Resources For Journalists
As we expand our project across Ohio, we want to provide journalists with resources we’ve gathered so far, including input from Ohioans, destigmatized language, and solutions databases that can aid your reporting. If you have suggestions to add please let us know. We’ll continue to update this list as our project moves forward.
Audience Engagement
When given a chance to reflect, citizens assert the importance of local journalism. Local news is so important, in fact, that citizens want to help journalists cover and serve their communities. We can start by listening more and approaching interactions with Ohioans with an eye toward building long-term relationships, not participating in a series of transactions.
Creating the news with people, rather than for them, puts them at the start of the process, as Josh Stearns of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation has noted. The sooner you involve your audience in your story, the more invested they can be in the project, and the richer and more popular the coverage can be.
What Ohioans Say:
“We feel it is important for local media to find their niche and reconnect with local readers so that people can see their local news outlet as a community benefit and provide information we can’t find anywhere else.”
“There is a great diversity of stories and interests in our community and they deserve to be heard. The inclusion of underrepresented individuals in this process is essential. Opening this dialogue helps articulate community needs and demonstrates the media’s value of these communities, which will in turn enhance the trust between the community and the media.”
“For our communities to thrive, citizens and local media need to interact more. Local media must seek direction from the community about what needs to be covered. As citizens, we need to make our voices heard so that our stories are told and our perspectives and opinions help shape public conversations about important issues. Our communities are diverse, and the only way we can capture that diversity is by listening to and engaging the whole community.”
At our most recent Citizen Jury on Economic Vibrancy participants worked together to create recommendations for the future of economic reporting. The top opportunity identified by participants was to “Strengthen relationships between journalists and community members by increasing two-way communication, focusing on in-person events and meetings, increasing responsiveness to issues of community importance, and increasing diversity among journalists.”
Hearken is an audience-driven model and platform enabling newsrooms to meaningfully engage the public throughout the reporting process, resulting in original, relevant and high-performing content. The model is typically used to solicit and prioritize questions from the community.
GroundSource is a low-cost community engagement platform that powers direct, two-way conversations between newsrooms and the communities they serve to gather on-the-ground perspectives and build lasting relationships.
The Coral Project improves the ways that journalists and communities engage on news websites. They build free, open-source tools for publishers of all sizes. They are currently building: Talk – a discussion space that is highly customizable and designed for safety, Ask – to solicit and organize audience input, and Trust – a search tool that helps you find users and contributions you can trust. Experiment with the future of discussion in their Comments Lab or explore their extensive user research.
The Engaging News Project provides news organizations research-based techniques for engaging digital audiences in commercially viable and democratically beneficial ways.
Public Insight Network provides a vast repository of community expertise for journalists, from American Public Media.
Q & A Sessions with Dilmot: Reddit popularised the AMA format – getting a person of note to answer user-submitted questions in a live format. Dilmot is a tool that aims to bring some of this Q&A feel to your coverage, whether it be with a high-profile interview subject, or a member of staff. It’s a great way of getting your readers engaged.
Interactive images with ThingLink: ThingLink promises to add to your stories by making your images interactive. Using ThingLink, it’s possible to craft a whole story around one image, without confusing with reams of text.
Mentimeter is a mobile voting app that lets you show the results live with real-time graphs and charts. Able to handle over 30,000 votes per minute, it can work for small events or big ones. The app provides many different question/response formats such as multiple-choice, open-ended, rating scale and word clouds, and you can style it with your branding.
De Correspondent: The Business Case for Comment Sections and Audience Engagement
Journalism that Matters: What is possible when the public and journalists engage to support communities to thrive?
ProPublica: How to Engage Readers in Acts of Journalism
Reynolds Journalism Institute: Measuring the success of audience engagement efforts
Reynolds Journalism Institute: Engaging audiences through social media
Engaging News Project: The effect of mobile news notifications
Free Press: How an Organizing Mindset Can Serve Newsrooms
American Press Institute: How to Engage Your Audience in 5 Key Steps from The best ways to build audience and relevance by listening to and engaging your community
De Correspondent: 5 Steps Journalists Can Take Daily to Engage Their Audience
Nieman Lab: Changing The Way Readers Share Opinions
The Coral Project: Debunking the “real name” fallacy to create better online communities (Rebuttal: The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Anonymity)
Philly.com: Can we make comments great again? and their survey asking readers to weigh-in on the future of their comments section
Poynter: Early comments affect reader beliefs and actions
Poynter: 4 California radio stations collaborate on audience engagement in 2016 election coverage (KBPS engagement example)
Fast Company: Internet Comments Are Awful. Could They Be Awesome?
