A four-day online training was held on January 21 to 24 for a new cycle of grantees in Audience-Engaged Journalism. The grants are part of the Media Innovation Europe MEI project: Independence Through Sustainability.
This two-year initiative is led by the International Press Institute (IPI) and its partners: The Fix Foundation, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), and Thomson Media (TM).
The programme provides business needs assessments and personalised advisory, grants, training, hackathons and mentorship to media managers and journalists working in newsrooms that are moving towards a full digital transition.
BIRN’s role in MIE is to advance audience engagement using the BE-engaged tool, a specially designed tool to crowdsource input from citizens and engage them in journalistic reporting.
During the first cycle of grants, 19 participants from nine media outlets in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, North Macedonia and Serbia attended training delivered by international and regional experts in audience engagement.
During the first day, Ariana Tobin, an award-winning editor of ProPublica, a New York-based organisation specialized in engagement journalism, introduced participants to ways of engaging citizens. She focused on the “reporting cycle” of engagement stories and crowdsourcing “when you have a fair reason to do it”.
“Engagement reporting, crowdsourcing is creating a space for sources to share information they have been collecting, that has been part of their own life, and we hope it will have an impact – by impact, something in the world changes for the better,” she said.
Paul Myles, co-director of On Our Radar, explored their toolkit, designed to break barriers that prevent communities from sharing their knowledge, experiences, and concerns.
On Our Radar builds networks to report about underrepresented communities, supporting organisations to be more participatory in their work, to achieve “an equal exchange of skills and knowledge between the producer and the person with lived experience”.
“We see collaboration as truly equal. The communities we are working with bring access and deep knowledge of the story from living really close to it. They bring more authenticity when telling that story, connect with the audience, and bring alternative viewpoints which we may not have considered,” Myles said.
The third and fourth days saw regional trainers Katarina Zrinjski, Besar Likmeta and Gyula Csak, discuss BIRN’s particular method of engagement using a specialized tool and callouts inviting communities to share their experiences.
Milica Stojanovic and Karla Junicic demonstrated the specific usage of BIRN’s tool for audience engagement, designed to collect experiences and analyse crowdsourced results to find the best storytelling approach.
Participants learned how to design callouts that invite people to share their stories, how to create safe spaces for community input, and how to transform crowdsourced experiences into stories following analysis.
Grantees will continue their work under BIRN’s mentorship, shaping their reporting into collaborative and audience-driven storytelling.
