Does the way your newsroom covers politics and elections connect with and serve your community?
How do you know?
The aha moment for one newsroom happened when the public became more than just the audience.
“They became contributors …” said Hugo Balta, publisher of the Latino News Network and executive editor of The Chicago Reporter, in a recent “ask me anything” session for the Advancing Democracy Fellowship.
“We started the fellowship in covering politics and covering elections and ending up covering democracy,” Balta said. “… Because of the surveys and what the public was telling us, we are leaning in on what happens between the elections, and that’s the work of the state legislature, municipal elected officials as well as of course looking at the federal government. We are now demystifying the work behind the titles of those elected officials in the hopes of … inspiring civic engagement.”
The Advancing Democracy Fellowship is now accepting applications, and when Hearken’s Jennifer Brandel reached out and asked if I’d share it, I asked her to talk a bit more about it. (Hearken, by the way, “helps organizations embed listening into their growth and operations to build more resilient companies and communities,” according to their site.)
Here’s what you need to know:
- The fellowship, formerly called Democracy SOS, is open to newsrooms based in the U.S. and provides a stipend of $5,000 per newsroom. There is no charge to participate.
- It’s run jointly by Hearken, Solutions Journalism Network and Trusting News.
- Applications close Feb. 14.
- The fellowship includes nine months of training, about four to six hours per month.
- It requires at least two people from a newsroom — a reporter and editor — be involved, but more are welcome.
- 20 newsrooms will be selected.
The goal is to help newsrooms pivot from horse-race or narrative coverage into becoming the help desk for their communities, Brandel said.
I asked about a few things any journalist can do now to start to inch toward this approach, and Brandel shared two ideas.
Arrange a meeting with colleagues and have a discussion about how well your newsroom served your community in the last election, “and also how do they know that they were served well?”
That discussion can reveal a lot of assumptions newsrooms make about their work.
Next, ask your editors: What’s our role as a newsroom in a democracy? Is it to empower? Defend? Support?
“I think a lot of journalists know intuitively that journalism and democracy are related,” Brandel said, “but asking them to articulate it is another amazing Pandora’s box that opens up and allows them to wrestle with assumptions.”
You can learn more about this fellowship here.
And here’s one more great opportunity to deepen your work and your skills. This year, Poynter is hosting Beat Academy from March through October. Topics include private equity, climate change, the American Rescue Plan and infrastructure, crime, immigration and health care. The academy costs $75, and according to a release, “some of the workshops include reporting grant opportunities for participating newsrooms. Following the private equity workshops, newsrooms can apply for reporting grants of up to $20,000. For climate change, newsrooms in the Great Lakes region can apply for reporting grants up to $15,000.”
Apply here.
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