By Massarah Mikati

As the 2024 election neared, staff at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel knew they wanted to tailor their reporting to readers’ needs, priorities and questions — and they knew they couldn’t assume what those needs, priorities and questions would be. With engagement initiatives such as the Citizens’ Agenda already under their belt, the Journal Sentinel’s community engagement and Ideas Lab teams set out to find new ways to hear directly from their communities. They landed on a partnership with the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to implement a robust community engagement initiative called the Main Street Agenda. This initiative aimed to prioritize voter concerns and foster meaningful discussions on key issues affecting Wisconsin residents. Through a scientific survey, expert op-eds and town hall meetings, the collaboration provided a model for how newsrooms can better serve their communities by focusing on substantive issues rather than traditional horse-race political coverage — and how the roadmap to that coverage lies within communities themselves.

The Approach

The Survey

2024 wasn’t the first time the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel experimented with surveys to have readers steer their reporting agendas. During the 2022 midterms, they sent out a non-scientific survey created by the paper. While that survey was helpful, they thought a scientific survey would reassure readers that what they were doing was based on valid research, not their own agendas. That’s why they and La Follette decided to partner with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Survey Center to create and send out a scientific survey in January 2024, asking respondents what their top issues were heading into the new campaign cycle. The survey provided data that was statistically valid and representative of Wisconsin voters’ most pressing concerns. This ensured that the coverage was rooted in real voter priorities rather than editorial assumptions. 

Once the survey results were in, the Journal Sentinel worked with university faculty to produce a series of monthly op-eds over the course of a year on the most important issues identified by voters. These opinion pieces provided research-backed insights and expert analysis, offering readers a deeper understanding of key topics such as inflation, education and public trust in elections. The op-eds also encouraged community feedback through letters to the editor.

The Convenings

While the Journal Sentinel had previously held town hall meetings with community members, they had never branched outside their city of Milwaukee. For 2024, they wanted to do things differently, holding a series of six town halls that spanned a broader area of the state: Madison, Milwaukee, a Milwaukee suburb, Green Bay, Eau Claire and La Crosse. The events took two forms:

• Structured Small Group Discussions: In four of the town halls, La Follette invited survey respondents to participate in facilitated conversations designed to bridge political divides. Participants engaged in civil discourse on topics like K-12 education and economic policy, which contributed to research on reducing political polarization.
• Traditional Town Halls: Two town hall meetings, including a final session in Milwaukee, were open to the general public. These gatherings featured community members, experts and journalists discussing issues such as inflation — which was the most pressing concern identified by voters. The Milwaukee event, attended by over 100 people, was also live-streamed to broaden its reach.Journal Sentinel’s Main Street Agenda town hall meeting discusses inflation. Here’s what we learned.

James Fitzhenry, community engagement director and Ideas Lab editor at the Journal Sentinel, said that the partnership with the university and research center helped fill in bandwidth and resource gaps the newspaper had.

“Both the university and the Journal Sentinel had a similar desire to get out into the community and talk to people and listen to and engage them,” he said. “We were able to do it better as partners than we could alone.”

The Partnership

La Follette and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel partnered on a Main Street Agenda initiative once before, for the 2022 midterm elections. In September 2023, La Follette reached back out to Fitzhenry to explore partnering once again around the presidential election. Together, the two institutions brainstormed how they could evolve the Main Street Agenda in this second iteration, and came up with the policy perspective campaign and in-person events.

To carry out the policy perspective campaign, the teams met on a monthly basis to edit and rewrite op-ed pieces and make sure each one would land well with audience members.

“We’re an academic university, so we want to make sure everything is relatable,” said La Follette’s outreach director, Jennifer Wagner.

The teams then began preparing for their in-person events in the early summer of 2024, launching the events that fall. La Follette took on the roundtable events, while the Journal Sentinel led the charge on the town halls. Each institution respectively handled finding venues, contractors and panelists, but worked together to promote the events. The events were financially supported through grants and funding secured by La Follette, and promoted and shared by the Journal Sentinel.

Results

One of the metrics the Journal Sentinel looked at to determine the success and impact of their engagement initiatives was attendance and engagement at their events. For example, the four small-table discussions for survey respondents sold out almost immediately — they didn’t need to do nearly as much marketing as they had expected. People were eager to attend and engage in discussion.

The first traditional town hall they put on had lower attendance, but vibrant conversation, so the paper still considered the event to be a success. But the final town hall had about 100 attendees, and the paper also livestreamed it for broader reach. The discussion at that town hall was also rich, focusing predominantly on inflation.

“If you watch the video, you’ll get a sense of why the outcome of the election was the way it was,” Fitzhenry said. “There’s no substitute for talking to people — it gets you out of echo chambers. I thought that was invaluable.”

The Journal Sentinel also considered participant satisfaction, which leads to built trust, as a success metric. At the end of each event, people thanked the hosts for organizing the convenings and creating space for thoughtful dialogue in the midst of growing political polarization.

The paper also measured the success of their initiatives through their content. The op-eds they published, for example, had higher than average pageviews. And their production of a body of work with insightful analysis and commentary on issues important to voters — filling the critical information gaps identified by community voters — was the ultimate win, Fitzhenry said. The structured discussions provided unique story angles and firsthand voter insights that he said would have been more difficult to obtain through traditional reporting methods.

Lessons Learned

• The earlier, the better: Organizing the town halls, especially in coordination with their partners, required months of planning. Starting early led to more success and maximized community participation.

• Experiment with diversified outreach methods: Not everybody is going to read a 1,000-word op-ed. The Journal Sentinel is trying to learn how to get complex information out in more accessible bits, such as short social media videos or through texting services, in an attempt to reach younger and more diverse audiences who do not frequent traditional information sources.

• Take advantage of readily available resources. Surveys are expensive to implement, which is part of why La Follette reached out to the Survey Center on campus to partner. “Other universities or outlets who are wanting to do the same, try to tap into something that already exists,” Wagner said. “Otherwise it just becomes a big draw on time and budget.”

• Meet diverse communities where they’re at: Two of the locations the Journal Sentinel chose for their town halls were in underserved communities — one predominantly Indigenous, the other predominantly Black. Strategize town hall locations to reach more diverse communities.

• Two is better than one: Partnerships with other institutions or community organizations can help broaden your reach and fill in resource gaps.
• Patience is key: “We’ve got to be honest that it takes resources and it takes time,” Fitzhenry said. “I think all the problems and questions that we need to solve are found in the community by talking to people and listening to them, and reconnecting ourselves with the community.”