Partner with the Listening Post Collective to create a more navigable and effective support ecosystem for civic media providers

Since launching the Listening Post Collective in 2013, we have developed a civic media design process that has helped more than a thousand civic media providers listen to communities to understand their information needs, seed local civic media partnerships, and cultivate these relationships to build power and resilience.

One of our core values, and superpowers, is our ability to listen. And what the civic media providers we work with have been telling us for a while is that it’s difficult to navigate the growing number of beneficial services, programs, and tools that promise to help make their fledgling businesses more successful. We agree, and we’ve also found it sometimes tricky to keep up with the myriad–– and sometimes overlapping–– offerings from other support organizations.

So, we set out to answer the question, working with Anika Anand, cofounder and partner of Commoner Co., of how do we help civic media providers get the help they need, whether that’s from Listening Post Collective or other support organizations? Core to answering this question is building better communication and partnerships with others in the support field and defining our own work and appetite for partnerships better too. As part of her work Anika helped us design this JSO Information Card that explains what we do, how we do it, and who we are doing it for. 

If you’re someone working in the local news support field, we hope you read this post and consider whether we can promote each other’s work or have it intersect in meaningful ways.

But first, we’ll explain, in very simple terms, who we are and what we do.

What the Listening Post Collective does

LPC is positioned at the starting line within the journalism support ecosystem, providing hands-on facilitation, self-guided tools, early-stage funding and professional development to grassroots outlets so that they can grow into thriving, sustainable media organizations that authentically meet community information needs. By addressing the decline of local news while also acknowledging that many legacy media organizations have never fully represented their communities, LPC prioritizes media initiatives that serve civically vulnerable places. LPC employs a four-step media incubation process: 

1. Map: Use our data-driven Civic Information Index to identify vulnerable US regions with the greatest potential for civic media investment.
2. Listen: Guide these communities through Information Ecosystem Research (IER) to understand the supply and demand sides of local information, identifying gaps, assets and opportunities.   
3. Seed: Pilot new civic media programming based on IER findings to better meet the community’s information needs. 
4. Cultivate: Scale and sustain long-term capacity for their project, including organizational investments such as strategic planning or community-centered investments such as civic and media literacy activities.

Types of partnerships we want to create

We’re looking for partners who can help us with at least one of these four partnership outcomes.

1. Discovery: We want to work with partners who can help us connect with communities interested in assessing their local information needs. Specifically, we want peer journalism support organizations, funders, civic organizations, and other actors to help us identify communities with demonstrated need to build more robust information ecosystems and an interest in partnering with us to get started.

2. Quality improvement: We want to connect with people and organizations with different expertise and experiences than us on how we can strengthen the quality and performance of our main offerings. This includes our Information Ecosystem Assessments, our Civic Information Index and our self-paced Civic Media Playbook. We are also looking to learn from funders outside our field on how to implement trust-based funding.

3. Wayfinding: If you offer services, products or tools in the local news support field that can help nascent civic media providers build their businesses, we want to talk with you. We’re building a list of who can help with specific needs that come up so we can recommend them to the civic media providers we help.

4. Continuity: We want to build a pathway for civic media providers who have used LPC’s offerings and who are ready for the next stage of their development. Once a civic news provider has completed an IER and/or has received funding to further a specific project, they may “graduate” from LPC and into another organization that can support their next stage of growth. For example, as part of our MacArthur Foundation grant, we are already collaborating with co-grantee Tiny News Collective on streamlining more direct pathways for local partners to move between our organizations based on their unique needs. . Reach out to us if you’re interested in chatting about our early-stage news startups and how they might benefit from your services–– we see a lot of value in showing civic media providers that pathway at the very beginning of their journey.

How we approach partnerships

Here are a couple other thoughts on how we’re building these partnerships.

Not every partnership has to be a collaboration

A partnership may be better served by coordinated or collaborative efforts. Generally speaking, we believe coordination is understanding another organization’s work, choosing to share best practices and learnings with each other, and/or deciding to actively promote each other’s work to our core constituents. Collaboration is when we work with a partner in concert on a specific initiative to achieve a shared goal with shared success metrics.

Depending on our strategic goals, timing and other external forces, we think a partnership can be rooted in coordination and then later evolve into a collaboration–– or vice versa. One isn’t better than the other–– the partnership type should always be in service of the best way to get the work done. 

Partnership alignment is key

The how is just as important as the what when it comes evaluating whether a partnership is a good fit. We want to consider whether the partner has a history of mutual respect and trust with the constituents it services; how well our definitions of impact line up; and whether the partner believes in building strong ecosystems, in addition to strengthening their own organization.

What happens next

Given the urgency of our work, we know that sometimes it feels easier to do this work alone than in partnership with others. And while many of the individual efforts being made across the local news support field are worthy of dollars and civic media providers’ time, we do believe the lack of cohesion and strategy of those efforts is creating diminished returns. 

We encourage support organizations whose work aligns with ours to check out our JSO Information Card, created by Commoner Co., and reach out to [email protected]. And, importantly, we encourage funders to engage in more conversations about how to more strategically fund the growing need for this support work. 

Listening Post Collective History

The Listening Post Collective (LPC) is a project of Internews, an international nonprofit organization giving people the news and information they need, the ability to connect and the means to make their voices heard. Since its formation in 1982, Internews has worked in more than 140 countries worldwide — to train journalists, advance internet freedom, and help media outlets become financially sustainable – so that everyone has trustworthy information to make informed decisions and hold power to account. LPC brings Internews’ time-tested methodologies to the United States, partnering with people and organizations to develop local news and information solutions that help communities thrive. LPC envisions a world where everyone lives not in a news desert, but in an information garden with access to high-quality, civic information in accessible languages and on issues that impact them.