The Hallmark of Engaged Journalism is Sustained Listening
Journalism is alive in West Virginia, but it requires deep listening and a dedication to meet people where they are.
This is a story about what happens when people are asked to choose between their safety and their right to vote.
On June 6th, 2020, I packed up my orange Honda Element and drove 500 miles from my family home in New Jersey, in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century, to move to Charleston, West Virginia, a place I’d never been in my life.
Scratch that…rewind back to January 2020 when I’d pitched an internship to Ken Ward Jr., the legendary coal reporter and MacArthur Genius, at the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia. I’d wanted to learn how to do engagement reporting from someone who “got it,” and Ken was the guy I wanted to show me the ropes. But through a series of firings and resignations, an internship at the Gazette-Mail was no longer possible.
Sometime in the Spring, Ken contacted me about a new startup that he was forming with former Gazette-Mail editor Greg Moore, and Pulitzer winning reporter Eric Eyre. He wanted me to come down to Charleston in the summer and help get the start-up started up. Instead of learning how to do engagement reporting from Ken, I was going to have the chance to take what I learned in New York City at the Newmark J-School and build it into a newsroom strategy in Appalachia at a new nonprofit newsroom, Mountain State Spotlight as their inaugural Engagement Reporting Fellow.
Fast forward back to June 2020. On the 10th, four days after I arrived in Charleston, I actually lost my housing, packed up my car again, and drove 500 miles back. As a brand new newsroom set to launch during the pandemic, Mountain State Spotlight didn’t and still doesn’t have a newsroom, so I was tasked with the challenge of getting to know and listen to a community that I would never actually get to meet.
During the last week of my fellowship, I worked with Ken, Greg, and Fiona Morgan from Branchhead Consulting to host two “Community Conversations”. We gathered 21 West Virginians from across the state on Zoom to talk about the ways that news had covered the state in the past, and what possibilities might exist in the future for investigative journalism. With the election looming three months later, the question hung in the air: how was a brand new, investigative newsroom going to cover the election?
Soon after the conversations, I received a tip forwarded to me from one of our participants, Betty Rivard. Betty is a retired social worker in her 70s, and a longtime poll worker who was concerned about the safety of voting in person during the pandemic. She’d been sheltering in place aside from a once daily walk along the Kanawha River, and was going to vote by mail in a general election for the first time ever. The problem that she noticed was, back in June, the Kanawha County Clerk sent her a paper application in the mail to get her ballot, but now in an email she received from the Secretary of State’s office, it said she needed to apply for a ballot on a new web portal.
In the primary election, 50% of voters voted by absentee ballot. Betty had a tough time getting the web portal to work, and contacted Mountain State Spotlight to point out that she thought the portal might be intentionally designed to disenfranchise older, rural voters. Federal government estimates range between 18 and 28% of West Virginia households having unreliable broadband, and in September the Wall Street Journal reported that possibly up to 50% of children in West Virginia don’t have access to the Internet.
The risk of contracting COVID during June 2020 in West Virginia was considerably low. On the day of West Virginia’s half mail-in primary there was 1 case per 100,000 people across the state, and the risk of contracting COVID looked like this, according to data from the Harvard Global Health Institute:
With all of these numbers on the pandemic, election, and broadband access floating around in my head, I reached out to another one of our conversation participants, Julie Archer, who leads the West Virginia Citizens for Clean Elections coalition. Since the summertime, Julie had been pressuring the state government to make commonsense reforms to be able to keep people safe during the pandemic election.
From Julie, I learned that county clerks were overwhelmed with the amount of paper that they needed to process in June, and that the proposed solution to make voting easier from home was to create this new online portal. The problem was that the Secretary of State’s office also declined to send mailers to every voter letting them know about the change, so voters who weren’t online wouldn’t know that the rules had changed. Only two out of West Virginia’s 55 counties would be sending the absentee ballot application to every registered voter for November’s election.
I thought to myself at this point, what would an engagement journalist do to reach non-Internet connected voters as quickly as possible? While talking with John Keefe, the Social Journalism Design and Development course instructor, about my dilemma, we realized that the simplest solution might be the lowest tech option; good old print newspapers. I was going to, with Julie’s help, get the West Virginia Press Association to print the paper version of the ballot application and run it as an ad in all of West Virginia’s weekly or daily papers, reaching around 300,000 subscribers.
