Hearken provides a lot of opportunities for you to connect with audiences and share your expertise in non-traditional ways, from puppet shows to cruises and bus tours. Below are some creative public-powered live event examples from partner newsrooms. We love these ideas because they're a great opportunity to deepen the sense of place that Hearken projects so often provide in a local setting. 

They're also a creative reimagining of what journalism can be. Plus, you and your coworkers have put in a lot of work to gain the expertise that you have. Why not share that information you've gained in multiple different ways? Finally, any chance to get off the internet and connect face-to-face with your audience is very valuable! 

WPLN in Nashville created a puppet show for a live version of their Curious Nashville podcast. The episode was based on a question about construction trash, since so many houses are being torn down in Nashville. They followed the life of a house from the cradle to the grave, and then some volunteers created a puppet show about it: The Construction Boom Puppet Show!

WESA in Pittsburgh created quite an inspired fundraiser that was a smashing success, the Curiosity Cruise. For $125 bucks a pop, public radio fans could get onboard to mingle with their favorite local public radio personalities and enjoy drinks, food, and games for a couple hours on a Saturday evening. They rented out one of the main Pittsburgh tourist boats (the old-timey "Gateway Clipper"). Reporter Katie Blackley live-produced a feature from their Hearken-powered Good Question series—appropriately, a feature about the rivers.They included other programming like music trivia and Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me! quizzes. Those Pittsburgh public radio nerds bought up hundreds of tickets, and the cruise reached capacity! 🚢

Zoinks, Scoob! The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC) Curious Canberra invited audience members to join them on a Mystery Bus Tour to visit a handful of locations from past stories. The tour was be co-hosted by two ABC journalists, including their Hearken producer Sonya Gee. And the participants got a chance to meet some fascinating experts connected to the stories and sites along the way. 

Finally, WBEZ's Curious City did a story to answer one audience-member's questions about biking in Chicago cemeteries. Sure enough, as a bonus to that story, the reporter led listeners on a bike tour of one Chicago cemetery that had recently changed its biking rules.

WBEZ's Curious City and KUOW's Local Wonder have both used Hearken questions as the basis for pub trivia nights. At Curious City, they created their trivia questions using audience questions that hadn't been answered already. Each question was something that'd be fun to know and trot out at a dinner party (E.g., "What part of Chicago has the most biodiversity?"). 

Participants worked together in teams of 4-5, and got the surprise thrill of getting a WBEZ host or reporter added to each of their teams. Both the public and the newsroom staff loved the opportunity of getting to hang out together and compete in the spirit of who knows their city best.

WKMG, a TV station based in Orlando, Florida, devoted an entire day to covering gun violence. The planned coverage culminated in a televised town hall on gun violence. WKMG collected questions in advance from viewers to structure the town hall and the live chat. 

WBEZ Curious City received an audience question that launched a series of events in partnership with the American Islamic College (AIC) in Chicago. An ESL teacher asked Curious City, “Do Chicago’s Arab And African-American Muslims Share Mosques? If Not, Why Not?” To answer it, in October 2017, Curious City brought four Muslim leaders from the Arab and African-American communities to its studio to talk through their perspectives on racial divisions in the community. 

Those guests suggested a follow-up live event around the topic so that more people in the community could take part in the conversation, so Curious City partnered with the AIC to put on a panel on their campus a month later. The Q&A got heated, as people spoke from personal experiences of intra-community racism. It became clear to Curious City and the partners that they should create a space where people could work together more. So, in September 2018, WBEZ worked with AIC to host an interactive workshop geared toward solutions for building interracial relationships within the Chicago-area Muslim community.

Our partner WFDD in Winston-Salem holds an annual event called Community Conversations, aimed at getting community members to come together to talk about a large issue. The conversations happen World Cafe-style, a method WFDD describes in its invitation post as a way of tackling big ideas together as a community.

The 2017 event was WFDD’s second Community Conversation. In 2016, the station planned to center the conversation around food insecurity in their region because of a community partner they had in mind.

In 2017, they chose to reach out to the audience to help plan the event, from suggesting and selecting the topic to providing questions to help shape the actual conversations that would happen. WFDD News Director Emily McCord said WFDD “probably from that night alone could devote all our coverage to mental health for months.”

That’s how powerful the questions were that came out of the conversations happening around the tables. Emily said it is important to know that the most actionable items for your newsroom will lie in the questions that come out of the dialogue. Questions are a great starting point for reporting — they’re familiar to journalists and audience and community members and provide an actionable starting point.

WFDD was awarded an "Excellence In Innovation" Regional Murrow and a National Murrow for this event.

WFDD created a new call-to-action asking their audience for questions about issues facing Winston-Salem, N.C. The prompt was “What question should WFDD take on for our upcoming community conversation?

2. Organize 

Nearly 50 topics emerged in the responses to the prompt. Emily determined the most common themes: mental health access, education access, and bridging social and cultural divides. 

3. Turn back to the audience for the final decision

Those top three themes were included in a voting round for the audience to vote for the topic they cared about most. The community chose mental health as the topic, and WFDD staff began planning the event around how to improve mental health access.

4. Gather questions (again!) 

WFDD opened up a call for questions about mental health access that they would roll out at the event to spur conversations among the tables of participants.

There was no voting round after this second call for questions. Emily instead sifted through the submissions and developed three questions from the most popular themes. They were:

5. Get together 

WFDD put event participants at different tables and had them rotate throughout the event to allow for a variety of conversations with a variety of people.

6. Report from the event 

"It truly felt like a listener community conversation," Emily said. "They chose the topic. Having reporters around the table hearing from all different types of community members (advocates, health care providers, patients, interested and curious listeners) was fascinating."

WFDD reporter Paul Garber documented the event as it unfolded with a Storify post (which is no longer available).

"From that night alone," Emily said, WFDD "could devote all our coverage to mental health for months."

7. Going back to your audience (yes, again!) 

Emily crafted a follow-up voting round after the event:

8. Follow through 

The third question won, and they published a full feature story in September 2017 under their general assignment series, Carolina Curious.

Emily said one issue her newsroom has had with the World Cafe method is that it often feels "solution-based," which doesn’t always give the newsroom a good starting point to respond to the conversation. She said one way to really get the most out of this kind of community conversation is to recognize that the most actionable items for your newsroom will lie in the questions that come out of the dialogue. It might seem like a minor tweak, but she says it's one that can clear up any confusion about "what the station should do next" to solve the issue.

As we always say, questions are a great starting point for reporting: They're familiar to journalists and community members. Given that our whole model starts with questions, it's a smart goal to have a community conversation lead to more questions that need to be answered.