Your Voice Ohio

Election 2020 Engagement Project Underway

The uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing protests for racial justice, concern for how the economic recession will affect businesses, families, and communities, and the overwhelming amount of misinformation circulating online about everything from vaccines to voting have already made 2020 a year unlike any other.

Not surprisingly, people are stressed as they sort through unprecedented volumes of information (some of it intentionally misleading), worry about how to be safe and healthy, and pay the bills.

Amidst this turbulent landscape, reliable information related to the 2020 presidential election has become increasingly urgent and important. In an effort to meet the information needs of Ohioans, more than 40 news organizations in the Your Voice Ohio media collaborative will work together over the next five months to provide relevant, important information regarding the 2020 presidential election.

Your Voice Ohio’s Election 2020 project will explore the complexity of the state’s nearly 12 million residents through community engagement, data analysis, and collaborative reporting. Media partners will engage the public to produce a series of stories focusing on the issues that matter most to Ohioans and present the platforms of Presidential candidates so that voters can determine whom they believe provides the best path forward for our country.

Your Voice Ohio is seeking volunteers for as many as 20, two-hour deliberative engagement sessions to be held online from July through November. These conversations will help to ensure that electoral coverage produced by the collaborative is shaped directly by Ohio residents. Participants will be selected from the volunteers in an effort to best reflect state demographics and will be compensated $125 for participating in a single engagement session. To volunteer, visit YourVoiceOhio.org/election2020.

The first digital conversations and package of collaborative stories will focus on the 2020 presidential campaign and election. In addition to the engagement sessions with journalists, Your Voice Ohio also will sponsor a statewide poll, to be conducted in July by the the Center for Opinion and Marketing Research and co-authored with the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. Subsequent conversations and stories will focus on specific issues such as healthcare, the economy, or education – which will be identified and selected through polling and engagement.

Your Voice Ohio media partners have successfully used deliberative civic engagement to produce innovative, community-centered coverage on issues such as the 2016 presidential election, opioids, addiction, and recovery, and the future of the economy. Previous community conversations sponsored by local news outlets showed a deep desire to rebuild relationships among people with different life experiences, to find common ground and work together to improve their communities.

The issues Ohio residents wanted to address were affordable housing in every community, jobs with living wages and benefits, affordable and accessible health care, access to mental health services without a negative stigma, accessible and quality education, safe neighborhoods, access to fresh food, accessible public transportation and inviting places to live, with parks, recreation and the arts. Racial and economic equity were top of mind for Ohioans prior to this spring.

Building on what’s been learned from previous experience, Your Voice Ohio media partners are uniquely positioned to engage with Ohio residents and collaborate on their coverage of the upcoming election. Follow along with Your Voice Ohio here.

Project History and Evolution

In 2016, through our Informed Citizen Akron/Your Vote Ohio project, we conducted a statewide poll and community events which surveyed thousands of people around the state of Ohio. We posed the question: “How can local news media shift their coverage to help voters better evaluate candidates and make more informed electoral decisions during the 2016 election?” Specifically, we wanted to know what coverage Ohioans weren’t getting from candidates and from national news outlets.

Regardless of political affiliation or ideology, one message rang loud and clear: Ohioans don’t see themselves represented in their local news.  Along with Ohio media partners,  we saw an important opportunity: now is the time to respond proactively and embrace representative, community-based news coverage. We formed the Your Voice Ohio™ media collaborative as one solution to address this issue. Journalists in the collaborative are currently working together to cover Ohio’s addiction crisis and the changing economy.

Shifting coverage of Ohio’s addiction crisis

For the 50+ news organizations of the Your Voice Ohio media collaborative, the ongoing opioid and addiction crisis is a critical story. But their coverage about overdose totals was no longer resonating with audiences, leading to disengagement, apathy, or outright hostility towards opioid reporting.

Mark Sweetwood, Managing Editor of the Youngstown Vindicator, exemplifies the desire to try a new approach:

You can do story after story after story, but eventually you get to the point, what else can we do? There must be something we can do other than just report on the story. How can we take the words, and the pictures, and the stories we put together and get other people involved.

Exploring how to make Ohio vibrant for all

The Ohio workforce is experiencing big shifts, including manufacturing automation to the gig economy, homelessness, loss of farmland, and more. To help Ohioans navigate these changes and define what the state needs from its next governor, lawmakers and local leadership, our journalist collective is asking readers to envision a more vibrant Ohio.What would it look like? And most importantly, how would we get there?

Partners & Funders

Democracy Fund and the Knight Foundation provide funding for Your Voice Ohio. Our partners include Journalism that Matters, Hearken, and our 53 (and growing) collaborative members around the state.

Our Approach

To provide a space for citizens to interact and communicate effectively with journalists, we needed to create a simple and welcoming dialogue model that could be used across the state.
We decided to host two-hour forums driven by small group discussions, modeled after the World Cafe dialogue method. Since October of 2017, we’ve hosted 23 of these discussions, with almost 700 community members in attendance across all events.

Sitting down with a diverse group of community members in this way can help surface new ideas, uncover problems or solutions that aren’t being reported, reach new communities and sources, illuminate information gaps, shift coverage towards critical areas, and position reporters as “real people” in the community.

In September 2018, in order to explore how journalists could help create a shared understanding of Ohio’s economy, we hosted a 3 day Citizens Jury in Columbus. We convened a demographically-balanced panel of twenty-three Ohio residents. The participants were asked to explore this question over the course of the weekend: What roles might journalists play in supporting healthy, thriving, and vibrant communities, and how can they fulfill those roles?

Your Voice Ohio Vibrant Communities Report

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To reach Ohioans that can’t make it our community events or didn’t participate in the Jury, we’re also partnering with Hearken, a digital audience engagement organization, to collect public questions newsrooms can answer.

Project Goals

Our project goals with the Your Voice Ohio media collaborative include creating a replicable model for community conversations to illuminate local issues, and spread this model across newsrooms around the state.

The project aims to connect newsrooms to new audiences, especially those who feel ignored by media. The effort is exploring how new approaches can support journalists in better listening to and understanding their communities to begin the process of (re)building relationships and trust. These relationships, based on listening and responding to the needs of their communities, will form the foundation of a new, more powerful journalism.

Recent Outcomes

Reports and editors are walking away with a sense that their current reporting may not be serving the whole of their community. Jordyn Grzelewski, a reporter at the Youngstown Vindicator, puts it this way:

Sometimes there is a disconnect between the stories people want and need from us and the stories we are telling.

Reporting itself has shifted based on what journalists have heard at community events. For instance, we heard participants often ask, “Why do you use images of needles and drugs in your stories? Don’t you know those are triggers for drug use?” Many journalists, weren’t thinking about their images as triggers or that they’re either turning away readers/viewers or making someone’s recovery that much more difficult. It may seem simple, but it’s a revelation that wouldn’t happen if reporters weren’t in conversation with their community.

The Your Voice Ohio collaborative is continuing to cover stories and connect with readers from community events, and we update resources for journalists and the public on the Your Voice Ohio website, and share in a weekly newsletter.