The Listening Post Collective is a community media initiative formed to connect media makers and their communities. Via its new web site, The Listening Post Collective provides mentorship, resources, tools, and peer-to-peer support for journalists, newsroom leaders and community groups looking to revitalize their local news and connect more directly with the public.
Listening Post Collective projects focus on audience engagement and explore ways to reach and directly involve underserved communities in local media.
The new site pulls together a playbook for journalists, newsroom leaders, and communities to start their own Listening Post projects in their neighborhoods, as well as a host of tools and guides to improve and sustain them, including recording device blueprints and a guide to crafting good questions. The site’s Discussion Board provides a live and interactive space for partners and individuals interested in community engagement to brainstorm together, ask questions, and share best practices.
About the Listening Post Collective
The Listening Post Collective launched its first project in New Orleans, in 2013. The project started with an assessment of the information needs of neighborhoods left out of the city’s post-Katrina development. Partnering with WWNO, the local public radio affiliate, the project began to give residents opportunities to receive news via SMS, and also record reflections on issue-focused questions at stand-alone recording devices set up in libraries, community centers, and local businesses. The community conversations created through the Listening Post project are regularly shared through WWNO.
Subsequent Listening Post projects started across New Jersey, Baltimore, Omaha, Georgia, and Minneapolis are based on the tried and tested strategies of the original New Orleans work. The Listening Post Collective offers a seven-step community engagement process which reflects concrete experiences. The steps are designed for flexibility to allow local partners to create and sustain a project that fits the unique information ecosystem of their community.
Visit the site at www.listeningpostcollective.org
Contact: [email protected]; [email protected]
About Internews
A non-profit organization, Internews works to ensure access to trusted, quality information that empowers people to have a voice in their future and to live healthy, secure, and rewarding lives. We envision a world where everyone can communicate freely with anyone, anywhere, and exchange the news and information they need to shape their communities and the world.
For more than 30 years and in more than 90 countries, we have worked with our local partners to build hundreds of sustainable organizations, strengthened the capacity of thousands of media professionals, human rights activists, and information entrepreneurs, and reached millions of people with quality, local information, improving lives and building lasting change.