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Hearken Aims To Help Media Gain Traction With Readers By Crowdsourcing Story Ideas | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Newsrooms are shrinking, and today’s reporters have far less time to take the pulse of the community. Hearken is a startup founded by a former journalist with a software platform that supplements dwindling newsrooms and supercharges community outreach with one deft stroke: by bringing readers into the story-creation process. By letting users vote on which story they’d like to see written, newsrooms using Hearken like Chicago's WBEZ, San Francisco's KQED, and Seattle's KUOW have seen Hearken-generated stories get consistently higher visibility—and even win awards. Hearken had been quietly beta-testing earlier iterations of its platform with public radio and local news outlets while the startup fine-tuned its approach, but it has recently released Hearken for any newsroom that wants to shake things up and give readers a voice at the editorial table.
via Hearken Aims To Help Media Gain Traction With Readers By Crowdsourcing Story Ideas | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.