Tailored Listening
By: Daniel Laplaza
Tags: Listening Post, Listening, Social Journalism, Cerebral Palsy, Journalism

Now that I’m officially enrolled as a social journalism student, I’ve had to clarify my new distinction to my peers. Many of them have asked me how social journalism differs from traditional journalism. Although my answer may develop as I begin to practice social journalism, I believe a key distinction between the two is who the journalist is listening to.

My understanding of traditional journalism is reporting that results from listening to an audience, whereas social journalism is reporting that results from listening to a community. Who reporters are listening to is important when discovering what a community’s real issues are. An audience may ask for more reporting on crime when the community’s major issue may be gentrification. Social journalism believes the key to informing the community is through listening to them.

An excellent example of this approach in practice is The Listening Post Collective. The collective places the community’s needs at the heart of their reporting:

The Listening Post Collective provides journalists, newsroom leaders, and non-profits tools and advice to create meaningful conversations with their communities. We believe responsible reporting begins with listening. From there, media outlets and community organizations can create news stories that respond to people’s informational needs, reflect their lives, and enable them to make informed decisions.

Reflecting the five-point process of design thinking, the Listening Post’s playbook is designed to help “journalists, newsroom leaders and, community groups” take a community first approach to journalism:

Listen to and engage with their community. Better understand the needs of residents who aren’t getting the information they need or whose voices aren’t being heard. Create sustained two-way conversations with citizens around essential news and information. Create journalism that highlights a diverse range of voices and experiences and makes local media representative and accountable to the community it serves. Collect and analyze project data that helps track trending topics and citizen engagement.

Example of Listening Post text message information survey. Source

These are the blueprints to the collective’s Listening Post Project in New Orleans that came as a response to the city’s condition post-Hurricane Katrina. The project engages with the New Orleans community members through “cell phones, public signs, and roving recording devices to capture and share voices, information, and opinions from around New Orleans.” The service allows the community to relay important issues directly to reporters, who can respond with specialized reporting methods, such as providing local news through text message.

Jesse Hardman, the creator of the Listening Post, was brought in as a guest speaker for my engagement course at CUNY Newmark. After teaching my class his approach to social journalism, which he calls Engaged Journalism, he opened himself up to questions. I asked him how the Listening Post has ensured that their programs are accessible to people with disabilities. Although the project has accommodated their services for non-English speakers, Jesse admitted that, to his knowledge, there is no special access for the physically disabled.

Jesse’s response reflects a great challenge I will face when I begin to work with the community of people with severe physical disabilities; the challenge of accessibility. Along with being physically limited to the locations that are handicap accessible, certain disorders limit one’s ability to communicate all together. Conditions, such as cerebral palsy may impair one’s fine motor skills, making it difficult to speak or write. It is then difficult for me to access a person’s concerns about their community through basic communication methods.

However, I will address this challenge the way any social journalism student would, by listening. In consideration for people with disabilities, listening means always coming to them. It means going to locations that are properly equipped to welcome the community. It means communication through augmentative and alternative communication devices like Tobii Dynavox’s eye gaze devices that use eye tracking and eye control technology to generate speech. It means constantly adapting my approach to listening to the varying severity of the disability. It means making listening, as it always does with social journalism, the heart of the process.