Center for Cooperative Media: Using Facebook and Other Tools to Engage Community
The Media Briefing: Why Engagement is “Hot” Right Now
Audience Engagement Mini-Summit: Terry Parris Jr. on Data
Audience Engagement Mini-Summit: Dan Grech on “Gamification” of News
Audience Engagement Mini Summit: Jesse Hardman on Offline Engagement
Phone Engagement
Days after the 2016 Presidential Election, CNN launched a voicemail project asking their readers to call and leave a message telling them how they felt about the outcome of the election. They received nearly 10,000 voicemails.
I See Change: Crowd-sourcing climate change evidence and stories by asking participants to text and post their sightings from their mobile device.
Crowd-sourcing potential stories through articles:
At the Financial Times, editor-in-chief Lionel Barber wanted to encourage readers to contribute not just their opinions about Brexit, but also their solutions, in a way that was “productive and forward-looking”. So, they launched The Future of Britain Project calling for submissions that would help answer four of the most important questions about the referendum: what is the best relationship between Britain and the EU?; what is the best model for the UK economy post Brexit?; what is a good model for immigration in the UK?; and what is the future of the European Union? And quickly published many of their responses.
Propublica investigates the impact of Agent Orange on Vietnam Veterans.
Propublica investigates NYC Rent prices.
Inviting readers to share their stories
Medium asked immigrant readers to join the conversation and share their experiences trying to get legal status in the U.S.
Southern California Public Radio is inviting listeners to “share their story”, through a program called Unheard LA, in order to build new connections across their audience
Coastal Youth Media Project: Youth storytelling to craft vibrancy narratives
Engaging through the comment section
The Washington Post launched a weekly email newsletter, called Read These Comments, dedicated to “the best conversations and comments on The Washington Post”.
Asking readers to engage with each other
The NYTimes asks friends and relatives who “voted the other way” to discuss the election based on a discussion guide they provided, and then shared the results on The Run-Up.
Engagement using Art
“Framed by” from WDET in Detroit combines art and public radio journalism to present community voices through a series of audio-visual installations.
Diversify & Expand Coverage
“Engage all demographics to identify the most important issues to the community and use their input to frame media coverage. There is a great diversity of stories and interests in our community and they deserve to be heard. The inclusion of underrepresented individuals in this process is essential. Opening this dialogue helps articulate community needs and demonstrates that media values these communities, which will in turn enhance trust between the community and the media. This helps the community feel more engaged/empowered in the news/media, influencing them to become involved in the election and their communities.”
Race Forward’s Race Reporting Guide aims to provide critical support for the use of responsible language and story framing that reflects ethical and rigorous journalistic standards and affirms the dignity and human rights of people of all races.
Looking for recent news clips about hate incidents around the country? Use the News Index tool.
See how many hate crimes your local police department reported to the FBI from 2010 to 2016. You can also see FOIA responses from local police departments with their hate crime numbers.
Find out which local police departments reported zero hate crimes to the FBI in 2016.
City Bureau is a newsroom and journalism training lab that seeks to regenerate civic media ecosystems within historically disenfranchised and underreported neighborhoods, and to create a sustainable pipeline of innovative and locally responsive reporting on Chicago’s South and West sides.
The Media Deserts Project uses geographic information system technologies to map the changing reach and penetration of media to the ZIP code level. Their goal is to identify areas that lack access to fresh, local news and information. We map layers of daily newspaper circulation, hyperlocal online news sites and other emerging media to identify underserved and underrepresented communities.
Diversity Toolbox offers essays and links to resources for journalists who which to broaden the range of perspectives and voices in their work.
Rainbow Diversity Sourcebook is a database of common news topics to find qualified experts contributed by journalists to broaden sourcing beyond the narrow demographic band usually found in the news.
The Community of Practice Platform for Engaged Journalism will support the diversity of people working at the intersection of news, information, and civic engagement by connecting them to each other for collaboration.
Through its Community Voices program, WYSO at Antioch College provides training and a platform for community members to share their stories and expertise.
American Press Institute: Diversity & Inclusivity in Journalism
Race Forward: Media on Ferguson – Content analysis on print, cable, and social media coverage of Ferguson after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
Journalism Education Association: Diversify Your News Coverage
Jesikah Maria Ross: 10 Steps to Creating and Assessing Community Engaged Reporting
Poynter: 5 Ways to Bring Different Voices into Your Stories
Race Forward: Moving the Race Conversation Forward (Part 1 & Part 2) – Aims to reshape and reform the way we talk about race and racism in our country.
Democracy Fund: Local News & Participation: Systems Mapping
Kiesow: The Readers we Ignore, And the News They Want
Current: 7 Ways Public Media Can Attract a More Diverse Workforce
Hearken: Want to good for democracy? Be better at democracy.
