#61 Can a Zebra Survive in a Unicorn World?

Community Impact

Jennifer Brandel's company, Harken, revolutionizes journalism by involving communities in the storytelling process. By allowing audiences to propose and vote on story ideas, Harken ensures that news coverage is both original and relevant to the community. This approach not only enhances trust between news organizations and their audiences but also results in stories that perform significantly better than traditional ones 1. Jennifer shares an example from Nashville, where a community-driven inquiry led to the rededication of a park, highlighting the power of audience involvement 2.

The newsroom decided, this is interesting. Let's put it up for a vote. They ended up putting it up for a vote. The public said, yeah, who is this Fred Douglas? Well, it turns out, after the newsroom started looking into this, that Fred Douglas was actually supposed to be named Frederick Douglass Park 80 years earlier.

--- Jennifer Brandel

Harken's tools are now used in about 150 newsrooms, generating unique content and fostering deeper audience engagement.

   

Implementation Hurdles

Integrating Harken into newsrooms presents several challenges, including client retention and aligning traditional journalism with new methodologies. Jennifer Brandel explains that while Harken collects valuable audience data, it takes time for newsrooms to see the business value, often leading to a high churn rate 3. The process of onboarding a newsroom is lengthy, averaging six months, which can be a barrier to retention 4.

The thing ends up collapsing because if it's not in the right person's hand in editorial, that they pass it off within editorial, then we have to retrain someone to be the torch bearer for it.

--- Jennifer Brandel

Despite these hurdles, Harken's approach aims to transform the relationship between newsrooms and their audiences, shifting from viewing the public as consumers to partners.