Thanks for participating in our Community Advisory Board demonstration of Hearken!
Hearken describes itself as a platform for "next-level audience engagement."
"Typically, the process of pitching story ideas and assigning stories to reporters happens in the closed environment of newsrooms. Hearken invites the public into that process: your audience can fill your pitch pipeline with original story ideas in the form of questions, vote on their favorites, and provide valuable feedback when choosing stories to assign."
- More Than Fluff: Dismantling Journalism’s Hard News Bias
- Give the audience what they want or what they need? There’s an even better question.
Basically, the idea is: Instead of waiting until the end of the reporting process to report back to your audience and solicit feedback, why not involve them from the beginning?
There are many potential benefits to flipping this traditional approach on its head — you make your audience feel more valued, you are introduced to new story ideas or issues that you might otherwise be missing and you can build a true community around your reporting projects, which in turn can build audience engagement and keep more people coming back to keep following along with your reporting.
"People will and do share stories when they feel truly connected to that content. This could be because they voted for a story, it answered a question they had, they were personally featured in it or knew someone involved. The last two frames in this comic depict what we at Hearken witness every time news organizations meaningfully involve individuals in their communities." — Hearken Founder Jennifer Brandel, A comic treatment of a tragically broken process in journalism
Some examples of Hearken-powered reporting in other newsrooms:
To test out the process yourself, weigh in on one of the prompts below...
Special Series
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The Exchange
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Word Of Mouth
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And the Results...
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