One of the great — and often unheralded — aspects of PIN is the collaboration and sharing of ideas that occurs among PIN partner newsrooms. For instance, several partners have built on one another’s success using PIN to drive engagement around mayoral elections and involve the community more directly in their campaign reporting. These newsrooms include OPB, KQED, KCRW, KUHF, KPBS, MPR News, WLRN/The Miami Herald, WAMU and KPCC, which has wowed PIN partners with its ongoing #DearMayor project.
Credit The Simpsons ™ & © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Two recent projects that just wrapped up involve WLRN/The Miami Herald and WAMU. They provide great examples of how to marry PIN with social media, face-to-face engagement and on-site commenting, and of how to communicate the impact of engagement back to the audience. You can find them here: ”If I Were Mayor” (WLRN/Herald) and Mayoral Debate (WAMU). (WLRN and The Herald even credit OPB for inspiring their project!)
In both cases, PIN was instrumental in shaping coverage streams and unearthing questions for reporters to put before the candidates. At WAMU, PIN sources submitted questions to ask candidates during WAMU’s live Democratic Primary Mayoral Debate, some of which were recorded and played during the debate (video below). Miami used a series of questions over the course of many months to highlight issues across several mayoral races. Miami also used the queries as collection and publishing tools, deploying the PIN API to publish responses on the query itself and to link to a list of the stories produced with the help of PIN sources by using PIN’s impact tool, PINfluence.
When a newsroom uses the various features of the PIN platform in this way, PIN can initiate, fuel and close the engagement loop while also creating turn-key, archived content for the newsroom’s online audience, and then communicate the impact of engagement back to the audience — and to the foundation that helped fund the project. This type of full-circle engagement creates journalism that is not only highly relevant but also authentic and trustworthy, an often tricky feat in political coverage.
