WASCO CO. — The University of Oregon (UO), in collaboration with the City of The Dalles via its Sustainable City Year Program (SCYP), is surveying how Wasco County residents find, trust, share, and use local news and civic information.
Andrew DeVigal, a UO journalism professor and director of the Agora Journalism Center, explained the assessment during a city council meeting on Oct. 26, which residents can fill out anonymously until Nov. 8 at bit.ly/dallesinfo for a chance to win a $25 gift card.
DeVigal and his students have collaborated with community partners, such as The Next Door Inc., to co-design and distribute the survey, which aims to diagnose potential holes in information sharing, with the ultimate goal of helping residents take part in local decision-making.
Focused distribution to communities that may lack access to or don’t subscribe to local media or other sources has been a key component. “We want to reach out to those that are generally unreachable as well as those who are reachable,” DeVigal said.
A public listening session will take place on Nov. 21, with UO students present, where community members will contextualize and discuss their responses. The results will be compiled into a public report that offers recommendations to city officials, community partners, and residents.
Over the last eight years, UO SCYP has provided the same assessment to seven communities across Oregon. They discovered one principal question: “Where do we find news we can actually use?” DeVigal explained. “There was so much more fragmentation when it comes to access to local information that people didn’t know where to find it.”
The seven reports illuminated eight dimensions of a civic story: civic engagement; trustworthiness and transparency; accountability and power; equity and inclusion; complexity and nuance; solutions orientation; civic impact; and information access.
Each dimension is touched on within its latest anonymous assessment here in the Gorge, which takes approximately 10 minutes and is available online by phone or computer, or on paper.
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