There’s already a lot of great work going on in the arenas of media transparency and engagement (we define the latter as productive conversation and collaboration with the community). We’ve begun compiling what we think of as a “cookbook” of practices for anyone who creates media. We are interested in practices that improve news and, at the same time, help the public better understand how news works.

What do we mean by cookbook? We want to help people who produce and share news to learn about work that has offered evidence of success. So people can cook up their own experiments, we provide how-to explainers, or “recipes.” We also include top educational programs you can promote in your communities or participate in yourselves and technology tools that help with fact-checking and verifying information.

Each best practice page explains what the practice is, who is behind it, why it works and how you can do it. Click on the image to see the PDF collection of best practices. 

The best practices team preparing the pages is Michele McLellan, writer Traci Angel and graphic designer Michelle D. Wise. Writers Ben DeJarnette and Simon Galperin also worked on the project.

We expect this page to keep growing as we learn of other practices and as media innovators invent, test, and prove out more of them. We compiled the first set of best practices into a downloadable cookbook for easy reference.

Have a best practice you want us to profile? Send us an email (newscollab@asu.edu) or Tweet us @news_collab . Please briefly (but clearly) explain what the practice is; tell us who is behind it and who is using it; with evidence, explain how you know it works. Is there research? Do user metrics back up your contention?; and if someone else wants to know how to do it, what are the basic steps?