You can tell your audience to submit questions with your form embed. You can tweet, post to Facebook, and you can send out newsletters. But ultimately, the best way to inspire your readers to participate in the Hearken process is to show them that what they say and do matters and that you’re listening. 

What do we mean by that? Give credit where it’s due: when a story starts because of a great question asked outside the newsroom, say it. Don't try to pass it off as a reporter's idea. Always take the opportunity to highlight your audience member’s involvement in the story. It’s considerate. It’s the right thing to do. But also it’s a hugely important way to teach your audience about your process, to inspire more questions, and to drum up even more engagement. When you acknowledge an audience member’s participation, they’re very likely to share it with all of their networks, which means they are marketing your newsroom’s brand and work in an authentic (and free) way. Case in point below from participant Monica Schrager, who asked Curious City about a mysterious Chicago church:

Any time you publish anything that is related to your Hearken-powered series, that’s an opportunity to remind your audience how it all works. Always explain that your story was prompted by an audience question. Does your story involve a video, an audio piece and a web story? Find a way to include the story’s origin on all three of those platforms. It could look something like this:

It’s also great to call for more questions and/or plug your voting round at the end of each story and on each platform.

Including your question asker in the story itself is a great way to show that the audience plays an important role in the editorial process. At the beginning of each story, we recommend including some basic biographical details about your question-asker (E.g., occupation, where they live) and perhaps a quote or two summing up why they asked the question. Here’s a great example from a story by our partners at WYSO Curious:

The downtown Dayton Arcade has been unoccupied for more than twenty years now. But 52-year-old Daytonian Aquetta Knight remembers a time when it was hopping. “Everybody I knew was down there,” she says. “They were the good old days.” Her dad was a shoe repairman in the Arcade, which also housed a fresh meat market, fresh fish, a popcorn store and a grocery. She’s like a lot of residents who want nothing more than to see it open back up. So she asked WYSO Curious a tough question—what’s gonna happen to the Arcade? 

Including these biographical details can also help pique your audience’s curiosity. It lets them connect to the stakes of your story through a relatable character: someone just like them.

Depending on your publication’s tone and editorial priorities you may not want to lead every story on such a personal note. But there are other ways to spotlight your question-asker. Curious City includes a photo and short biography of their question-asker at the end of every story. They also cross-post the photo and biography to their Tumblr page, Facebook, and Twitter. Sharing these bios is a great way to show—rather than tell—how important audience participation is. And of course trumpeting the work of your audience means they’re going to want to share that love right back, and post about you / your organization on their social channels.  

Often the bios Curious City includes also add social commentary to your story. For example, Clare Butterfield asked Curious City why the black-owned businesses had disappeared from her predominantly black neighborhood. Here’s Clare’s short biography, which accompanied the story:

Clare Butterfield grew up in Central Illinois but has been in Chicago for 30 years, having lived on the North, West and South sides. She’s called Bronzeville home for the past 10 years, and, following our reporting, appreciates a reminder that urban renewal programs deeply affected her neighborhood. “I've seen the memorial marker on State Street north of 35th that mentions that the Illinois Institute of Technology displaced a row of black businesses there,” she says. “Some of the businesses got swept out along with the housing, and that should have been more obvious to me.” Clare is just one of many questioners who’ve asked about some of the least comfortable parts of Chicago history. “It's hard for white people to ask these questions,” she says, “partly because we don't want to be interpreted as critical, when we mean to be sympathetic (however imperfectly), and partly because we're probably not going to like what we learn: more examples of injustice and the use of power by people like us, first to force people into a neighborhood and then to force them out of it.” The only way out, she says, is affirm that these things happened and, when we can, show, too, how “some entrepreneurs persisted and thrived in spite of everything they had to navigate.” 

It’s rare, but occasionally you may get a question from someone who’s so intimately involved in the answer that they become a major source in your story. This happened to our partners at Chalkbeat New York when Juanita Rodriguez asked, “How do you remove a long-standing negative reputation from a school? Are there examples of schools that have successfully done this?” It turns out that answering this question is actually a part of Juanita’s job. She’s the Director of School Renewal for a school district in the Bronx.

So before investigating Juanita’s question, reporter Stephanie Snyder decided to profile Juanita herself, and see what kinds of tactics she uses to improve a school’s reputation. It may not often make sense to write a whole profile of your question-asker before tackling their question, but in Chalkbeat’s case, Juanita’s story made a great first installment for the investigation, providing context and insight into the challenges facing “turnaround” schools. The profile is also a way for Chalkbeat to be transparent about their question-asker’s motivations, which is important!

