What more can local newsrooms do for civic education? Lessons from LAist's 2024 ballot workshops

LAist goes big on local elections. For the past few years, we’ve made our coverage more expansive and voter-centric with each cycle, even for the most obscure down-ballot races. It’s paid off in a big way, bringing in record-breaking digital traffic, memberships, donations and a growing reputation as Southern California’s best and most comprehensive local voter resource.

In the lead-up to the November 2024 election, we tried something new: bringing these voter resources directly to classrooms in the form of a workshop.

LAist piloted this workshop to help community members better understand how to research the local races on their ballot. We conducted it for more than 200 students in October, and the feedback was incredibly encouraging: Not only did participants tell us the workshops made them more prepared to vote in local races, but they also overwhelmingly said they were more likely to vote too.

The wheels in our heads have been turning ever since. What more can we do with these workshops in upcoming elections? And what can they do not just to engage people around elections, but also provide more local civic education in general?

We'll dig deeper into these questions below. But first, here’s a closer look at what we did.

A presentation slide from LAist's local ballot research workshops.

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Courtesy Philip Goodrich

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UCLA

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The workshop: Understanding your local ballot

We designed a workshop that was an interactive, 90-minute session about how to research your ballot. We intentionally steered away from the presidential race everybody was talking about and instead focused in on the other 99% of the ballot that was all about local offices.

This was a natural fit with LAist’s work. Our core election product, Voter Game Plan, is meant to help people filling out their ballots who are seeking information about candidates running for local offices — info that in some cases can be nearly nonexistent elsewhere (think local judges, for example).

This workshop would extend that service further, helping people who weren’t even sure what the local offices were, let alone how to decide who to vote for. What do some of these local offices even do? How do you figure out who these candidates are and what they stand for? How would a local ballot measure affect your day-to-day life?

Here’s how the runthrough typically went:

1. Icebreaker: This was a quick fill-in-the-blank prompt: “Filling out my ballot makes me feel [blank] because [blank].” That let us know what the vibes were: Did people feel excited about voting? Anxious? Indifferent? And it helped us calibrate the tone of the rest of the session.
2. Mini-presentation: A quick 10-minute overview of why local offices matter to your day-to-day life.
3. Here's your ballot. What questions do you have? We gave everyone a sample ballot with one race on it, exactly as it appeared on the actual ballot — no context, just names and titles. Participants took 10 minutes to write down all the questions they would want to know in order to figure out how to make a decision.
4. Research! Gathering in small groups, people used whatever device they had on hand — a phone, a laptop or just talking with their neighbors — to figure out the answers to their questions.
5. Discuss. We regrouped to talk about what everyone found. How easy or hard was it to figure out the answers to their questions? What information was available and what wasn't? Then our team went through the questions we heard most often and how we as journalists went about figuring out the answers (many of which end up in our local voter guides).
6. Repeat. We did the exercise a second time, giving everyone a local ballot measure to decipher, research and discuss. People found this to be a notably different experience. This time there was a concrete outcome at stake, rather than vague possibilities of what a candidate might or might not do if elected into office.

We set up sessions at five locations in the lead-up to the November election, all scheduled in October 2024:

• East L.A. College, a community college.
• Cal State Los Angeles, a state college (one in-person session and one virtual).
• My Friend's Place, a local organization serving unhoused youth.
• University of Southern California, a private university.
• Otis College, a small private arts college.

Most of these sessions were arranged through preexisting relationships we had with faculty or staff members through LAist’s years of engagement work.

This workshop doesn’t have to be limited to schools, but classrooms were a natural environment to try this out. Faculty wanted to find ways to engage students with the election, and we wanted to better understand what younger voters — especially those who weren’t already in LAist’s existing audience — needed to make their decisions.

We tried these sessions in front of groups of all sizes — the largest one had about 180 students, while the smallest had just seven — all with different levels of familiarity and interest in local elections.

What participants told us

The overall feedback we heard from participants told us something really exciting — not only did the workshop help students feel more prepared to vote, but it also made them more willing to vote.

We heard this feedback in two ways: verbally during the sessions themselves, and through an anonymous online survey we distributed after the fact.

Out of about 225 students who participated in the workshops, 49 filled out the survey.

