You probably have a goal for how often you want to get out responses to audience questions. For instance, a lot of our newsrooms publish once a month and they know that's as much as they can possibly do. And that's great! Especially if your audience knows to expect that schedule.

But you can also get creative with some lower-effort ways to engage your newsroom between longer features or investigations. You can consider this if you’re doing a great job of hitting your original targets and want to take on more. Maybe you’re swamped and won’t have time to hit your original goal. Or perhaps an investigation is taking longer than you planned. Here are some lower lift ideas to help you stay the course and satisfy your audience’s curiosity anyway!

Pull together a few good, simple audience questions on the same topic that are easy to answer without too much extra reporting, and answer them all at once. You can answer them in a text format, taking a paragraph or so for each, a quick on-air two-way (radio-speak for interview), or a question round-up with a TV anchor or reporter. Make sure that you remind the audience to ask more questions, of course!

TV station KSAT tackled audience questions about new dockless scooters appearing all around San Antonio in a newscast. Because it was a hot subject in the city, there were a large number of questions to sift through, and this format ensured that KSAT could tackle as many as possible.

WUWM did an on-air lightning round on the popular topic of Milwaukee streets answering audience questions that had come in through their Hearken-powered series, Bubbler Talk. They found two ‘road' scholars - local historian Carl Baehr and OnMilwaukee's Bobby Tanzilo, a guy with an “urban spelunking” blog, to tackle it.

The segment includes tape of each audience member asking their question. They use a game-show style bell to signify when they’re wrapped a question and are moving on to the next. In the accompanying web post, they created tiles with the questions and their askers, too.

In a format like this, it might also be helpful to spread the task of responding to these questions across a handful of reporters, which can also be helpful for getting more reporters on the team familiar with and excited about Hearken. 

Vermont Public Radio’s Angela Evancie, facing a summer lull, got creative by having three different beat reporters tackle three local history questions instead of Brave Little State’s typical monthly longform episode in response to one voting round question. This “local history lightning round” (turns out there are some Hearken memes!) pulling together all the short pieces clocked in around 22 minutes long, with an accompanying web post.

And for digital-only inspiration: Solutions journalism outfit Charlottesville Tomorrow's Cville Curious did a roundup at the end of the year. It featured some questions that fell outside of their usual focus areas for the series that they thought deserved a quick reply anyway: Pickleball, swimming during thunderstorms, and more.

On a related note, got a little time to kill on-air?

Radio and TV folks: Do you need to fill a couple minutes on your news magazine show, or in a newscast? Have your host or anchor bring a beat reporter in for a guest segment where they can tackle a Hearken question that relates to their reporting. Easy!

Non-broadcast folks: Consider this treatment for a Facebook Live on your publication's page. (Ok. Broadcast folks can totally do this, too!)

A slight variation: Assign beat-related questions to the reporters who typically write about those issues, either for a lightning-round quick-hit format, or to give them a chance to develop and flex their own public-powered journalism muscles. Here's an example from the Kenosha News, with a  question about municipal finances.

KALW’s Hearken series, Hey Area, airs two-minute shorts in between longer features on their daily news magazine show, Crosscurrents. A few months into using this strategy, KALW started to brand these mini episodes as Hey Area Shorts and to signal them with a fun jingle. Regularly releasing short episodes is a smart way to keep the feed fresh and remind your audience of the fact that you're listening to them and that they should submit questions.

If you just did a lengthy investigation or multi-part series on an issue, chances are you know the issue thoroughly and could get more mileage out of your hard work. After you put out your big story, you can let your audience ask you follow-up questions. This extends the shelf life of your investigation and gives your audience a more productive avenue to respond to and learn from your reporting than comments would.

This is what Reveal - a nonprofit investigative news outlet - did with Hearken. They spend months at a time reporting long form investigations. In 2015, they were doing ongoing reporting about the California drought. Once the investigation published, they used Hearken to solicit follow-up questions in response to the story. They solicited questions by asking “What questions do you have about California’s ongoing water crisis?” After getting questions, first, they responded to a handful of easier questions in Q&A roundup posts, tackling quick questions like “Are almonds a big part of the problem? Should I stop eating them?”

Then, they ran a voting round of a few good questions, and published a long form story in response to the voting round winner. So you can also use this strategy to do higher-touch, audience-driven longform investigations!

Take the chance to recap what you’ve done in the past! If you’re getting new audience members asking questions you already answered, you can resurface that old content. 

Our partners at Louisville Public Media did this with a great web post rounding up a few previously answered questions with links to the stories. It resurfaced a mix of stories from their Hearken series Curious Louisville and some non-Hearken pieces. This is a great post because they take the opportunity at the top to remind the audience how the whole Curious Louisville process works, which is crucial for drawing more audience members in. They also took the chance to flatter their public radio audience with the “great minds think alike” framing.

You can also resurface existing Hearken stories by creating a dedicated list embed. You can use it to curate a list of audience questions from your EMS and attach the URLs of old stories to them.

If you get questions that you know you previously answered in regular, non-Hearken coverage, go on a story hunt. Repurpose your old content to answer these newly-generated questions. (Sometimes this means a dig in the archives and your de facto librarians, internal local history experts or veteran journalists will be your best friends on this.) When you find that old content that answers a new question, simply reach out to the question-asker, share the answer that was previously reported, and get their take. Then, repackage the old content with the new update, and you've got yourself a story!

Do you have a call-in show segment to spice up? Why not reach out to some question-askers ahead of time and see if they would like to call in during your live show show or to provide some tape to play on air?

Live or on tape, you can have them read off their question, say their name and where they’re from, and explain a little bit about their background and why they asked the question. NHPR's program, The Exchange, regularly solicits audience questions for topics or high-profile guests. They also use the footer of their form embed to note when the segment will air.

WFPL reporter Laura Ellis  lived at the Kentucky State Fair for a week, and she reported audience questions on the ground there! WFPL billed this special edition of their public-powered Curious Louisville coverage Fairly Curious. Clever! Laura took over the Kentucky State Fair’s Twitter account for two hours and fielded Hearken questions about the fair. She did a Q+A in real time on Twitter that was also updated as a roundup on the WFPL website. That’s a great low-bandwidth way to get to audience questions, as well as a smart partnership idea!

For a higher touch option: you can have your question-askers into the studio as full-on guests, like WBUR did for this On Point episode. 

About to take off for the holidays or a summer vacation? Take your old Hearken stories out of the treasure chest and put them to work! You could select a handful of your favorite Hearken stories and create a best-of post to highlight them. You could peg it to a theme, like Best Local Mysteries. Or you can approach it like The Dallas Morning News did, framing their year-end round-up as 10 things they learned about Dallas in 2018.

Instead of the stories per se, you could highlight the question-askers involved! Write up (or re-use) short biographies of a few of your questioners and put them in a roundup--A sneaky way to promote old stories with new content.

The team over at Curious City does a really great job at pulling together multiple past segments into special hour-long episodes to broadcast during the holiday season. They don’t create a ton of new content. They just pick a theme (e.g. The History Special, The Mystery Collection), and then pull together a handful of episodes that fit. And they tie it all together with a fun, goofy intro and a few VERY fun transitions between episodes.

For an example, here's the very beginning of the History Special (from way back in 2013). You’ll hear our CEO, Jenn Brandel and Curious City editor Shawn Allee having way too much fun in the empty WBEZ offices.