Hearken

A collection of exercises and examples from March, April and May 2020

COVID-19 Engagement Efforts

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Strategy, best practices, and case studies for your public-powered work

Hearken Partner Newsrooms: Editorial How-To's

Public-powered journalism is a radical shift in the traditional reporting process. Here's how it works.

Map: The Hearken Process

Public-powered journalism requires a slightly different workflow than traditional reporting

Staffing your Hearken-powered effort

How to make a home for Hearken on your website

Building your Hearken landing page

If you're interested in branding your Hearken-powered effort, here are some ideas and inspiration that can help spark your creative juices.

Branding and Design Inspiration

Tips and tools to help you introduce Hearken's public-first mentality throughout your newsroom

Introducing the Hearken culture to your newsroom

You're about to launch your public-powered effort! Here's what you should expect.

Getting started: what to expect

Learn why you shouldn't fret if a nearby newsroom starts a Hearken-powered series.

Navigating nearby / similar media who also use Hearken

Planning and Preparing to Launch with Hearken

Perfecting your prompt is a critical first step to soliciting questions from your audience.

Perfecting your prompt

Learn why it's important to explain the public-powered process to your audience and get inspiration from our partner examples.

Introducing and explaining the Hearken process

Why gathering questions is an important part of the public-powered process and how you can begin collecting questions from your audience.

Gathering questions

Sharing responses with your colleagues is a great way to generate buy-in and encourage others to tackle the responses you've received.

How to share responses with others in your newsroom

Collecting Questions

Learn some best practices for selecting good questions to go in a voting round.

Curating questions into voting rounds

Learn tips and tricks for communicating with question-askers before and after a voting round.

Alerting folks at different stages of a voting round

Here are the next steps you should take once a winning question emerges from a voting round.

A question won! Now what?

Collecting Votes

Learn what to do if you get a great question from a question-asker who wants to remain anonymous.

How to handle anonymous or no-show question askers

Effective public-powered journalism is transparent and illustrates to your audience that your newsroom cares.

How to be transparent and prove to your audience that you care

Learn some tips and get ideas for how you can work with a community member on a story.

How to work with a question-asker

Learn best practices for structuring your public-powered story in order to maximize audience engagement.

What should go into a Hearken story?

Sometimes it may not be possible to report a full public-powered feature story.

Lower-effort ways to answer audience questions

Reporting an Answer

Learn about the different ways partner newsrooms have used Hearken for their editorial priorities.

Use cases for Hearken

Learn how you can generate buy-in from reluctant reporters.

Advice for dealing with reporters who are being sticks-in-the-mud

Public-power your breaking news coverage.

Using Hearken for breaking news

Here are some of the ways newsrooms are listening to their audiences  using Hearken  around elections.