Not so long ago, there was widespread hope that news could become an exciting, engaging, and enriching two way experience for reporters and the audience; now, too many of us are in the bunker, not reading the comments. What can be done? What should be done? What would that job description look like?
Yes, absolutely. Here are some instructions on how to add to this repository: Here's a beginner's guide. Just substitute this repository for the one used as an example in the tutorial.
If that feels like too much, you can just click Issues and let me know what's on your mind. You'll need a (free) Github account to do so.
If that still feels like too much, summon me on the Twitter, where I am @lisawilliams.
Intro
We believe that we cannot have a better world without a better journalism, and we believe that we cannot have a better journalism without doing a better job forging deep & lasting connections with the people we serve.
Although we believe that building community is tied to our mission, we also know that it is tied to the long-term viability of our news organizations. The value of pageviews is driven down every year by click-driven juggernauts like Facebook and Buzzfeed. Few regional or even national news organizations can be competitive in the pageviews arms race. Because the pageviews arms race is a race to the bottom, both in terms of quality and economically, we do not want to base our work or our business on it.
But we do have to pay the bills. So if we're not driving pageviews to drive advertising revenue, then what? Ultimately, we must convert some number of the people who consume our work into supporters of our work, and that rests on excellent, energetic, and mission-driven engagement with the people who care about our work the most.
A person in charge of community engagement for our organization will:
(This is written from the point of view of an NPR affiliate, but could be any news organization)
What to put here: How news creates the public space, the medium upon which community forms.
This is an offshoot of Do Read The Comments, a similar collection specifically about reforming and reclaiming one component of online community -- comments -- from their current slough of despond.
Here are things I am reading and noting as I think this through. They may be of interest to you too. Have more? Submit them here.
Melody Kramer's If I Ran A Station is a cornucopia of engagement ideas, from running classes, to having public recording stations, to personalization, to...well, just go read the whole thing.
I write this in 2015, and it is remarkable to me how old many of these essays are. It feels in part as though we've passed on beyond community, like it's a missed opportunity. True? -- LW
"We search for new business models that involve paywalls, more video, the iPad, and wealthy donors, while the most powerful emerging business driver in the new economy is community."
Community: A New Business Model for News Michael Skoler, writing in NiemanLab, 2011
If you ever write a blog post, article or content piece which is open to comments, you may sometimes be dismayed by the comments which follow it. You may have deserved them. You may not. But people being rude to you in public is never nice, is it? So rather than feeling depressed and downhearted about the public discourse surrounding your efforts, you can ameliorate any negative feelings by simply using the alternative comment scoring grid below...
For news outlets in the twenty-first century, engagement means somehow getting audiences invested enough in the outlet's journalism to make a habit of coming back -- and converting that attention into revenue that pays the bills.
Engaged Journalism: Connecting With Digitally Empowered News Audiences Jake Batsell, 2015 (book)
For that effort, API will create a flexible “toolkit” for putting on a news organization-run community event that discusses a local issue, including an event guide and flexible program.
API is creating a toolkit to help news organizations run community events, Kevin Loker, American Press Institute
This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages...So it falls to us to make sure that isn't all that happens.
The Shock of Inclusion Clay Shirky, writing in 2010
The long-term sustainability of local news depends on deepening journalists’ engagement with communities. Through shifts in technology, economics and newsroom processes, the public has become increasingly central to journalism as creators, consumers and collaborators.
Declaration of Dependence Molly DeAguiar and Josh Stearns, writing in the blog of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, 2015
Creating in-roads for community participation and giving people more power to contribute to local journalism efforts is complex and time intensive. However, the end result can be a public that is more engaged in their communities and in supporting local news.
Creating Journalism With Community, Not For Community Josh Stearns, Local News Lab, Medium, 2015
Engagement is the job of every journalist, Meg says, but her primary contacts in the newsroom are folks called community coordinators. They’re spread around the desks in the newsroom, focused on content areas. Their job is basically to be a bridge between editor and user. They’re part host, part researcher, part social media manager, part evangelist for user ideas.
What engagement means to the Guardian's Meg Pickard Joy Mayer, writing in 2010
Appropriately, a lot of what we teach in journalism school is about the craft of gathering information and telling stories.
But too often missing is a discussion of who it’s all for.
Who wants it? Who is it helping? Who will seek it out? Who will pay for it? Who gets to decide what “good journalism” is?
If we want a future full of relevant, well-funded journalism, we have to be teaching students to ask those questions.
