THIS IS AN ARCHIVED PAGE
Listening to America was an attempt to launch a new project for Press Watch, devoted to advancing democracy, local news, and the constructive use of AI in journalism. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find funding.
The 2024 election will be a momentous one, but journalists are still failing to explore a key question: Why are some voters more susceptible to misinformation and the allure of authoritarianism than others?
This project will employ local journalists and new AI technologies to build a searchable online repository of contemporaneous American voices – ordinary Americans of all stripes answering questions about their backgrounds, their values, their hopes for their community, the issues they care about, and how they arrived at their political views. Journalists, researchers, and the public will be able to query the database for actionable insights into what divides us – and what unites us.
The interviews will be conducted by local journalists (some from Report for America) who will be trained in solutions journalism techniques to conduct deep, empathetic discussions with a diverse cross-section of their communities.
Reporters will also get access to automated transcription and databasing infrastructure — a useful and overdue step in the newsroom transition from analog to digital. The interviews will generate valuable local content and help identify a citizens’ agenda for political coverage. Journalists will be well compensated for their time — a powerful incentive to participate that is also a highly effective, bottoms-up approach to funding local news.
This project is possible because today’s AI-based products allow us to transcribe recorded speech at scale as well as make sense of it through categorization, tagging, summarization, and extraction. We can now treat spoken words like structured data.
We’ll use these new advances in AI to highlight key passages and common themes on a public-facing website. The interface will allow journalists and researchers to explore concepts and identify segments from interviews that they can easily embed in their work.
Questions the database will be able to answer: How can any normal person believe something so diametrically opposed to what I believe? How significant a factor is news consumption? What are some key inflection points in people’s political evolution? How do they decide who and what to trust? Where is the common ground?
The project’s output will powerfully address important, unanswered questions about who we are as a country, while simultaneously subsidizing local news and bringing AI to the news industry in an ethical and journalistically valuable way.
Corporate and social media too often prioritize content that is shallow, reductive, and angry. It feels like everyone’s shouting and no one is listening. This project is all about listening. It aligns with other projects attempting to strengthen media and democracy. It embodies engagement journalism. It embraces the complexity of America and — even as it explores fault lines – will call attention to widely shared core American values. This is public service journalism.
ABOUT DAN FROOMKIN
Dan Froomkin is the project lead. He is a longtime political reporter and trailblazer in online journalism. He is currently editor of Press Watch, an influential non-profit media-criticism site that advocates for bolder political coverage, particularly when it relates to misinformation and threats to democracy. During 12 years at the Washington Post, he served as managing editor of washingtonpost.com and wrote its popular daily White House Watch column. He has extensive experience building, editing, and project-managing websites. He has held senior positions at the Huffington Post, the Intercept, and the Watchdog Project from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, where he also contributed news and opinion. He is an adjunct instructor at New York University’s American Journalism Online master’s program. He began his career as a local news reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal, the Miami Herald, and the Orange County Register.
TECHNOLOGY PARTNER
Cortico: A project of the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Constructive Communication, dedicated to powerfully combining human listening and machine learning.