Earlier this year, a team from Vermont Public joined five other organizations in participating in a live event sprint for alumni of the American Press Institute’s Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program. The goal of the five-month cohort was to help news organizations design and market live events within their communities. API also created a self-guided workbook for journalists who want to get started with live events. On a recent episode of the podcast Better News, Amy Zielinski, senior event producer for Vermont Public, discussed her station’s live events strategy and what it learned from participating in the sprint. Better News is produced by It’s All Journalism in partnership with API. This transcript is published here with their permission and has been edited for clarity.
Michael O’Connell, host, Better News: Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you get interested in news and events, and what led you to your current role at Vermont Public?
Amy Zielinski, senior event producer, Vermont Public: It goes back to a love of media. I grew up watching PBS, and my first job was actually with the PBS station in Detroit. So I really started on the television side of public media, worked my way through a number of different NPR and PBS stations, and after many years doing that, a couple years working in agriculture, I really wanted to move to Vermont. And I saw an events position advertised for Vermont PBS, and I was hired to come to Vermont and produce events. Since then, Vermont PBS has merged with Vermont Public Radio, also known as VPR, and we are now known as Vermont Public.
O’Connell: Does that mean that you’re planning events for both radio and television?
Zielinski: Correct. Yes. So we are a PBS and NPR station, among other things that we do. So yes, we are not just producing news events [but are] producing events that … literally could be for any topic, really could fit into the PBS and NPR mold.
O’Connell: Had you had any experience running or planning events before you came to Vermont Public?
Zielinski: I was an events manager for a farm, so I was doing farm-to-table events and community celebrations. I was a television producer for a while, and I really think that fits well into events. It’s a very similar kind of field where you’re coordinating a bunch of people around a shared goal and on a very certain time frame, because I was doing live television. So I feel like that’s very similar to producing events.
O’Connell: I’m sure that a lot of people listening to this are familiar with NPR, they’re familiar with PBS. But tell me a little bit about Vermont Public. What’s its mission? What’s its perspective on how it covers the community?
Zielinski: What is great about Vermont Public is that we are a statewide television and radio network. And in addition to Vermont, we also serve communities outside of Vermont, folks that live in Quebec that might live in eastern New York or western New Hampshire or northern Massachusetts, or literally anywhere with some of our podcasts and online streaming. So I really love that we have this Vermont focus. We are always speaking to folks that may just have a love of Vermont or are geographically close to Vermont. But in addition to NPR and PBS, we also have a really robust education department. So we focus a lot on working with teachers and educating students. And our events are really a big part of what we do. We have recently hired a second events producer, so we are making a bigger investment and getting out into the community and creating events that help build communities and help to strengthen the relationship that we have with Vermonters.
O’Connell: How would you describe the job of a senior event producer or event producer at Vermont Public? Day to day, what are you looking down the road at as far as these are some events we want to make sure that we touch on?
Zielinski: Every day is different, which is awesome. And again, there’s so many ways that we can go. Folks that are engaged with PBS and NPR, we like to call them lifelong learners. They often are really passionate about a lot of different topics. So recently we did events about birding. We’ve done events about gardening, cooking. So really running the gamut. We can focus on the British comedies on PBS. So … almost anything could fit into what we’re doing. So my goal is to serve our current audiences, our current members, making sure that we’re doing events that appeal to them, but also trying to reach new audiences, because obviously everyone in Vermont doesn’t necessarily listen to us or watch us or read our news. So [we’re] trying to come up with events that are really broad and invite folks that might not know us to come to an event, get to know us, and maybe that encourages them to get to listen deeper, to tune in, to check out our website, to maybe come to another event. It’s exciting. And it’s also a lot, because it’s not like … we’re just producing events for a very narrow audience. It’s really wide, which gives you a lot of freedom. But that freedom can be overwhelming because you’re like, where do I go next?
O’Connell: I can imagine a lot of things like this in media, when you’re planning something, it’s almost like you open yourselves up to including the entire world. You realize, no, we’re going to narrow this because we actually have to do this at a particular day and time and deliver something. What’s a typical successful event for Vermont Public? What events can you point to that say this really appealed to our audience?
Zielinski: I’ll list a couple of examples. One, PBS Kids is a big part of public television. So one event that we have a lot of success with is our PBS Kids Days. A character like Daniel Tiger will show up at, say, our local science center, and we’ll have a family fun day. And those are always super successful. Folks love to come out and meet these characters that their children love watching and learning from. We’ll do activities and giveaways. Those are usually wildly successful.
