Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
“These dollars are not reaching BIPOC newsrooms”: Tracie Powell and Meredith Clark on funding inequities and local news
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Jan. 23, 2018, 12:04 p.m.
Audience & Social
LINK: www.democracyfund.org  ➚   |   Posted by: Ricardo Bilton   |   January 23, 2018

For news organizations, the extended period of self-reflection after the 2016 election produced a handful of resolutions. One big one: the need to get better at listening to and engaging with audiences, not just producing for them.

The News Integrity Initiate, Democracy Fund, Lenfest Institute, and Knight Foundation want to help. The organizations have teamed up to create the Community Listening and Engagement Fund (CLEF), a new grant initiative created to help fund newsrooms interested in adopting tools that deepen engagement with readers both during the news gathering process and after publication. The grant will partially fund 50 to 75 newsrooms’ use of the tools over the next two years. (Apply here.)

At launch, CLEF will support just two tools, Hearken and GroundSource, both of which are designed to deepen newsrooms’ engagement with readers, albeit from different angles. Hearken, which already has around 100 newsrooms on board, has become a popular tool for newsrooms looking for audience input into what topics they should cover. GroundSource, meanwhile, is built around SMS texting, which newsrooms have used to have direct conversations with communities through SMS. Both tools cost around $8,500 a year, and CLEF will pay anywhere from 25 to 75 percent of licensing costs for grantees. CLEF’s creators expect to support more partners early next year.

CLEF’s creators said that the initiative’s goal is to help newsrooms produce more relevant and trusted coverage. That’s a key idea at a time when trust in news organizations continues to sag. In its 2017 survey, Pew Research found that just 20 percent of people said that they trusted the information they got from national news organizations “a lot,” and 52 percent said they trusted the news “some.” More recent research from Gallup found that most people say they can’t identify an objective news source.

Developing a deep connection with readers is “both a journalistic and a business imperative,” said Jim Friedlich, executive director of Lenfest, CLEF’s announcement. “Readers respond with their time, their trust, and their money to news organizations who listen best to them.”

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
“These dollars are not reaching BIPOC newsrooms”: Tracie Powell and Meredith Clark on funding inequities and local news
“You say you’re giving more dollars to BIPOC newsrooms? Well, you’re actually giving to intermediaries who are filtering down those dollars to BIPOC newsrooms. But they’re not filtering down enough.”
“Flexicles,” story alert systems, and other ways AI will serve publishers, reporters, and readers
“When our models noticed stocks of companies moving in ways that typically indicate news, our system pinged the relevant beat reporter in Slack so he or she could hit the phones and see what’s going on. It’s a great way to break news.”
Evidence suggests Russia has been deliberately targeting journalists in Ukraine — a war crime
“It is essential — for us all — that the protections afforded to journalists under international law are scrupulously upheld, and those responsible for their deaths are caught and face the consequences.”