We asked everyone to rate how prepared they felt about voting before the workshop, on a scale of 1 to 5 — 1 being not at all prepared and 5 being very prepared. On average, students gave a rating of 2.3.

We asked them to rate their preparedness again after the workshop. The average jumped to 3.9.

In another question, we asked people to tell us whether they agreed with the following statement: "After this workshop, I am now more likely to vote in the Nov. 5 election."

Of the group, 42 out of 49 respondents — 85.7%  —  said they agreed or strongly agreed. Six were neutral. One strongly disagreed, although they wrote in comments elsewhere they were already planning to vote.

In open-ended responses, most of the participants described the workshop as informative and helpful. One mentioned it “made me comfortable in asking questions and allowing myself to not feel embarrassed about being confused”  — something we definitely aimed for.

The verbal feedback we heard during the session was encouraging too:

• Two students said they felt “better” after the workshop because they had a stronger idea of what one of the (very confusing!) ballot measures meant.
• One student who initially said he felt disconnected from the election because the presidential pick wouldn’t affect him either way later said he felt more interested in researching local measures.
• At My Friend’s Place, an organization that serves unhoused youth, attendees learned about Measure A, a county measure to raise the sales taxes to fund homeless services and affordable housing. Most told us they had never heard of the measure before, and one participant asked mid-presentation how to vote on it.

What we learned about LAist's election coverage

Not all feedback was glowing, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable. In fact, the other comments we heard were incredibly useful — and highlighted more information gaps for our coverage to help fill. Here are a few of our takeaways:

• We need to help people feel less anxious about elections. Many told us the election made them anxious — how do you know if you’re making the “right” choice? The workshop itself didn’t do much to ease that anxiety. What else can we newsrooms do to address that? One possibility: Look for clearer ways to follow the people we elect and their actions in office, so that people can better understand the outcomes of their choices and build on that understanding with each election cycle. (This is something LAist is actively working on!)
• We should do what we can to make the research easier. One student said she felt disheartened by how much work it took to research just one race on a local ballot, especially for those without a college education. What more can we do as a newsroom to make the process easier for people, especially across different education backgrounds?
• Don’t skimp on the basics. During a discussion of one ballot initiative on whether to overhaul rent control laws in California, students asked questions like, “What’s rent control?” and “How do landlords price their apartments, anyway?” These questions led to great discussions and helped us realize there was a lot more groundwork we needed to lay for the average voter before discussing the ballot measure at play.
• People are interested in local issues. That doesn’t mean they’ll seek out the information. The most productive, engaging sessions we had were the ones in which attendance was mandatory for participants. Compared to those who voluntarily came to the workshop, mandatory participants were much less likely to be regular news readers or follow the big issues we discussed. Yet the mandatory sessions had more active conversations and more curiosity from participants about the underlying issues they were being asked to vote on. News organizations have a major opportunity to engage with these community members who are less likely to follow our work. We can provide directly helpful information, get them closer to the local issues that affect their lives and perhaps even convert them to future supporters — if journalists can find more ways to get in front of them.

LAist's Brianna Lee conducts a local ballot research workshop at Otis College in October 2024.

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David Rodriguez

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LAist

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Bridging local news and civic education: What’s next?

We talk a lot about journalism as essential to civic engagement — getting people involved with their communities, fostering dialogue, holding officials accountable and empowering residents to vote.

The workshops showed us that there’s also a lot of room for journalism to do more in local civic education  —  helping people understand how local governments work, unpacking the basics of local issues like rent, and drawing clearer connections between actions like voting and the policies that shape our day-to-day lives.

LAist is thinking hard about ways we can use workshops to bring some of our other reporting closer to communities.

What about a workshop about building new housing in L.A.? A local civics workshop for high schoolers? What about ballot research workshops for specific groups, such as seniors, new citizens or formerly incarcerated voters?

We're actively exploring all these possibilities — and more.

• If you’re a local newsroom, educator or civic organization that wants to chat about anything similar you’re doing or thinking about, I’m always happy to talk! Email: blee@scpr.org.
• Does your organization want to financially support our work, which better equips voters to make decisions and become more engaged with issues in their communities? Email: grants@scpr.org.
• Empower more community-focused reporting by becoming an LAist member today at LAist.com/give.