New year rarely feels as joyful as it should. The idea of a fresh start – something uplifting, motivating, freeing – seems, in practice, to result in denial with a side order of beating yourself up. So this year, instead of cutting something out, how about taking something up?
Later this month, we’ll be launching a new podcast series exclusively for Members, in which Guardian journalists will debate the topics you think important, and answer questions submitted by you. We’re hoping it might be your new monthly habit for 2017.
The podcast, We Need to Talk About…, will be yours to shape. We know from your emails and letters that you are incredibly knowledgeable and care deeply about a wide range of issues – political, environmental, cultural, and beyond – so we want you to help set the agenda for the podcast: to determine what exactly we need to talk about.
We Need to Talk About… will include conversations and features recorded exclusively for the podcast, and audio from special live events, as well as featuring your voices. For each podcast we’ll bring together Guardian Members and journalists to discuss the big news issues of the moment alongside the topics you feel are under-reported or deserve more attention.
Some of these live events will take place at the Guardian’s offices in London, but others will happen elsewhere in the UK, as well as in the US and Australia. We hope that means many Members will be able to join us in the next 12 months at these live debates.
But we also hope that, wherever you are based in the world, you’ll join us on the podcast if you can’t make it to an event in person. I’ll be working with Guardian producer Stuart Silver to bring you a monthly audio programme that features the most interesting points from the event, along with thoughts from Members on how the panel tackled the thorny issues and your ideas for solving them.
But most importantly, we’ll be featuring your questions in both the live event and the podcast. You can submit questions to me via email at weneedtotalkabout@theguardian.com, or fill in the form below. Do please leave us your phone number, whichever way you send your question – we might like to give you a ring, chew it over, and record it.
For those who dive straight into the comments on the website, or go first to the letters section, this idea that readers have interesting and illuminating contributions to make to the Guardian will hardly be news. But through Membership we’ve been looking for ways to amplify Members’ voices, give them more active participation in the Guardian, and bring journalists and readers closer together.
We’ve been doing that through collaborative reporting projects such as The View from Middletown, in which Gary Younge spent a month in Muncie, Indiana ahead of the US election, and Labour & Liverpool, where Ewen MacAskill dug into debates around the future of the UK’s Labour party. Both these extended series had readers at their hearts – we asked you to guide us on where to go, who to talk to, what to pursue.
We hope the We Need to Talk About… podcast allows us to hear more from you, and for journalists and Members to work more closely together. At this political and cultural moment, in particular, it feels crucial for the media to broaden the range of experiences and insights it gives voice to. I am looking forward to talking with you – please don’t be shy in joining in.
As a first step I’d love to hear about the topics you think we should tackle in the podcast. We regularly ask Members for your views on how we should cover stories such as Brexit, Trump’s America and the changing world of work. Your responses are often illuminating. So tell us, what does the Guardian need to spend more time reporting? What could we cover better or differently? Are there issues that you’d really like to discuss with other Members? Essentially: what do you think we really need to talk about?
You can be sure those topics will form the basis of our future events and podcasts. But with our first audio programme due later this month, we’ve had to plan ahead. Many Members have contacted us already about the subject of climate change, and the importance of keeping the issue at the top of the news agenda. In a recent survey of Members, the environment was one of the topics you said you wanted the Guardian to cover in more depth. So in late January, you can expect to hear from me, other Guardian journalistsand your fellow Members in We Need to Talk About… Climate Change.
We’ll be recording part of the podcast at a special panel debate on 19 January in London – reserve your place here – and, whether or not you can attend the live event, we’d love you to contribute to the discussion.
There are two ways you can do that: by sending us questions for the panel, and by telling us about how you are responding to climate change. If you are employed or volunteer in this area, you might like to tell us more about your work, and we’d love to hear from Members who are trying to make changes in their personal lives. You might only be taking a small step – but if all of our tens of thousands of Members are taking such steps, then together we might make an impact. By sharing your actions with others, you can help us all take action.
I look forward to hearing from you. Do get in touch.
- Vicky Frost is the Guardian’s deputy membership editor. The first episode of We Need to Talk About…, will be available late January