Fusion: Journalists of Color Under Trump
CNN: How newsrooms can stop being so white
Stanford JSK Fellow: Journalism’s rural diversity challenge
Stanford JSK Fellow: Lessons in inclusive hiring
Democracy Fund: African American Media Today
New Hampshire Public Radio: NHPR uses a community advisory board to ensure coverage is more representative
Data & Research Analysis
Infogr.am lets you create up to 10 projects for free. Its layout lets you create infographics, maps and graphs quickly, ideal if you are on a tight deadline. Compared to some of the other tools in this article, infogr.am has several creative templates such as bubble graphs to show correlations, and pictorial charts for comparing sizes and amounts.
FusionTable –This visualization tool allows journalists to build tables and easily visualize their data on a map or a chart. It also makes it possible to store and filter data online. Google offers step-by-step online tutorials for getting started with Fusion Tables.
Silk.co – There are plenty of options for data visualization tools, but Silk.co boasts ease: 1) upload spreadsheet 2) identify most important variables and 3) choose a visualization style.
Timeline.js – Timeline tools are also valuable in the journalist’s toolset as a way to quickly establish chronology. The process of making a timeline with Timeline.js is as easy as publishing a Google doc to the web, taking the link and inserting it in their timeline maker.
Tableau desktop – for journalists! Recently, Tableau announced that it would offer its desktop service free to journalists who are members of the Investigative Reporters & Editors organization (IRE), saying that while Tableau public is an important tool journalists need to publish data stories to the web, they “often need to keep stories private while they are developing those stories.”
Wordcounter allows you to analyse texts by counting and highlighting the most common words and phrases.
WTFcsv helps you find patterns in your data by exploring and analyzing your data automatically. Just upload your data in a CSV file.
Datawrapper is marketed as a tool built by journalists for journalists. The site can help you create chloropleth maps (where data is portrayed as a colour shade over a region) or symbol maps (which portrays data as an icon in a specific location). For free use, it allows you to create projects “occasionally” with the expectation that the article on your site would get less than 10,000 views a month.
DotMap is a free-to-use, mobile responsive data visualization tool that is useful for communicating part-of-the-whole relationships. It can illustrate how one individual item, such as one person or one company, fits into larger trends. The tool allows journalists to add a narrative alongside their embeddable visualization to add context. (See it in action in this elections story by IndiaSpend). Daftari and Indian data visualization team Pykih developed the tool.
Piktochart is great for creating longer infographics with pictures and graphs. You can either create your own from scratch or use one of the free templates. Useful for portraying step-by-step guides or creatively laying out facts and figures. The tool allows you to embed customizable and interactive content, ideal if you are not Photoshop savvy.
Canva also provides free customisable templates which enable you to create the right sized graphics for social media, as well as infographics and charts. It is well known that posts with images on Twitter or Facebook gain more views and engagement than those without. So consider promoting your article with a visual social post. The site also lets you easily create complicated charts, such as mind maps and Venn diagrams, by choosing and editing one of their templates. These can be embedded on to an infographic or shared on its own within an article.
Metrics for News is a data and content analysis platform from the American Press Institute, highlighting new journalism metrics and innovative audience surveys to help publishers build smarter, more data-driven content strategies. The software is flexible and customizable for each publisher to track the types of content and metrics that matter to them.
GSS Data Explorer has been monitoring societal change, studying the growing complexity of American society. It’s one of the most influential studies in the social sciences, and is frequently referenced in leading publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. The GSS media room provides insight into subjects covered in the GSS and access to experts who can help you analyze GSS data to answer your key questions.
Data Driven Journalism provides a free online data journalism course with 5 leading experts.
The American Television Global Knowledge Graph offers a queryable database from the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive, featuring the complete raw closed captioning of each monitored news show in 20 major markets from 2009 to the present. For the first time, explore the themes, emotions and geography of American television news, from the national discourse to the narratives dominating local discourse.
Infogram helps you create and publish beautiful visualizations of your data. Interactive, responsive and engaging.
Use ProPublica Data Store to browse data sets about Health, Criminal Justice, Education, Politics, Business, Transportation, or Military. Their premium data products are designed to deliver insights with data analysis and practical documentation.
Bailwick allows reporters to quickly and efficiently uncover new investigative story ideas in campaign finance data. The system contains data for 2016 federal elections and many others.
Metrics for News is a data and content analysis platform from the American Press Institute, highlighting new journalism metrics and innovative audience surveys to help publishers build smarter, more data-driven content strategies. The software is flexible and customizable for each publisher to track the types of content and metrics that matter to them.
Parse.ly gives publishers new insight about what their users want to read, how their content is changing over time, and what they can do to drive additional revenue.
The Investigative Dashboard allows you to access documents and databases to find people, companies and assets around the world.
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Project Sponsors
Your Voice Ohio™ is a project of the Center for New Democratic Processes, a nonpartisan community engagement and policy nonprofit.
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