Your guide to
Better elections coverage.
The Citizens Agenda:
A guide for generating more responsive, inclusive & useful news coverage for voters.
Video and photography by DDC - Digital Development Communications
Find out what the electorate wants politicians to address
In collaboration with influential journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen, Hearken has created a step-by-step guide to an audience-centric reporting method that better serves voters.
We call it The Citizens Agenda — it’s public-powered journalism applied to elections coverage.
Using training, alongside our Engagement Management System, we help teams launch this alternative approach. Most recently, we ran two cohorts in June and July 2022 to work with newsrooms in time for the critically important 2022 U.S. Elections.
Have questions or want to train your team? Reach out to info@wearehearken.com
Of the newsrooms who participated in our Citizens Agenda training for the 2020 elections cycle,
84%
said participating built trust between their newsroom and their community members
89%
said participating helped them be more able to listen and respond to their communities
78%
said participating increased the size of their audience
100%
said they will use the engagement strategies they learned in the next election
From: Robinson, Sue. (Forthcoming). How Journalists Engage: A theory of trust-building for a multicultural world. Oxford University Press