• What are journalists missing in our community? We want to hear from you.
• If you could be in charge of our reporting team for a day, what would you assign them to do?
• What do you wish the community knew more about?
• What people or programs are working hard for our community and deserve more attention?
• What problems do you wish our community were addressing?
• What else do you want to know about this topic? Let us know what questions you’d still like answered.

• What do you wish journalists understood about how you see the world?
• What does news coverage often get wrong about things you see in your life? 
• We try hard to cover life in our community from diverse angles, but we know there’s some we may miss. What would you like us to do better at capturing?
• This is a complicated issue, and our goal is to reflect voices from a diverse set of stakeholders. Whose voice(s) have we missed? 
• In this story, we worked hard to share diverse perspectives and highlight them fairly. How did we do?

• We took time today to explain how we make decisions. Did you find it interesting and worthwhile? What else would you like to know about our reporting process?
• We can’t cover everything, and our goal is to assign reporters to cover issues and events that matter to the community. How are we doing? What are we missing?
• Have you ever talked to a journalist for a story? What was the experience like? 
• How could we better earn your trust? Sample language: We know this is a tough time to keep up with the news, and we want to be your most trusted source for information about our community. A shared set of facts and a place to talk about them are core to democracy. We’d love to hear from you: How could we better be worthy of your trust? What questions can we answer about how our newsroom operates? 

Creating a survey can be a great way to engage with your audience and get in touch with your community’s frustrations, confusion and needs.  

Here’s an in-depth look at how we worked with one local newsroom on a community survey. 

Some advice as you craft questions:

• Ask some quantitative questions you can repeat over time for benchmarking (How likely would you be to recommend this news outlet to a friend? To what extent do you find that this outlet provides accurate, credible information?)
• Ask questions that will help you make decisions and steer future coverage (If you could assign a reporter to any issue or topic, what would it be? What do you most rely on our newsroom/our journalists for?) 

If your goal is to find out how well you are serving your existing audience, you can use existing channels to send out a survey. Consider newsletter lists, subscriber lists, social media channels, texting sign-ups and anywhere else you regularly reach your current audience. 

If, however, you want to find out from your wider community what they need from local news, consider options such as paid outreach and partnerships with community organizations to spread the invitation more widely. 

We also highly recommend checking out Membership Guide’s audience handbook. It includes a section on surveys that walks journalists through how to design, structure, promote and test a survey.  

Once you’ve finished your survey, look at the responses honestly. Moving forward, use that list of questions to anticipate ways you would better explain your process and decisions to your audience. 

Head to the bottom of this Trust Kit to see our best practices around acting on audience input. 

If you’re really committed to listening and learning, start with our community interview guide. Perhaps have each journalist in your newsroom commit to interviewing one person a month who has low trust in news. One question we especially love to ask: What do journalists often get wrong about you or about things in your life?

It can seem tedious or like a lot of work (you’re spending 30-60 minutes talking to someone who isn’t necessarily a source!) but we’ve seen the positive impact interviews like this can have. Our research partners said they found these one-on-one conversations help build trust, make people more likely to subscribe, and give journalists a deeper understanding of what they need to do to earn trust. 

Learn more listening strategies in the Listening Trust Kit.

Like with all transparency and engagement efforts, they work best if you tie them to your organization’s overall mission and goals. That helps people understand why you might be asking them for guidance and demonstrates that hearing from your community aligns with your goals.  

You can do this by pairing questions with language about why you’re asking. Some examples include:

• It’s important to us that our work be based on the community’s needs and curiosities. Are you willing to help shape our priorities?
• Part of our mission as a news organization is to uplift and reflect the community. What sort of things do you wish you saw more of in our news coverage? 
• Our newsroom of XX people can’t be everywhere, and we rely on you to help keep us in the loop about what’s happening. 
• Our journalists know what *we’re* curious about on this topic, but we want to make sure we answer *your* questions, too. What would you like to see us find out about this issue?