Unfortunately, they told me no. They were worried about how the application would scale to print, and how it might end up confusing more voters than it would help without a proper educational insert accompanying it.
So as my investigating continued, I got the green light from Ken to publish a story in Mountain State Spotlight. Ken had taught me, in a maxim from his former boss Ned Chilton, that:
“The hallmark of crusading journalism is sustained outrage.”
In that proud West Virginia journalism tradition, I knew that if I was going to tell the story about how rules changes were affecting people’s ability to vote safely, I knew that I was going to have to give people the ability to remedy that and sustain the outrage.
My low tech solution was going to become a high tech one when I got to work on the West Virginia Ballot Bot. I knew that despite spotty Internet access, West Virginians still had cell service to send and receive text messages. Using natural language processing, I made an easy to text cell phone number that was available around the clock, and could help people by connecting them with: information about absentee voting deadlines, contact information for their county clerk’s office, contact information to get legal help from the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline, and the ability to report problems with voting to journalists at Electionland.
On October 15th, we published the story and the bot’s phone number online. The absentee ballot request deadline was coming up on October 28th, and just over half the amount of ballots sent out for the primary had been sent for the general election. I shared the story and bot information on West Virginia specific subreddits to drive traffic, and on October 26th my story was republished by 100 Days in Appalachia, another nonprofit digital newsroom.
Between October 15th and November 3rd, my story was viewed 340 times. The BallotBot exchanged 55 messages with 7 different voters in West Virginia. I set out to contact as many West Virginia voters as possible, and although I only reached 7 people, I reached 7 people! We as journalists have to remember that every vote matters, and if my service was able to help them navigate a system designed to leave people behind, then I think engagement journalism succeeded during this election.
That’s not to say this project was without faults. I had no way of knowing who the people using my bot were, and I had no way of receiving feedback from people. I launched a project without prototyping that only ran for three weeks. If I could go back to the drawing board, I would’ve made sure that the bot integrated a listening phase so I could really get an understanding of what voters needed to know to vote safely, and I definitely would’ve started earlier.
I think that if the hallmark of crusading journalism is sustained outrage, then the hallmark of engaged journalism is sustained listening. I wouldn’t have known where to begin if I hadn’t convened a group of people who cared about the future of news in their state, and I wouldn’t have known who to talk to or what questions to ask if it weren’t for people like Julie and Betty who took the time to teach me about the issues when I was reporting remotely from New Jersey. Listening is our superpower as engaged journalists, and we have to wield it to empower people to make change in their own lives and their own communities.
I’m under no illusions that my project fixed voting. West Virginia law still doesn’t allow absentee voting without an excuse, ballot dropboxes, or same day voter registration. I had the opportunity to monitor voting issues on Election Day with the Electionland project at ProPublica, and I saw firsthand how we didn’t do everything that we could to make it safe to vote.
COVID-19 forced all of us to be vigilant and make a plan to vote this year. West Virginia’s government locked down in the beginning, but then became hesitant to ever regulate people’s behavior again. That hesitation meant that the most vulnerable West Virginians might not have gotten to vote, or they had to risk getting sick at the polls to do so. On Election Day, the COVID map looked like this:
There were 80,000 fewer absentee votes cast in the general election after the rules changed from the June primary, but 23 times more COVID cases by Election Day.
Engaging West Virginia around voting during the pandemic has given me a new perspective on the role of journalists in civil society. Not only do we have to meet people’s information needs, but we also have a responsibility to make sure that content gets to them in the spaces where they can access it. This project’s quick turnaround and limited capacity put a ceiling on how many people it could reach, but it’s my hope that the lessons within this experience can serve as an inspiration to other journalists to engage communities in pro-democracy efforts like voting.
I was sad to leave West Virginia so soon after my arrival, and I feel like I have so much left to learn and give back to the Mountain State. When the pandemic is finally over, I’ll be headed back down south and look forward to greeting my friends for breakfast at Tudor’s Biscuit World, and a hike at New River Gorge.
