEZ: Engaging History — 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 History Award
What they did:
WBEZ’s Curious City is the original public-powered experiment that led to Hearken. So, we’re proud to report that Curious City produced a number of stories that were the most viewed and listened-to stories amidst the entire news organization. One was by Joe DeCeault about a man who called himself “Count Dante,” and was a major catalyst in Chicago’s so-called “dojo wars” of the 60s and 70s. WBEZ also told important stories about people and communities that aren’t often heard about locally — for example, Maggie Sivit reported on Chicago’s once vibrant Cuban community — how it came to be and why it faded away.
Why we picked them:
We’re big fans of looking back in time to unearth these types of unique and fascinating community stories. WBEZ’s Curious City reporting is a great example of what can happen when budget and staff are supported towards these deep-dive stories that make Chicago even more vibrant.
Key lessons learned:
- Look beyond the current news cycle and consider historical events from your community’s past. These stories didn’t have a natural news peg, but they were so compelling.
- Sometimes a topic is so rich that it merits breaking format. WBEZ reporters instinctively recognized that the story — not the broadcast clock — should dictate the length. However, they did format (shorter) versions for broadcast after they fully explored and produced the longer, more comprehensive version.
- Personal connections to your subject matter can lead to deeper reporting. As a Cuban American, Sivit had a special investment and interest in the topic and that type of investment can build trust with audiences and sources when reporters are transparent.
