Building Civic Media Together: A Classroom Guide from The Listening Post Collective

The Listening Post Collective’s Civic Media Playbook, adapted for educators in collaboration with Student Reporting Labs, is a self-paced course designed to help teachers and students explore and improve their community’s news and information ecosystem, especially in communities where access to trusted, relevant information is limited. The Listening Post Collective is a nonprofit that supports newsroom and community efforts to increase access to reliable local information.

Through three digital modules, you’ll find:

• Tactics for developing community information research projects with your students
• Sample lessons, case studies, discussion prompts
• Strategies for community engagement

• Listen and engage with your community
• Gain a deeper understanding of the information needs of community members who have limited access to the information they need
• Initiate community conversations using text messages, live events, social media, and other strategies
• Produce journalism that highlights diverse voices and experiences and prioritizes transparency and accountability
• Gather data that helps track important local topics and community engagement

Visit listeningpostcollective.org/playbook to create your free account and begin the course.

• Civic media is any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting.
• In today’s news and information industry you hear people talk a lot about the local news crisis. Often, the conversation centers around “news deserts” — places where local newsrooms are dying, leaving their communities with just one newspaper or no newspaper at all. Traditional newsrooms are just one part of a healthy information ecosystem, where everyone can easily access the information they need to live their lives. People get information in all kinds of informal ways that can be just as valuable.
• The Listening Post Collective envisions a world where every community is rooted in an information garden—where access to trusted, relevant information drives civic health and local power.
• Access to trusted information can take many forms outside ‘traditional’ media: for example, a neighborhood WhatsApp group sharing safety updates, a mutual aid Facebook group, a student-run Instagram account highlighting local events, or a bilingual newsletter connecting community members with local resources. This course encourages exploring what that could look like in your school and surrounding community

Nobody knows a community better than the people who live there. An information ecosystem assessment (IEA) involves working with community members to:

• Identify where and how information is currently exchanged
• Discover what’s missing
• Learn how people want to receive information

This process helps shape responsive, community-centered media that serves everyone.