Rachel Hubbard is an award-winning journalist with a track record of innovative collaborations during her 20-year career at KOSU in Oklahoma. She is now the executive director and is focused on entrepreneurship as the future of journalism and tells her staff to take a little bit of risk every day to figure out what works. KOSU is a small station that covers two-thirds of the state — with a news staff of only four — but have successfully integrated engagement into much of their journalism.  We asked her to explain the process. 

We’ve been loosely working in engagement for about 10 years with community forums and other events, but we didn’t start thinking about it as a core part of our organization and our journalism until the 2016 election cycle, when we were challenged by a local foundation to really experiment with our election coverage. 

We spent a ton of time over a two month period listening to people in two precincts, and we were blown away by the coverage that emerged from that work. That was when we started thinking about what an engaged newsroom could really look like. 

We’ve used GroundSource (a texting service), done listening tours, hosted virtual listening sessions with the Local Voices Network and more. Some of it has worked and some of it hasn’t, and sometimes one tool will work for one project and will totally bomb on another. We try to remain flexible and keep trying because when it works you just know it. 

RESOURCE: See Tools for Engagement section for more ideas

The success comes out in all sorts of different ways — from a disabled woman in a nursing home doing an audio diary about what it’s like to have all of her friends on ventilators, to a first-time voter asking for help to know what it will look and feel like when they go to the polls. It is slow work, and we’re often not sure where it’s going to end up, but we’re open to that.

KOSU still does newscasts, but working from an engagement mindset, I think the information is much more practical because we are thinking about how an actual person might use that information or what they might need. 

When we started out, we were just experimenting in the margins and it was really hard to do it consistently because it wasn’t anyone’s job. So we changed one of our beat reporting jobs to be an engagement reporter and really keep track of all of the people in our community and how we’re serving them and set a strategy for us. 

Now we’ve rewritten all of our reporting job descriptions to include an engagement element so that we don’t lose focus on our goal of truly being reflective of and responsive to the communities we cover.