Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to “Noon Wednesday.” I’m multimedia journalist Marisa Wojcik with “Here & Now.” Joining us today is Bridget Bowden. She’s a special projects reporter with Wisconsin Public Radio. She’s here to tell us about a new project that she’s working on called Beyond the Ballot. Bridget thanks for being here.

Bridget Bowden:

Thank you for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

What is Beyond the Ballot?

Bridget Bowden:

Beyond the Ballot is a project that the WPR newsroom is taking on this year. It’s a community engagement based reporting class. Reporting project, I mean. We have a goal of interviewing 500 people throughout the state over the course of the next few months leading up to this fall’s elections. We’ll be asking everyone the exact same set of questions. Then we’ll use those interviews to inform our election coverage this whole year. Hopefully we’ll learn somethings that we didn’t know by going in and talking to this many people.

Marisa Wojcik:

So this is kind of flipping the journalistic model on its head a little bit. Where did the idea come from, and what are you kind of hoping to come out of changing the format?

Bridget Bowden:

It is really different. Normally as reporters, you know, we keep up with the news. We keep up with what officials are saying, and we use that to decide what we’re going to do stories about. With this project we are going to be taking whatever the people tell us is important to them, and do stories about those things. It is a little bit flipping in on its head. We’re hoping for a couple of things. We hope that we find out about things that we didn’t know people cared about, and hopefully report on those issues. We’re also hoping to get a whole new group of people on our airwaves that we don’t have on our airwaves very often. So by interviewing 500 people, we’re hoping to meet all sorts of people across the state, and hopefully use them in our stories.

Marisa Wojcik:

So where and how are you finding people?

Bridget Bowden:

A couple of different ways. We are going to events. We actually started with the Wisconsin Public Television Garden Expo. We set up a table and did interviews there. Anywhere where there might be a large group of people. Some are festivals, farmer’s markets. We’re hoping to be at those events, and just talking to people at random. Whoever is willing to talk to us. The other way we are finding people is by deliberately seeking out people who we know we don’t hear from very often. This would be maybe approaching a class of students. Seeing if we can interview them, or a certain community group. Or even someones book club. We’ll approach them and ask if we can come do interviews.

Marisa Wojcik:

You said you’re hoping to talk to 500 people?

Bridget Bowden:

500 people, yeah.

Marisa Wojcik:

Okay, and where are you guys at right now?

Bridget Bowden:

We are at almost 100 interviews. We have 92 so far. We are moving right along. I’m really pleased with how it’s going so far.

Marisa Wojcik:

You think you’ll exceed your goal?

Bridget Bowden:

I won’t make any predictions right now, but if we make the goal I’ll be extremely happy.

Marisa Wojcik:

So you go out and you seek people out, and you conduct an interview. What happens after you conduct the interview? How do you take that information and where does it go?

Bridget Bowden:

After we are out in the field doing these interviews we’ll bring them back. We have photos of everyone and audio of everyone. We’ll sit down and think what was the most interesting part of these interviews? Who were the most interesting people? Did we learn anything new? Is there anything that surprised us? We’ll use that to write stories. Whether they’re for the radio or online. We’ve experimented with a bunch of different story formats in this project, which is really exciting. You’ll hear typical radio stories that you’d always hear on our air, but we’ve also done a couple of stories that didn’t have narration which is new for us. We’re playing around with it a little bit.

Marisa Wojcik:

You’ve talked to a lot of people. What have you heard so far?

Bridget Bowden:

A lot of different things. People are very different and have very different opinions and different things that are important to them. That’s one of the best parts of the project. Is that we’re getting such a wide group of people. I think the thing that surprised me the most so far is that people are really enthusiastic to tell their stories. I was expecting it to be a little bit like pulling teeth. You go up to someone and they’re trying to just enjoy their Saturday at an event, and you ask if we can talk to them for 10 minutes. I was expecting that to be a little bit hard, but people really want to talk to us. They don’t get asked what they think about these issues, or what they care about very often. People have been really excited to share their stories with us, which is great.

Marisa Wojcik:

What stories have stuck out with you?

Bridget Bowden:

I think one of my favorite interview sessions that I did so far was going to a high school government class. At Madison East High School. We went and we interviewed the students there. It was really interesting to hear from them, because many of them are either too young to vote. Or will be first time voters this fall. So they had a really unique perspective on some of the issues, which was cool.

Marisa Wojcik:

What kind of issues are you hearing about from people that you’re talking to?

Bridget Bowden:

So with those students at East, they were very concerned about guns. Most of them in the class had participated in the walkout, which was huge just a few months earlier. That was the main issue that they talked about. Across the state we’re hearing a lot of different things. I’ve heard everything from water quality to student loans. Healthcare costs. Even things like rural population loss. People are concerned about a lot of different things.

Marisa Wojcik:

So you’re not only, kind of, looking in one particular area of the state. You’re physically covering many, many parts.

Bridget Bowden:

Right, our goal is to get as many places as we can. We’re pretty well positioned to do that at WPR, because we have bureau reporters in cities across the state. They are involved in the project as well, and they’ll be doing interviews throughout the next few months. Our reporters in Superior and Green Bay and La Crosse and Eau Claire will all be going out for the project.

Marisa Wojcik:

It sounds like even if someone isn’t reached out to by a reporter, they can still call in. They can still go to the website, is that right?

Bridget Bowden:

Yeah, there are several different ways that people can reach out to us on our website, which is wpr.org/ballot. People can leave their stories there, and that will email it to us. We can maybe use that and reach out to you again. We also have a hotline that people can call, which is 877-782-8942. You can leave us a message that we might be able to use on the air.

Marisa Wojcik:

Very cool. Thank you so much for joining us.

Bridget Bowden:

Thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

If you like this interview, please share it. Please leave your comments below. If you want to learn more about the Beyond the Ballet project, visit wpr.org/ballot. If you want to see more “Here & Now” coverage and more from Wisconsin Public Television, visit wpt.org. Thank you for joining us on “Noon Wednesday.”