Hearken’s Champions of Curiosity Awards celebrate news organizations practicing community listening and service journalism. KUNR won in the “Impact” category of Hearken’s 2022 awards for its public-powered elections coverage.
From April through September of 2022, the KUNR Public Radio news team implemented a question submission form from Hearken, a company that offers technology and training to newsrooms to help organizations engage their audience and broader community.
Through this form, the KUNR news team conducted a survey asking community members to share topics or issues they would like to hear about from candidates running in Nevada’s 2022 elections. Analyzing 30 community responses, almost 40% of respondents voiced concern about climate change and wanted to know how their local politicians would respond to environmental issues. With additional environmental questions collected from a group of students from the University of Nevada, Reno majoring in a variety of fields, KUNR created a questionnaire for candidates running for nine races: city council or mayor in Reno or Sparks and commissioner in Washoe County. The result was KUNR’s 2022 Candidate Surveys on the Environment project.
Natalie Van Hoozer was the lead reporter and community engagement coordinator for this project. Shelby Herbert assisted with fact-checking as a reporter for the Hitchcock Project for Visualizing Science, which is an initiative from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism. Crystal Willis was the digital editor, and Lucia Starbuck and Brian Duggan were the editors. María Palma contributed to the Spanish reporting for this project.
KUNR would like to thank community members and students of the Reynolds School of Journalism’s “Latinos in the Eyes of the Media” class at the University of Nevada, Reno for submitting the questions which shaped this survey. KUNR’s work on this project was supported by the Democracy SOS and America Amplified programs.
