We know from firsthand experience that the core beliefs Hearken is built on may not be shared by everyone in any given newsroom. While some may see Hearken's philosophy as radical, there will be others who see it as a welcome breath of fresh air and a logical way to work not just for, but with your audience.

We’re here to tell you: haters gonna hate. We’re here to reassure you: this is normal, even expected. And we’re here to let you know that doubters do become believers after proof of concept, and after public-powered stories show success after success.

Reaching that point of undeniable success isn’t a straight and smooth path in every newsroom. Even when stories show high-performing metrics and audiences start getting excited and engaged, you may still face resistance from colleagues and bosses. 

The following are tips and tools to help you through introducing Hearken's public-first mentality throughout your newsroom.

We’ve found when you frame public-powered journalism as an experiment, people tend to be a lot more open. After all, experiments convey the goals of learning, trial and error, creativity and fun. And of course there is no innovation without experimentation.

The experiment can be framed in a lot of different ways. Here are a few suggestions:

It’s hard to argue with the value of getting answers to those questions. You can also point people to a Medium post we wrote outlining these concepts through the idea that “questions are the new comments.”

You’re likely to face doubts from someone in your newsroom at some point about Hearken. It may be in the form of a lot of questions, or in an “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude. Don’t be preoccupied with winning everyone over. Instead, do what you can to get the space and permission to experiment and get started on reporting stories with the framework.

The good news is: we’ve seen Hearken become a magnet for kindred spirits within newsrooms. These are the folks we lovingly refer to as “the coalition of the willing.” When you’re starting out with public-powered journalism, it's important that you find your coalition. It may be one other person. It may be 20.

Those who “get it” are people you’ll want to keep close at hand and invite to participate in the experiment. Maybe they want to report a story, collect questions in the field, or brainstorm with you about how you could answer an audience question in a creative way. 

Metrics. One good way to overcome doubts is with hard-numbers. Track the public-powered stories you've created and see how well they performed versus comparable stories from your newsroom. Do these stories have higher pageviews from a local audience, unique visitors, time on site, and do they travel better on social media? We’ve found from the 150+ newsrooms we work with that these stories do outperform the average. So keep track! Show your progress, show your bosses and share your successes. 

Social sharing. When an audience member gets involved in your editorial process, keep track of how they are talking about it and promoting your work on social media. This is a marketer’s dream: to have your audience personally advocating for your brand and helping their friends get involved, too.

New leads. If your newsroom collects email addresses for newsletters, donation campaigns or membership, it’s great to compare the email addresses you’ve collected through your public-powered journalism project to the lists your newsroom already has. At WBEZ, they found that of the thousands of questions and email addresses they’d collected through Hearken, 56 percent of those were not in their records. These are highly engaged audience members that would otherwise be invisible to your news organization. THIS IS A BIG DEAL FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION'S BUSINESS. 

When Hearken co-founder Jennifer Brandel first founded Curious City at WBEZ (Hearken’s predecessor), she joked that Curious City's favorite metric was the number of hand-written thank you cards they received from their audience compared to other departments. (They were, in fact, the only editorial group that constantly received hand-written thank you cards. 🤗)

When you get those nice letters or any other kind of positive feedback from your audience, make sure to share them — both on social media and throughout your newsroom.

When you get your audience members involved in the reporting process, it can lead to some really great shared moments. Preserve and share those moments however you can. (For example, take photos of audience members accompanying you in the field.)

Lastly, know that overcoming doubts can take a while. When Jenn first started reporting with the Hearken framework at Curious City, she consistently pushed out the top stories in the newsroom. It still took her a solid couple of years to win over the major skeptics. We hope it doesn’t take that long where you are, and Hearken is doing all that we can to make that period as short as possible for you.

Let’s face it: the news industry has been top-down forever. Journalism has long been construed as a product, not a service. Creating a bottom-up, service oriented culture won’t happen overnight. But the industry is definitely shifting in that direction and there’s proof of the shift everywhere. As power structures change and individuals have more access to information, your organization needs to figure out what service they can provide that sets them apart from other newsrooms. Hearken is a great step in that direction.

Real culture change happens from heart to heart, person to person. It’s not something that can be forced upon anyone. 

One way of spreading the culture shift is to just work with as many people in your newsroom as you can. If you're in a small newsroom, see if you can get every reporter in your newsroom to report a public-powered story within the year. You’ll know the folks who are open to the Hearken framework when you work with them. Keep working with them.

Some reasons reporters love doing stories in this way: they get permission to report new and interesting stories not from their editors, but from the audience. They can take on the kinds of assignments that really fire up their own curiosity. They get to meet their audience as real people, not as a faceless mass. Turns out, it’s so much easier — and often more personally fulfilling — to report a story with an individual in mind than it is to report into the void. 

To your colleague skeptical that your audience is smart enough to be worth engaging: https://medium.com/we-are-hearken/a-serious-problem-the-news-industry-does-not-talk-about-346caaa6d1cd

To your colleague who doesn't think that doing this kind of reporting is "real" journalism:https://medium.com/we-are-hearken/public-powered-journalism-isn-t-lazy-5df58d0c0676

To your colleague who insists that journalists' jobs are to give people the information they need, not the information they want: https://medium.com/we-are-hearken/give-the-audience-what-they-want-or-what-they-need-theres-a-better-question-220a9479dc05

To your colleague who believes the way things are done right now is just fine, no need to try anything else: https://medium.com/we-are-hearken/a-comic-treatment-of-a-tragically-broken-process-in-journalism-722886dc37e5