As we shared earlier this year, KCUR was one of 10 stations selected to participate in NPR's series, "Seeking Common Ground," which facilitated nearly 30 small groups of three to six people per session to try to understand how people think about community.
Community engagement producer Zach Perez represented KCUR for this project.
"We first reached out to people and communities that don't often appear in our content or our source logs," Perez explained. "We used a common set of questions for all of the sessions — we asked what they thought people from other communities did not understand about them, and what they wanted to learn about other people."
The sessions yielded hours and hours of taped conversations. As part of this project, they teamed up with a nonprofit affiliated with MIT, called Cortico, to help spot themes that ran across the conversations.
Cortico's AI tools helped the participating facilitators by analyzing the hours of tape the gathered. Rather than generating any content on its own, the tool helped search for patterns that could then be more deeply studied and written about by the reporters. ("This is in keeping with NPR's policy: Everything we do is written and edited by real people," noted Perez.)
One through-line was consistent throughout the sessions: The participants described being labelled, stereotyped or misunderstood. We heard this a lot, no matter where people lived, the demographic group they felt part of, or the jobs they have.
Alba Lopez from Kansas City, Kansas, said that some people believe her working-class neighborhood is a dangerous one. "Please don't listen to people wrong. Because they are wrong. They don't live where we live."
"I think one of the biggest opportunities this series represents is the chance to learn more about the life experiences of people we don’t ever see," Perez said. "We all know our own communities, this gives us a chance to listen to those who live outside them."
For more about the Seeking Common Ground project, click here.
