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04/10/2018

Your Voice Ohio's take on collaborative journalism starts with community events

From Journalism.co.uk

Getting readers and interested members of the community together in a room to talk freely about their concerns and information needs is one of the simplest yet most underrated ways news organisations can engage with their audience and involve them in the reporting.

Your Voice Ohio is an initiative launched in 2017 by the Jefferson Center in the US, a non-profit organisation that works to involve the public in civil life and democracy by better informing them to make decisions.

Some 42 local news outlets across the state of Ohio are involved in the project, and they take a collaborative approach to community engagement through events, as well as sharing data and content.

Your Voice Ohio, which is funded by the Democracy Fund and the Knight Foundation, was born from a series of three events held by the Jefferson Center with eight media partners around the 2016 US election. Reporters met with citizens in northeast Ohio to find out the ways in which people wanted the election and the candidates to be covered and how they expected news organisations to provide them with information.

"After the election, news organisations in Ohio saw what we were doing and felt a little bit guilty that they had sort of missed the call on the elections so badly. I think that was a starting point for local media to think 'hey, we need to do more and listen to our audience'," said Andrew Rockway, programme director at the Jefferson Center, who works on Your Voice Ohio alongside project manager Doug Oplinger.

"Part of this project is using a variety of engagement approaches to see how we can build a capacity for outlets to do engagement work in the longterm. In addition to face-to-face conversations we're using tools like Hearken and GroundSource to try and see what works best in each community and why."

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