How Inside Story hosts workshops to commission stories with readers' input

The Greek subscription news site is using co-creation methodologies and face-to-face workshops to source ideas from its Athens community

In a nutshell

A co-commissioning workshop between journalists and subscribers to help readers see the how journalism is created, and help journalists understand their community better.

Background

• Inside Story is a subscription-based digital-only news organisation founded in 2016 to offer quality, in-depth journalism. It focuses on investigative stories and produces approximately ten longform stories each week.
• The #YourStory event started as an idea to celebrate the end of the first year anniversary of Inside Story but morphed into a way to gather story ideas from readers, which would then be produced by the editorial team.
• #YourStory was a success in 2017, so the team decided to run #YourStory2 in March this year.

How did they do it?

• A call-out for story ideas was placed on the website and in Inside Story's daily news email. During the course of a month, 90 subscribers submitted 120 stories to a specifically created email address.
• Everyone who submitted a story idea was invited to a three-hour evening workshop in a gallery in Athens. It was facilitated by media academic Betty Tsakarestou, who has researched co-creation methodologies and brought design thinking expertise to the process.
• Around 50 people were able to attend the workshop. They were organised in tables of seven or eight with a journalist as a facilitator. Each of their stories was debated for five minutes in a kind of structured editorial meeting. After several hours, the table selected one story to go through.
• Six stories (one from each table) were then presented at a second event held in a bookshop in Athens, where the general public was able to attend.
• At this event, each subscriber explained their story in more detail and attendees voted for the one that was to take priority. The winner was a pitch by three 18-year-old women from a local school about racism in West Attica, a region of Greece.

What did they learn?

• Inside Story journalists learned about the readers and the kinds of stories they’re interested in. Subscribers reported via a feedback form that they had a much better understanding of commissioning and writing stories.
• The Inside Story team organised a further event at the school of the winners, which exposed Inside Story to a group of younger readers, although it's not clear if any became subscribers.
• Rather than covering just one topic, the journalists decided to follow up on several other topics (an interesting case of Turkish officers in Greece and the proposal for a historical building) that subscribers had voted for.
• The Inside Story team also reported anecdotally that several lapsed subscribers signed up again in order to have the chance to submit a story idea.
• In the future, the Inside Story team have said that they would like to analyse the subscription tenure of #YourStory2 attendees to see if the workshop helps keep subscribers longer.

In their words

During the workshop, readers learned what’s worth publishing, what’s doable and what’s interesting - they also told us they had a good time enjoying the mechanics of journalism.

-Dimitris Xenakis, general director, Inside Story

How would you improve it?
"Next year we are looking into focusing on specific themes/topics to see how this affects the interaction and taking YourStory outside Athens as there are quite a few participants already from outside the capital."

Now try it for yourself

Read more about how a local site in the US used meetups to help demystify their city and help readers understand how they can get involved in their journalism.