How Hearken’s Jennifer Brandel Thinks About Building Real Engagement

Jennifer Brandel is best known for being the founder and CEO of Hearken, an audience listening platform that evolved ten years ago out of the call-in format “Curious City” at Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ. The radio show and then Hearken pioneered audience engagement long before it became a pillar of journalism. 

It was a fundamental paradigm shift: Journalists involve users by no longer thinking in terms of articles or channels as products, but rather in terms of continuous processes that support constructive dialogue, regardless of whether this results in an article, a broadcast, or a town hall meeting. 

Success parameters changed from circulation figures, ratings, or click counts to trust, relevance, paying members and sustainable audience revenue. Since 2015, the company has worked with 300 newsrooms from the BBC to three-person operations in West Texas.

Now Brandel has handed off Hearken's day-to-day operations to her team to focus on exploring innovative audience engagement models as a Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Her vision: Finding new ways for journalism to survive in an era when AI threatens to replace the human connections that build trust.

This week, I met Brandel on the Stanford campus with a group of German media executives (the Chefrunde Study tour which I am co-leading) where she explained and discussed with us her vision of audience engagement in the age of AI. This post is based on our meeting. 

At the core of Brandel’s ideas is a reframing: Scalls it AE instead of AI. Actual experience instead of artificial intelligence.

When Brandel talks about engagement, she rejects what most people in media mean by the term. Clicks, shares, likes, reposts: "That's really consumption. That's not what I mean when I talk about engagement."

Brandel defines engagement as building a mutual, responsive relationship with people on a human level. Not people as data points, but as complex individuals who co-create journalism alongside publishers. This means learning from one another and co-evolving with the audience a newsroom serves.

This approach emerged from her time as a reporter at WBEZ in Chicago. She realized journalism's design creates an imperfect system: A newsroom tries to serve an entire city, but only people with a narrow band of experience make the editorial decisions. The process she developed asks: What questions do you have that you'd like us to investigate? Not opinions, not tips, but genuine information gaps where people search and come up empty or find information they cannot verify.

Brandel describes how this model works in practice. During one week at WBEZ's Curious City series, about ten people wrote in asking why water fountains in Chicago parks were running 24/7. "They were wondering, why are we wasting water in the water fountains? This is strange," Brandel recalls.

The reporters made a call to investigate. They discovered the park district was flushing water because lead levels had become so high that officials were trying to get toxin levels down to EPA-safe standards. The park district was not trying to make anyone notice, but they had water fountains running continuously.

That question broke a story that has continued for eight years in Chicago: replacing lead pipes, tracking which neighborhoods have them, understanding the infrastructure crisis. The mayoral election saw Rahm Emanuel decide not to run in part because of the cost of replacing all the lead pipes. "And that was just broken by our little cute local series, just by asking, what do you wonder about," Brandel says.

The story started with a question from residents who noticed something off in their daily lives. It ended in accountability journalism grounded in the experiences of people the newsroom served.

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The model can scale dramatically. When the BBC deployed Hearken embeds across five bureaus, including in Africa, India and sports desks, they tested it during breaking news. Right after Brexit broke in 2016, they put an embed on their site asking for questions.

They received 1,600 questions in the first two hours.

The BBC took the embed down because they had enough information, some of which they wouldn't have thought about. As BBC reporters, they all had citizenship. But the questions revealed angles they had missed: What does Brexit mean for non-citizens? 

The BBC was able to get a strong FAQ spread in that first hour. The volume demonstrated both the appetite for this kind of journalism and the information gaps that existed even in wall-to-wall Brexit coverage.

Brandel sees AI as bringing dehumanization, making everything immediate rather than relational, replacing longstanding durable relationships with transactions. "It's multiplying our degree of transactionality exponentially," she says.

This concern has empirical support. Research published in 2025 found that while AI-generated journalism gains acceptance, trust increases significantly when content is clearly labeled and ethically overseen. Human involvement remains vital for narrative authenticity and emotional depth. The study emphasizes that trust stems not just from factual accuracy but from transparency about the creation process.

Another 2024 study found that only 23% of Americans believe national news organizations prioritize the public's best interests. Content creators who build direct relationships with audiences through transparency and responsiveness often generate more trust than institutional journalism.

"I think of it like fire," Brandel says about AI. "It can be used to burn down villages. It can be used to cook your dinner. It really depends on how you deploy it."

She worries newsrooms will use AI to do the hard relational work so they can crank out more content. "I don't know anyone who's like, I need more content," she says. "They're saying I need more relevant useful things to my life, not there's not enough information in the world."

The bright line for AI deployment, according to Brandel, is this: At what point does replacing something you do with AI actually weaken the relationships you're building with the people you're serving and between them and each other?

In the US, media is now less trusted than lawyers and other professions that have had low trust for a long time, Brandel notes. Studies like The 2024 Reuters Digital News Report reveal time and again that most people think in similar terms about what makes news trustworthy: transparency, high standards, freedom from bias, and treating people fairly.

But many do not feel they are getting it. "You're not gonna get there by saying, this story was powered by AI," Brandel says. Building trust requires people interacting with the public in an embodied way. "It's not a scalable solution. It's not sexy, but it is durable and repeatable."

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Brandel identifies three key learnings from 10 years of community-driven journalism:

At Stanford, Brandel is thinking about how journalism might work differently. She asks: What does it mean that news is designed to be consumed as an individual but the problems we face are collective?

"What would it look like to design news or journalistic information for collectives to consume and to metabolize and to take action on rather than everyone getting it on their personal devices and feeling overwhelmed, dejected, useless?" she asks.

She imagines newsrooms moving away from daily updates toward something like old-fashioned newsreels: gathering on Saturday nights to spend four hours going through top local issues, splitting into discussion groups, connecting people doing related work. "I know a lot of newsrooms would probably say, not our job, we're advocates now, this is impure, this is bad," she says. "But I'm looking from a practical point of view of how do we survive as a species, not as a newsroom."

Brandel's most provocative idea: "How might you make an unkillable newsroom? I think there's kind of a joke in the answer and that it's not a newsroom."

To make an unkillable newsroom, she suggests, requires moving away from the concept of a centralized corporate body. "It is more of a distributed network of relational trust that people are sharing information on that maybe has to be monetized in different ways."

This means journalism's functions might need to be disintermediated and separated in society, joining forces with libraries, educational institutions, and community action organizations. "Is it going to become more of a team sport that's a web rather than like a hub that you try to bring everyone to?"

Legacy publishers face particular trouble, she argues. Small nimble startups that think relationally with their communities have more hope. But the fundamental question remains: Can news be better used for mutual aid and support, not just reporting what happened at meetings but helping people take care of themselves and their neighbors?