So that’s in the family category. We’ve had a lot of success bringing in NPR personalities. We recently did an event with Jenn White, the host of 1A on NPR. She came to Vermont and hosted a discussion about housing. Housing is a huge issue in the state of Vermont and around a lot of the country. And she hosted a panel discussion about that. We had an amazing audience for that event. We also last fall brought Ayesha Rascoe, another NPR host. She’s the host of Weekend Edition Sunday. Folks loved coming out. And when she came, we just talked to her and learned more about her as a person. Folks in the audience were able to ask her questions. Those kinds of events are great because it introduces our audiences to folks that they have maybe only listened to or seen their photos online, and it really creates a deeper relationship with the station and with NPR.
O’Connell: Let’s get to the meat of what we’re here to talk about. Tell me about the live event sprint program for Table Stakes alumni that you participated in.
Zielinski: It was really awesome. My boss, who is our director of marketing, was the Table Stakes alumni, and she had heard about it and forwarded it on to me saying, hey, this is coming up, what do you think? And also the application is due two days from now. I was like, yeah, we don’t focus a lot on journalism events, and I can’t really say why, but I was really intrigued because I said, we need to learn as an organization how to better produce events that are in conjunction with our newsroom. And I was inspired and said, let’s sign up for this. We were accepted, and we gathered our team together. And I was really happy that our executive editor, Brittany Patterson, joined our team because … essentially our newsroom leader was a part of this sprint. So we knew that we had her buy-in from the beginning that we were going to produce a series of events. But also she was going to learn right along with us the best practices for producing journalism-based events.
O’Connell: What was the journalism event series that you produced as part of the sprint?
Zielinski: We decided to do a series of community picnics. I will back up slightly to talk about our Citizens Agenda initiative, which is how we are approaching this year’s election season. Back at the end of January, we launched what was called the Citizens Agenda, where we were taking our cues from the public as to what we should be asking [political candidates] to talk about. We were saying, okay, folks, you are living this. Instead of us as reporters coming up with the questions for candidates, what do you want to hear? What issues are important to you? What questions should we ask on your behalf? And we really spent a lot of time using our own platforms — radio and TV and social media and website — asking those questions. We also produced postcards and gave them to town clerks. And we produced bookmarks and gave them to libraries and bookstores that, again, had this information. It said, hey, what do you want to hear from candidates for this election season? Let us know. Go to this website, click on this QR code and let us know.
We most recently partnered with Front Porch Forum, a hyperlocal web service that helps to create community on a very local level. They’re neighborhood forums. So we partnered with them to help us get the word out about this Citizens Agenda. So we’re doing that work. And then we said, OK, we want to have these community picnics, but we don’t just want to come into a town for the first time and say “We’re having a picnic, come on down.” So before we came to the towns, we made sure that we or our reporters went into these towns. Either we showed up at community events or we set up a table at a local general store or at the local transfer station. So we made sure that our reporters were on the ground talking to folks, finding out what was important to them.
One of the things we didn’t want to do is just parachute into a town and say, hey, Vermont Public is here, we’d love to talk to you. We wanted to make sure that we already had a little bit of a presence in these areas before we came and brought them a community picnic.
O’Connell: So what type of response did you have to the picnics?
Zielinski: We’ve only had one of three so far, and the first one, really happy with it. Our internal goal was to get 50% of the attendees to be new to us, folks that had never attended an event. They weren’t a member. They weren’t already engaged with us. And I’m happy to announce that [at] the first event, 47% of the folks were new to us. So that was really, really exciting and just shows that we did do a good job of getting the word out using channels besides our own, making sure that we had fliers up, and that we have already made a little bit of an impact in this area by letting them know who we are and that this event is happening.
O’Connell: I want to step back a second for the Citizens Agenda. We’re not at the election yet. Is that still going on? What is your audience telling you [about] the types of questions and stories they want to see?
Zielinski: We’re happy to announce that we have heard from folks in all 14 counties of Vermont, which was one of our goals. We’re really happy that we’ve had engagement. … The topics that really rose to the top are things like housing and education and environment. So we’re really seeing some themes come out, and that is helping us.
We actually have had our first couple of debates, and literally the questions that we asked the candidates came from folks in the communities around Vermont. That was so amazing. As opposed to the moderator coming up [with] questions, we were able to go to our database of Citizens Agenda questions and say “Person X from this town asked this question.” That was just really seeing the impact that the Citizens Agenda project has had. And it came to fruition when we hosted our first series of debates.
O’Connell: What do you think you learned out of planning the debate events and soliciting input from your audience, but also from your picnic events? What are some of the takeaways you had from a planning perspective but then also seeing it in action for your future planning?
Zielinski: For our first picnic, there [were] multiple things going on. We offered dinner, so there were essentially burgers for folks as sort of a carrot to bring them to our event. We had kids’ activities, like a bouncy house and cotton candy. We also had a roundtable discussion, and it was about a topic that was important to this community. And we also had our reporters there just sitting at tables, casually talking to people and getting their thoughts and recording them. So this event was multifaceted. One of our goals with this event was to use the audience to frame what was going to happen at the event, and we found out that folks were interested in hearing about the business community. So we gathered folks that are involved in business and had a roundtable discussion.