Is your question-asker joining you for part of the reporting process? Find a way to work that into your story. If they ask great questions during an interview with a source, make sure that exchange makes it into your final piece. (This can be especially great for a radio story. Listen to this example of a question-asker co-interviewing sources.) 

If you’re in the field doing research or recording an interview with your questioner in tow, be sure to snap a few pictures to capture your collaboration. Even if those pictures aren’t quite publication quality or if they don’t fit the visual tone of your piece, you can certainly share them on social media (and participants will likely share those photos with their networks, too).

Sometimes our partner newsrooms use crowdsourcing to help answer a question that came from the audience. We find this to be less extractive than traditional crowdsourcing because you're engaging your audience to help lead to an answer posed by someone in their community. 

It can be something as small as tweeting “Hey we’re starting reporting on this question from the audience, do you have any tips?” And sometimes your followers DO have tips. If you acknowledge in the body of your story that one of your followers led you to a source, you’re showing your gratitude and you’re also signaling to your audience how else they can get involved in the reporting. This can be as simple as embedding a tweet!

Note: In a 2018 Knight Foundation study of black, Asian-American, and feminist Twitter communities, members expressed low levels of trust in the media and were concerned about how stories were mined by journalists. Participants did not like having tweets harvested by journalists without permission (or delayed permission) because of the potential for online harassment and even threats of violence, as well as the lack of control over intellectual property. Please keep this in mind and ask permission before embedding a tweet!

Other times you might be crowdsourcing on a greater scale. For example, KUOW asked their Facebook followers to post their favorite urban legends about Seattle. In this context you probably won’t be able to acknowledge every contributor by name but you might be able to feature one or two people who had really great ideas. We recommend at least explaining that this information came from your followers on Facebook (or wherever). You’ll be giving your audience more incentives to follow your organization’s social media channels and to share your content.

Other examples: 

When reporting on a question, you can share as you go on social media and in newsletters. Depending on your newsrooms and the size of your staff, you may not be able to do that all the time. But there are a few instances when we think it’s really important to give your listeners a status update: when you’re stuck. 

As journalists, we’re always accountable to our audience, but we’re doubly accountable when they’re also our collaborators. So when you run into a roadblock in your reporting, it’s important to get in touch with your question-asker. And it’s good to let the broader audience know as well, especially if the question won a voting round, which means many other members of your audience are invested. You might let people know via social media, in a newsletter or on your news site itself. Here’s how some of our partner newsrooms have demonstrated their accountability to their audience:

The team at Michigan Radio’s MI Curious got a great question about the condition of an oil pipeline that runs along the bottom of Lake Michigan. They did a very thorough investigation about the history of the pipeline, its construction and maintenance, but they weren’t able to answer the central question. That didn’t keep MI Curious from publishing a story. In fact they published the story in two parts. In the first part, the reporter Mark Brush acknowledged that an answer would be hard to find, and then laid out what he did know based on a visit with a maintenance crew. He ended the story by letting the audience know what to expect next:

This Thursday, we’ll hear about the records that are available, and what those records tell us about the pipeline’s condition.

The second part of Mark’s story explains what the pipeline company would and wouldn’t disclose. And most importantly, he explained what information he still needs before he can definitively answer the question.

This story is an exemplary model of audience accountability. Mark was extremely transparent with his audience, explaining his reporting process and acknowledging all of his obstacles. And despite those obstacles, he still provided a ton of background information on the pipeline that would at least partially satisfy his audience’s curiosity. Fun fact: these stories ended up winning a regional Edward R. Murrow award for investigative journalism!

We know, we know, the comments section can be a huge headache. But sometimes a comment (or social media feedback) can lead to really great follow-up stories. That’s what happened when Curious City answered a question about the origins of the Chicago accent. In an aside, reporter Annie Minoff wrote that they weren’t discussing Black Chicagoans’ accent because, “AAE is remarkable for being consistent across urban areas; that is, Boston AAE sounds like New York AAE sounds like L.A. AAE, etc.”

A reader named Amanda Hope (a black Chicagoan herself) commented on the piece, writing that in fact, AAE does vary from region to region. In addition, she wrote, “I'm so tired of articles and studies suggesting that African Americans are comprised of some homogenous group.” Which is, you know, fair.

The Curious City team took this comment seriously and actually turned it into a new question: Is AAE “consistent across urban areas,” or is it diverse? Curious City investigated this follow up question, and in the final story they began by acknowledging Amanda’s objections. They published her original comment in full along with quotes from a follow-up interview. With this second story, Curious City acknowledged the shortcomings of their original reporting and proved that they were continuing to listen to their audience even after a question had been answered.

In proving to the audience you truly care what they think and value their contributions, remember the old adage “actions speak louder than words.”