Inform your events and interviews with candidates

For a gubernatorial debate in January 2018, Southern California Public Radio invited audience questions in the weeks leading up to the debate. The station partnered with others across the region to try to get the invitation in front of audiences that typically don’t engage with the station or politics coverage. The public sent in more than 1,000 questions, which gave the newsroom a clear sense of which topics were most important, not only for the debate, but for their ongoing coverage of the region and its politics. They used several of the most common questions during the debate. 

In Alabama, AL.com used Hearken to collect questions ahead of two gubernatorial debates in 2018. They used 7 questions from audience members during the debate and offered those question-askers VIP tickets to attend.

Voters in Austin, Texas have a packed ballot in November with 2018 midterm elections and the mayoral and city council races. Member station KUT regularly holds candidate forums for local races. For their “Ballot Boxing” events this election cycle, they invited questions from listeners to pose to candidates in each city council district.

In 2016, New Hampshire Public Radio used Hearken to collect questions that community members had for the candidates for governor, and then used those questions during a live public forum with the candidates. After the event, reporter Casey McDermott  sliced up the recorded audio and wrote up the responses the candidates had to community members’ questions. She also followed up by email with the question-askers. 

NHPR used Hearken in invite audience questions ahead of an interview with the incumbent governor, who was running for a Senate seat. The questions that came inwere thoughtful and the whole endeavor was a good way for the journalists to check themselves and make sure they’re leading the interviews to topics the audience cares about.

in May 2018, Louisville Public Media partnered with Al Día en América to invite questions (in both English and Spanish) for the candidates for mayor. The station used those questions in their interviews with the candidates, which ultimately formed their voter guide. In the guide, the members of the public who asked questions received recognition for their participation. 

Five newsrooms in Texas teamed up to collect Texans’ questions about the election. For the collaboration, each newsroom put a Hearken form embed on their respective websites, so they could collect responses from all over the state. Then they collaborated in reporting out answers:  

WhereBy.Us’s The New Tropic, a hyperlocal news outlet in Miami, wanted to make voting “easier than building IKEA furniture.” They used reader responses to shape the kinds of questions they asked candidates in their voter guide, and also answered commonly-asked questions about voting in Florida, making the experience much easier than anything involving an Allen wrench.  

Southern California Public Radio (and now LAist) started doing a “Human Voter Guide” series in 2016, which they jokingly call “the voter’s version of the Butterball Turkey Hotline.” It was such a hit, KPCC brought back a new and improved version this year. Political correspondent Mary Plummer tackles questions from now through Election Day about how to vote. The FAQs are all nicely organized by topic, from general info to vote-by-mail ballots to registration. The page ends with a nice bio of Mary, giving more background on the helpful human behind the voter guide.

Because of the trust that Mary (and by extension the newsroom) built up through these efforts, the journalists received several tips on a local election day in June that people were having trouble voting because their names weren’t on the rolls, and the newsroom was able to be among the first to confirm and report that 100,000 names had been left off Los Angeles County voter rosters, hours before the county officially acknowledged the error. 

In Spring 2018, Nashville Public Radio set out to do municipal coverage of a transit referendum “in a way that was interesting to people.” The city was asking residents to vote on a huge overhaul of the city public transit system.

A few weeks before the voting period started, the newsroom decided to use Hearken to see if there were any important questions about the referendum that they weren’t already addressing in their extensive coverage. The newsroom was initially worried there weren’t many undecided voters left.

“That ended up being wrong,” said Tony Gonzalez, a reporter at the station. “We realized there were way more undecided voters, and that the loudest voices weren’t always the majority.”

Nashville Public Radio received nearly 100 responses, and answered most of the listener questions online through three Q&A stories and in emails directly to the question-askers.

Read the Nashville Public Radio case study. 

In Fall 2018, WNYC (and Gothamist) invited their listeners to ask questions about how to be more civically involved in their city in their series, Ask A Reporter. The idea was to help audiences become more involved in the political process beyond the midterms and the presidential election.

“Our hypothesis was that there were lots of folks who wanted to act, perhaps in more local ways, but really lacked a map or a starting point that made sense for them,” Rhyne Piggot, WNYC’s editor for data and interactive news, said.  

Among the most common questions? How to find out when public meetings take place. A question that might have seemed so obvious to a political reporter proved to be a major barrier of entry for the average listener. The series has also tackled questions on how to help hospitalized patients vote, how to find volunteer opportunities that match a particular skill set and how the layers of New York government work. 

In January 2017, New Hampshire Public Radio launched a national podcast, Civics 101, to serve as a "refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works." The podcast invited the audience's questions about "our government and the people who run it?" Originally slated for only the first 100 days of Trump's presidency, the podcast's popularity and the wave of the questions that continued to flow in led to the podcast continuing on past the first 100 days.