Meet #FlatJo
With the removal or stalling of original data/documents from government sources, and trust in news on the decline, producing solid data-or-document driven reporting has become more challenging.
Recently, some newsrooms have inspired us with engagement efforts aimed to increase trust with audiences and build solid reporting.
For example, The University of Wisconsin used LEGOs to memorialize answers to surveys, data visualizations and citizen science data.
The Better Government Association printed and posted stories in Spanish in the public housing buildings they were reporting on for the residents who lived there.
Wisconsin Watch worked with an artist to create a life-size half cow and 1,000 balls of wool to visualize the impact of cow poop on water supply. The newsroom took it on tour as an art exhibit to communities around the state.
Block Club Chicago created T-shirts to memorialize the stories around alligator sightings in their coverage area.
Thinking of these, and wondering how we might encourage more newsrooms to experiment with this kind of thing, we were reminded of Flat Stanley.
Remember Flat Stanley?
He is a character from a 1964 children’s book that found himself squashed flat one night while asleep in his bed. Stanley decided to make the best of it and mailed himself to exotic places and had many adventures.
It became so popular that elementary students everywhere made their own Flat Stanleys and mailed them off to exotic locations - and some not so exotic - to have amazing adventures.
The project increased literacy through writing letters, collecting photos and telling stories. It engaged families and friends. And it was just plain fun!
The Flat Stanley project has some of the best parts of what journalists and newsrooms aim to do when engaging with their own news audiences:
It was low-tech and high touch
It met people where they were at
It showcased a place or experience differently
It developed audiences and relationships
So we wondered: Could we mimic a Flat Stanley project to help newsrooms build trust, expand sources and stories and better engage our local news audiences?
Over the next year, we hope to find out.
We are inviting newsrooms and freelancers to use #FlatJo either in their own newsrooms and/or share with their audiences to generate story ideas and issues in their communities.
Our hope is that #FlatJo will be a fun and creative way to connect reporters and audiences.
A journalist might, for example, take their own #FlatJo on a reporting trip, and snap a photo of #FlatJo on the job and share that via social media or in a newsletter with a caption that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the story or an important fact or piece of data.
A reader might download #FlatJo and take him/her/them to a place/scene the reader has always wondered about and post on social media #FlatJo with the questions they want. For example, in front of a lake and ask ‘how safe is this water to swim in?’
We’d love to see what you do with this. Join us?
Sign up here https://bit.ly/FlatJo-DDRP
