Learning to Listen:

Sometime in 2017, I moved from Melbourne, Australia to Dublin, Ireland. I’d studied and exhibited art in Australia, and in becoming an immigrant, I risked leaving my life and community behind to start somewhere else as a stranger. 
My work in Australia had centred around the connections between science, space and storytelling. It had also been, as all art is, a portrait of myself, albeit a heavily buried and obscured one. 
The move disrupted that work, and in my Dublin studio, I began making friends and exploring ways to make art that felt new and relevant. The dislocation that goes hand in hand with moving to the other side of the world crept into my practice. Listening to music felt like a way to time travel. I had an inkling that I wanted to write about music, but I stopped myself because it seemed so far away from the artwork that I’d previously made. 
Another reason that I didn’t, though, is purely that it didn’t fit at the time. Now it does, and the idea I had in 2019 is back:

better listen to, engage, and produce more relevant and differentiated content for the public they serve by using models, tools, and consulting designed for this purpose." The $650,000 fund includes contributions from these foundations to support adoption of audience engagement and newsroom transparency services, including Hearken, GroundSource, the Listening Post Collective, Document-Cloud/MuckRock, and the Coral Project's "Talk." Ideally, the integration of these audience-focused services will ultimately lead to more engaged audiences, more informed storytelling, and deeper relationships between newsrooms and communities. In turn, this will lead to revenue: subscribers and members, grants from foundations, and sales of event tickets or associated merchandise.

Philadelphia-based media strategy firm Dot Connector
Studio consulted with the Lenfest Institute to evaluate CLEF and examine how this initiative is changing relationships between newsrooms and audiences. We conducted this research by interviewing funders, service providers, and staff members responsible for audience engagement in newsrooms that were part of the CLEF's Cohort One and Cohort Two, which used either/both Hearken and GroundSource services. We also reviewed grant reports, scanned related literature, and participated in a convening of grantees. Many CLEF newsrooms reported increased levels of engagement around new reporting avenues, as well as the chance to deepen use of existing content. However, this took consistent effort and a well-crafted ask-especially when finding meaningful ways to reach out to underserved audiences.

Success factors include a receptive
newsroom culture, leadership buy-in, and a dedicated staff member.
Not all reporters or editors in the CLEF newsrooms were keen to pivot to engaged journalism strategies, but many reported that even the exercise of focusing on audience engagement led to an internal shift in thinking for their staff. Successful newsrooms often had "engagement superstars," who not only have support to lead such efforts internally, but are also vitally involved in the national conversation about engaged journalism.

Engaging audiences takes significant time and capacity.
Newsrooms found that onboarding the tools, dealing with technical hurdles, and crafting successful strategies was more time-consuming than they anticipated.
Personnel changes and lack of resources in an industry in flux also posed challenges. They requested more resources on best practices in creating workflows, successful use cases, impact measurement, and tying engagement to revenue.
Insights at a glance for funders 1. Funders are playing a central role in shaping the engaged journalism field, which is now at a tipping point.
Through collaborating with one another, amplifying successful efforts, bolstering field-building, and incubating innovation, foundations have been central to sustaining engaged journalism, often in nonprofit newsrooms. Now, the field is at a vulnerable moment where it is being tested in the marketplace. Mission-driven goals and foundation timelines do not always mesh smoothly with the realities of running either a service business or a newsroom. This can cause friction.

Adoption of new tools and services is
neither linear nor rapid. Chalkbeat published two stories as part of a GroundSource project on student discipline in Tennessee. This GroundSource implemen-tation aimed to make public data on schools more accessible to parents, including those in low-income areas. After publicizing the phone number provided by GroundSource, the team prompted parents to text "discipline" to the number and statistics for their district would be sent as a reply from Chalkbeat.
An example of the response folks received from Chalkbeat's discipline tool.
While this was successful, Chalkbeat's unique network of regional bureaus, along with staff transitions in key positions, made it difficult to drum up support and initiative to use GroundSource in each bureau, ex- work as intended-led to cultural shifts in the newsroom. These are difficult to quantify, but we found many mentions of "culture shift," "changing how we do business," "new mindset," "new approach to stories," etc. in the reports.

HOW CLEF NEWSROOMS USED HEARKEN & GROUNDSOURCE
This is a critical point and something CLEF funders may consider probing more explicitly in future reports.
• Staff capacity is a major issue. A majority of the reports we reviewed mentioned challenges with not having enough staff capacity. Even the newsrooms who are growing rather than shrinking mentioned difficulties with staff turnover and leadership changes.
• Who's working in the newsroom can also affect how the services are adopted, with some newsrooms reporting resistance from management or veteran journal- • Newsrooms reported difficulties with using the services themselves, and reported the need for improved interfaces for both services.
• Newsrooms struggled to use both services at once and requested support for how to use the services together.

Newsroom needs
• The biggest request from grant reports