If you’re a journalist, you’ve undoubtedly gotten this email. A story publishes about a utility rate increase, a rezoning, an industrial permit, and a reader writes back with the question: What can I do about this?
At Planet Detroit, our environmental and health newsroom focusing on Southeast Michigan, we decided to start answering that question with civic action boxes. For the first year, it was a manual process. Nina, managing editor Dustin Blitchok and our reporters spent 45 to 60 minutes per article figuring out which government body had jurisdiction, when it met next, whether a comment period was open and which community organizations were already working on the issue. We formatted all of it into an action box at the bottom of the story.
They took time, but readers used them. They submitted comments to the Michigan Public Service Commission, showed up at water authority board meetings and wrote to tell us they hadn’t known they were allowed to participate. The boxes worked. But the workflow didn’t — not for a newsroom as small as ours.
The Civic Action Builder is the tool we built to close that gap, and it’s what we’ll spend our RJI fellowship year making usable for any newsroom or journalist.
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