From idea to distribution, teaching an expanded lifecycle for a community news story Joy Mayer, 2014
(Have decided that I must basically read every post on Joy Mayer's blog -- LW)
But there’s opportunity within the empty quadrants – how could users/readers get involved before publication? And how could staff/journalists continue to be involved following publication?
Publishing process and opportunities for community collaboration Meg Pickard, writing in 2011
Any relevant twenty-first-century newsroom needs someone whose chief responsibility is to advocate for the audience, whether that person is a community engagement editor, social media manager, or, even better, has a position higher up the chain of command. This newsroom audience czar should have real internal clout, unlike many of the newspaper ombuds or reader representatives of years past, whose presence often was made known only in a weekly op-ed column. “I need somebody who actually is on my command desk, fighting for the audience and what they want at every point in the newsgathering process,” said Alison Gow, editor of the Daily Post in North Wales. Gow created the new position of head of audience engagement in May 2013, replacing the less powerful role of community editor because she wanted somebody “coming at it from a completely different perspective and quite possibly saying, “That story that you think is so great is actually repelling people’”
Alison Gow, quoted in Jake Batsell's book Engaged Journalism: Connecting With Digitally Empowered News Audiences 2015
I am grateful to the people who read through this and offered their thoughts. I have written to quite a few of you and will note your contributions here (with your permission, of course).
"It feels like we forget to think about how to engage those affected & interested often. It ends up making it impossible for management to understand why a well-built community may be upset when something changes."
Melody contributed links to two pieces of her own in this issue, which you can find in the Reading List and Hors Categorie
One concept you might also want to incorporate is the idea of audience advocacy. Karen Workman talks about this on page 47 of the book, as does Alison Gow on page 76 ... the idea of empowering an "audience czar" with real decision-making clout in the newsroom. Quotes from Jake's work can be seen in the Reading List.
Michael Skoler of PRI had this to add:
I wonder if you might go a step further. The description calls for someone to create partnership with the community. But what about creating service to the community?
I mean service not in a charitable sense, but in a business sense. While I have lived inside the public radio membership model most of my career, I have always thought it was limited because it depends on people wanting to donate to us rather than on needing to pay us in return for getting valuable service that is too important to go without. The first is choice, the second necessity.
I see our journalism as the attractant that builds a community of shared interests - you know this well from your own work. What happens once people feel part of a community is where engagement and service really start. I would want someone to really dive into the unmet needs that the community, or communities, have that we could fulfill using our ability to organize information and be a trusted facilitator. Perhaps when you say “make membership meaningful in a digital context” you are talking about making it “obviously valuable using digital tools.”
In my mind, there are two types of responsibilities: 1) Connecting - helping station news staff meet and converse and respond to the audience day-to-day by email, social media, phone; drawing people into discussion of stories online or in person; holding events with presentations, speakers or debates; getting audience story ideas as a driver of coverage or creation of new shows; asking and measuring whether news coverage is fitting the interests of the community. This is about strengthening the sense of community.
2) Serving - creating products and services based on what we know about the community. This can be as mundane as creating babysitter rating and scheduling services in a community with lots of young parents or as big as finding ways to bring people of different races together in a tense community around shared issues and events (kids sports or summer camp forums or volunteer matching.) Many of these services can be done easily with digital tools and could be tied to being a “member.” I am a fan of events revenue, too, and the underwriting opportunities they provide, a la Texas Tribune. WNYC has even held singles events with hot bands and good food to help people meet other singles who share a love of public radio.
The public radio discount card (a membership card shown at various local businesses would get you a 10-20% discount) was a step toward providing a measurable value to membership. In a digital age, we can go so much further. I would want to hire someone who is thinking a bit more in this business/service mode than in mainly a soliciting donations mode. You probably intended that. I’m not sure it comes through as clearly as you might want.
Here's where we put the big list of potential avenues for greater/higher quality engagement.
More to come here. Do you have anything to add?
More to come here. Do you have anything to add?
More to come here. Do you have anything to add? Recipes and existential questions belong in this section. These are the high mountains, the difficult to scale problems. Let's not just ignore them. Let us gaze upon their majesty, or shiver in their icy shadow as our mood suits us.
Melody Kramer's "What's the point of local?" asks why have local stations at all. This is an existential question for every local or regional publication. In the age of the web, tiered distribution models where local outlets rebroadcast/reprint material from a national source are unlikely to be defensible: users can go straight to the source, eliminating the middleman. So local businesses must have something of value to local audiences that is not easily reproduced by faraway, more centralized organizations who may be able to do so with greater resources or at a lower cost, or both. So what is that, anyway? More on this later.