O’Connell: I’m just trying to figure out the logistics of this. You’re planning a picnic, but it’s going to be around what the audience is interested in hearing about. Was there preparation beforehand to figure out what the topic was so you made sure that there were people who were going to be available to discuss it? And if so, how did you get that information — as part of the flier system or however you were promoting it? Were you asking people to say, hey, what is it you want to hear about from us, from your community?
Zielinski: The Citizens Agenda created this database, so anyone that clicked through onto our website or left a phone message or spoke to a reporter in person, it’s all aggregated into this database that we can sort by county. This picnic was taking place in Franklin County, so we could sort the data by Franklin County and see what topics rose to the top. Our news director and one of our hosts put this panel together. So they saw that talking to the business community and talking about small businesses was important. So they arranged for this panel to come together.
O’Connell: Were you involved with some of the news side, the journalists’ side of your organization? An event is a thing that happens a particular time. Were there stories that came out of it? Were there reports or radio interviews?
Zielinski: Absolutely. So the roundtable discussion that we hosted was enjoyed and folks in the community learned from it, but then we also packaged it and shared it on the radio. So the whole statewide audience got to experience it, because you find that a problem is probably not just specific to one community, that all communities can benefit from it. So this discussion, while it was created just for these folks in Franklin County [and] in the town of St. Albans to experience, we recorded it, and it was able to be shared with the entire state. And it can boost the local programming that we are sharing on our radio and digital platforms.
O’Connell: That’s nice. What I like about that is not only are you engaging a particular community, but you’re creating content that addresses an issue that maybe other communities are interested in. So you’ve got people listening in from that perspective, but then you also have a radio story that will show that we’re going to have a picnic here. And in a month or two, this is the type of thing we talk about that helps you get more people to come to that event. That shows them what you’re able to do — maybe not that particular topic, but maybe there’s another topic of concern that they can go, “Oh yeah, I think that we should really be talking about this.” And then I would imagine your Citizen Agenda, they were able to provide some of that feedback.
Zielinski: Absolutely. That’s our goal. We want the citizens of Vermont to know that we are here for them. We are providing a service of news and information and entertainment, but we want them to know that we are here for them. We really serve all of them. We don’t have any other interest but making sure that we are giving the citizens of Vermont the information that helps them to live their lives and make informed decisions.
O’Connell: Going back to talk about the sprint program that you participated in, were there any lessons that you learned from participating that helped inform what you were doing?
Zielinski: We often would come up with event ideas and say, “Oh, we should do an event on topic X,” and then we would go to the newsroom and say, “Hey, we’re doing an event about this. Do you have a reporter that could help us with this?” And that wasn’t always the best way of going about it. Now, though, we have been working in conjunction with the news department. Our events are coming from them. They are the folks that are on the ground talking to folks. They are living the news. So now we are working with them in conjunction to come up with event ideas, or they’re telling us, hey, we want to do a live broadcast about topic X, can you help us get an audience for it? … The events team is in the marketing department. So as opposed to us driving the train, we’re taking our cues from them, working together to say, hey, we’d like to do an event. You know what our topics are. What are the things that we can work on together? That was one of my goals — how do we work better with our news team?
O’Connell: What I like about that is that it allows both the news team and the events team to leverage each other’s expertise to advance what they’re trying to do for both of their benefits. And that sounds like a win-win to me. … What advice would you give to other newsrooms who are thinking that maybe it’s time we should start doing events?
Zielinski: My biggest piece of advice is ask your audience what is important to them. What do they want to hear about? What do they want to talk about? What issues are keeping them up at night? I don’t think you have to go as far as we did, spend months doing outreach. But I mean, a survey, social media posts. Just ask folks what they want as opposed to guessing and hoping that they show up. I really love this model of engaging our audience from the beginning.
O’Connell: Excellent. So what was the public’s feedback about the picnic?
Zielinski: From the photos you’ll see lots of smiling faces from the families and kids that came [and] were able to have fun in a local park. But there’s the engagement that the audience had listening to the roundtable and sitting and speaking with our reporters. We were really just so happy that people gave up their time and were really engaged with us. And then as we always do, we send a post-event survey. … Someone said, “I really loved the event.” Someone said, “I love how the event was about the community and it involved kids.” So I think it’s one of those things, like, you don’t need to get a babysitter to come to one of our events. You know, you can bring the kids along. And it just makes it family-friendly. … One person said, “I really appreciate what you all did, and I hope to see it improve even more as time goes on.” That was nice. Yes, there’s always something to be learned from producing an event like this.