December 9, 2004 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Minnesota Public Radio is tapping into the power of the Internet to expand the network of people that its reporters turn to in their reporting.
Over the last two years, the organization’s Public Insight Journalism program has built a database of 8,000 listeners, with information they provide such as age, gender, career, personal interests, and whether they have children, which reporters can use when they are looking for sources for their stories.
The program grew out of a recognition that listeners could be a valuable asset in reporting, and that new communication technologies like e-mail and the Internet made it feasible to reach out to them, says Bill Kling, president of Minnesota Public Radio.
“We concluded that there was somebody in our audience who knew more about any issue that we broadcast than we did,” says Mr. Kling. “You know there’s somebody out there shouting back at the radio when you’re broadcasting reports saying, ‘Yes, but you forgot this key piece, this critical element.’”
This fall when a reporter wanted to examine how the economic recovery was affecting Minnesota, an analyst in the Public Insight Journalism program sent an e-mail message with a link to a survey about the economy to 500 people in the database.
The responses helped reporters locate people with a grass-roots perspective on the economy — such as a truck mechanic who said that he’s working overtime again and that his employer is thinking about hiring additional mechanics — who would have been difficult to find otherwise, says Michael Skoler, Minnesota Public Radio’s managing director of news.
“All of a sudden, something that was going to be a four-minute story about whether or not the economic recovery was being felt in Minnesota became a series of pieces,” says Mr. Skoler.
So far, Minnesota Public Radio has recruited participants through Web features on specific issues, such as the state budget and the gap in academic achievement among different racial and ethnic groups in Minnesota, and at public meetings it hosts with listeners in towns across the state.
The organization says it treats participants in the database, called the Public Insight Network, strictly as news sources and does not use the information they provide for fund-raising purposes.
As part of its $46-million capital campaign, Minnesota Public Radio seeks to raise $2.25-million to develop the Public Insight Journalism program at its stations across the state. The organization hopes that in the next year or two it will be able to test the concept with some of the national radio programs it produces through its distribution arm, American Public Media.
