In Northern Minnesota, KAXE tackles its first election as a newsroom with an ambitious voter guide
Hearken, listening sessions, and candidate surveys were the building blocks of KAXE’s engagement.
Although the station has been a fixture of Northern Minnesota for decades, KAXE launched its newsroom in 2023 — just in time to cover the 2024 elections. News Director Chelsey Perkins knew from the get-go that she wanted engagement to be at the core of all their work. She also knew that they needed to fill a big gap in news coverage for their region — an area of 23 counties covering about 38,000 square miles. Fast forward to KAXE’s 2024 Election Guide. Perkins and reporter Megan Buffington told us how they pulled it off this hyper-local feat.
Tell us about your engagement Initiative or project.
We produced a 2024 Election Guide, displaying more than 170 local candidates' answers to questions about what they would do if elected. Because this was a new initiative, we needed to determine our mission, scope and scale, and build out our website with an election landing page. We contacted more than 900 candidates to request participation. The guide included any contested races from the state house to down ballot. This included one judicial race, county boards, soil and water conservation districts, mayor and city council races, school boards and township races. We also included a story listing the ballot questions for counties, school districts and cities in the region.
In shaping our questions for candidates, we utilized questions we received through audience engagement with our America Amplified Hearken embed which asked people what they wanted us to ask of candidates. We primarily directed our audience to the embed through radio callouts (both read by our on-air volunteers and in our newscast) and posters we hung throughout the region. We also made the decision to fact check the answers, which took it a step further and ensured our audience was not only reading what the candidates wanted to convey, but also that misinformation was clarified when necessary.
What was the main objective of this engagement initiative?
Our main objective with the initiative was to ensure people had access to good information about those who wished to represent them in public office. We saw a need to cover a wide geography and provide this resource as a public media entity -- meaning it was not behind a paywall, and it was collected in a single place as opposed to disparate websites / guides.
How did the collaboration between America Amplified and your public media station help shape this initiative?
We went beyond the typical questions presented in an Election Guide and asked focused questions on housing and climate resiliency -- two topics that came up repeatedly in our audience engagement efforts. We heard from many people that they appreciated the focus on topics that are important to our region.
How did you build trust in the community you were reporting on?
We built trust by first providing the information, and second by maintaining transparency about our process, our goals and by fact checking the information made available to our audience. We ultimately did not feel it was effective to simply allow the candidates to spread misinformation or make false claims, without clarification. We presented their answers exactly as written, but when necessary, attached editor's notes in italics as an addendum.
What engagement tools shared are helping your station to better engage with this community?
The Hearken embed provided by America Amplified served as one route for people to engage with us as a news team, but we found we received the most engagement from our radio audience who called or emailed and through our three focused listening sessions. We held one each in our core cities of Bemidji and Grand Rapids and one in rural Aitkin County at a conservation center we have worked with in the past. Though many who attended were established audience members, the sessions were open to the broader community, and we did connect with a few non-KAXE folks.
How are you bringing this reporting back to the community?
With focused attention on the SEO and promotion of our election guide, we gained tens of thousands of hits as people sought out information to guide their choices in the ballot box. Between the launch of our guide on Oct. 8 through Election Day, nearly 30,000 people viewed our guide and related coverage.
What lessons do you take away from this project in terms of strengthening engagement?
We learned that people appreciate their own questions being reflected in the work. Asking pointed questions about specific topics that resonate with our communities meant candidates had to truly contemplate those issues and how they would govern.
We also learned that casting a wide net can sometimes create more challenges than it's worth -- through our analytics, we were able to see which communities sought out the information the most, and we also were able to identify areas where we needed to do more outreach to ensure people were aware of the Guide.
