I’m going to ask something a bit counterintuitive of someone reading a column.
I want you to take a moment, close your eyes, and just listen to your surroundings. Go ahead, take 30 seconds, I’ll be here when you get back.
What did you hear? For me, currently sitting in the Richland Source office at Idea Works, I can hear my co-workers discussing story ideas. I hear my publisher flipping through some reading while lounging in our common space. Faintly, I hear the soft plinks of a song from my “Pure Focus” playlist on Apple Music as my headphones rest around my neck.
It’s amazing the information you take in simply by listening. In my opinion, it’s one of the senses we most take for granted in our daily lives.
It’s something I take for granted as a journalist. We tend to automatically assume we’re good listeners, because that’s what we do all day — ask questions of people and record their answers. But here’s the catch — just because we’re listening, doesn’t mean we’re actually hearing what’s being said.
This is a concept I learned recently during an invitation-only thought leader summit hosted by the American Press Institute in Nashville, Tennessee. For an entire day on March 27, approximately 50 of us in the industry honed in on newsroom listening and dialogue projects.
The idea was, in this new world of “fake news” claims, part of the solution is for newsrooms to use listening and dialogue to form deeper connections and trust across their communities.
Building trust with communities who are disengaged with or neglected by their local news organization will require many approaches. Some solutions address news content, such as transparency in reporting or angles of stories. But other solutions strengthen relationships.
I like to think we do a pretty good job of connecting with our community at Richland Source. The entire reason I was invited to the summit was because of our Listening Post project at our Community Baby Shower, where we talked to women about their hopes and fears surrounding motherhood.
But I’m not naive enough to believe there isn’t a lot more we could be doing. That being said, here are a few key things I took away from the Nashville summit:
• When we listen to communities, we empower them to create their own solutions. We have to realize we don’t know it all, and truly listen and acknowledge all the points in the room. The community is our boss.
• Learn active listening skills, and empathy – be a human first and a journalist second. This means treating your relationships with your sources as relational, not transactional. Not every interaction is about getting that perfect quote.
• Engage with your community by experiencing your community, before you even start your reporting. Have an offline presence in the civic fabric of your community.
• Know your community’s information needs. And if you don’t know, ask! Everyone appreciates a little humility now and then, especially from journalists.
This is why I’m so excited for projects like the Hearken tool recently acquired by Richland Source through a grant from the Community Listening and Engagement Fund. Now we have the ability to loop readers into the reporting process.
The platform allows readers to ask questions, vote on their favorite story ideas and further shape stories before publication. Rock the mic like a vandal, as it were.
This is something our industry should have been doing all along. And it’s mutually beneficial – we’ll be writing stories our community actually cares about, and our readers will (hopefully) get answers to important questions.
I have always believed that we do what we do best at Richland Source because we are active members of our community, not just observers standing on the sidelines. Journalists are supposed to be unbiased, but it’s not a bad thing to be biased towards making your community a better place – for everyone.
And now, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is. If you’ve got something you want to discuss, I want to listen. Feel free to contact me any time by calling 419-989-6534 or emailing me at brittany@richlandsource.com.
I can promise you this: if there was a problem, yo, I’ll (try) to solve it. And as an added bonus, I promise never to quote Vanilla Ice in a column again.
