Beyond showing your work, show your faces
How a floral thrift store couch and a polaroid camera helped build trust in Milwaukee local news.
On a Wednesday afternoon this summer, food truck vendors set up shop around the bandshell of Washington Park in Milwaukee. They posted signs for empanadas, spring rolls and popsicles in preparation for the weekly outdoor concert.
We parked next to them and hauled out an orange and yellow floral couch that I had picked up from a thrift store earlier that day.
To be fair, it was mainly Dwayne, our deputy editor of digital, who did the heavy lifting.
Ana, our community engagement reporter, set up a coffee table with a vase of flowers on it. Bridget, our reporting intern, made sure the lamps on each side table were set up just right.
We turned to Adam Carr, deputy editor of community engagement for Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, and said, “Now what?”
This whole ordeal that was getting us some funny looks was his idea after all.
Adam had been dreaming up the idea of taking family portraits with a full Wes Anderson-style living room set in different neighborhoods with iconic Milwaukee scenes in the background, and he decided it could actually be a really fun community engagement activity for the NNS staff.
This was all an experiment to see if we could find new ways to build stronger relationships with our readers.
He said the plan was that we were going to introduce ourselves to concert goers and see if anyone wanted a portrait taken at our living room set in the middle of the park.
We’d strike up a conversation and see if they knew about NNS. We’d give them a sticker and invite them to sign up for our newsletter.
Then, we’d take a polaroid photo for them to keep, and a digital photo to go on our Facebook page.
The next day, we’d send everyone an email with a little bit more information about who we are, and a link to our Facebook page where all the portraits were posted. They could then tag themselves and like our page.
We weren’t sure how it all would go, but before we knew it, we had a line of people waiting for portraits.
One conversation that stuck out to me went something like this:
“Have you ever heard of the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service?”
“Have I ever heard of what?”
“Cool cool cool. Do you mind if I share a little bit more about who we are before we take your photo?”
“Sure that’s fine!”
“So we all work for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. We’re a nonprofit news organization here in the city. We’re all online, and we cover 17 neighborhoods that in the past haven’t gotten as much news coverage as other parts of town. We send out an email with a new story every day. Would you be interested in signing up?”
“Oh cool! So do you guys have like real reporters and stuff?”
“Yeah totally! We actually are them. I write a lot of stories about different issues happening in Milwaukee as well as about a lot of the great things happening here too, and so does she, and so does she. *pointing to staff members hanging around* He builds our website. He does our social media. She takes photos for us.”
“And you’re just out here taking free photos for people?”
“Yeah! We wanted to introduce ourselves and tell more people about who we are and what we’re doing, and we’re always looking to hear from people about how we could do a better job telling Milwaukee stories and sharing important information with people in our neighborhoods.”
“That sounds great. Add me to your list!”
Okay. So maybe I idealized this conversation a little bit, but the gist of it is 100% what happened that evening.
That Wednesday in Washington Park was not only a ton of fun (and also a significant boost to our newsletter subscription list), but it taught me some really valuable lessons about the importance of how to build meaningful trust and relationships with readers.
Showing up to the park showed a lot about who we are and who we wanted to be to our readers going forward.
In journalism, editors always say, “Show, don’t tell,” yet when we talk about garnering audience trust, we often default to just telling people they should trust us as the media and expect it to work.
To build real trust, we have to take some of our own writing advice and do more of the showing part.
That evening in the park showed our audience that we are in fact real people writing these stories. (According to Pew Research, only 21% of adults have ever met a working journalist before.) It made it apparent that we live in the same communities as you, and we are accessible to you.
When we say in our newsletters and on our social media that we want to hear from you, and that we want to be a part of how you interact with your community, we mean it. We are literally and physically meeting you where you are by participating in community events like a summer concert series.
We care about the people of Milwaukee and the wellbeing of our community. We don’t just want to take your contact information from you, but we also want to give you something. We realize that your time, attention and curiosity are valuable, and we respect that. We think our relationship should be reciprocal, not extractive.
When we journalists talk about transparency as the currency needed to earn audience trust, that can look a lot of different ways. It can be stating a clear, accessible mission statement for readers to better understand where you’re coming from. It can be sharing the behind the scenes processes of how you report a story or how you found a certain statistic.
But bringing the value of transparency to life in person can go a long, long way in laying the foundation for trust and showing that a news organization genuinely has the interests of community members at its heart.
