I spent last year at RJI studying audience engagement — reading, talking, interviewing, writing, more reading — and ended that year motivated to put what I’d learned into practice.

Luckily, the job I came back to was in a newsroom built on experimentation, with colleagues willing to go along on the engagement ride.

In August, we kicked off the Missourian’s community outreach team, made up of students in a class I teach called Participatory Journalism. (The class has existed for years and was developed by Clyde Bentley, also an RJI fellow.) This year, the focus of the class broadened to include more ways the relationship between journalists and their communities are changing.

The underlying principle lies in a diagram created by Meg Pickard at The Guardian, which crystallized my goals.

The team’s tasks are diverse. We started out with some specific goals, succeeded at some, failed at a few and adapted others. We made up a lot as we went along, and a spirit of experimentation and assessment guided us.

I want to share some highlights from our first four months, and I’d welcome your ideas, feedback and questions.

Handouts.

The low-tech option is often the right one. On three occasions we distilled coverage or resources into a one- or two-page handout and took it out into the community. The underlying goal here was to identify who would most want and need some information and then to take the content directly to them, rather than hope they found it on their own.

— 9/11 parent resource: Our team reported a story about how to talk to kids about 9/11 with the intention of distributing hard copies. We got permission from after-school programs, daycare centers and the public library, and showed up at soccer picture day and some coffee shops. In all, we distributed 800 handouts. Parents and proprietors were surprised in some cases, but almost universally enthusiastic and grateful for the resource.

— City Council budget talks: With a reporter and editor, we distilled a week’s worth of coverage to a potentially contentious (and definitely well-attended) budget meeting. Our goal was to put facts in the hands of people who were having emotionally responses to controversial proposed changes. We took 100 copies, ran out and had people asking for more.

— School redistricting: When proposals were announced for new public school boundaries, we summarized the key points and key coverage, then took about 600 copies combined to several elementary schools to hand out as kids were picked up.

INVESTMENT: It cost roughly $30 to print these three batches combined (0.02 cents per page times 1,500 pages). Also, 8-15 hours each (of my time and combined student time) in repackaging and distribution.

ANALYSIS: Success can be partially measured in community reactions and awareness. People were surprised we went to the effort, pleased to have the information and, in some cases, helping us distribute further. Especially for 9/11, it’s safe to assume that of those 800 copies, at least half actually (conservatively) made it into the hands of people who would both find the information useful and be otherwise unlikely to find our content. That’s outreach. The external benefits in this case are extended reach, community awareness and community goodwill. The internal benefit is an awareness of this delivery method as a valid option for information sharing.

Analytics reporting.

Real-time analytics from Chartbeat; projected on the wall of the Columbia Missourian newsroom.

We began producing two analytics reports, one for overall traffic and one for local traffic. That represents a big step toward more sophisticated analytics reporting. Some highlights of what we learned can be found in this presentation. We began tracking the effect of social media on traffic. We also started using Chartbeat, a sophisticated real-time analytics service. We project real-time data on the wall of the newsroom, and that has raised the general awareness of the room.

 INVESTMENT: Four hours a week by one outreach team member preparing the weekly report, and another four spent by another team member on longer term analysis.

ANALYSIS: Based on our use of google analytics, we know more than we did about our audience, and specifically our local audience. We are working more closely with the business side to help them understand who we serve. We have at times used the analytics to make decisions about what information users are looking for and adjust our coverage based on it. Big steps will come next, to get more sophisticated about our analytics reporting and more strategic about what we do with the information.

Social media use.

We had a goal of making our Facebook and Twitter accounts more consistent, more social, more conversational, more productive (in terms of referrals), more responsive to users, and more useful to the newsroom. We also wanted to reflect back to the community what people are saying about the things we cover.

— We’ve used Storify to reflect what regular people are saying about news topics (such as the first snowfall and a new UM System president and #freetotweet day) and also for weekly peeks into football players’ tweets, and several of those files have showed up on the site’s most-read lists. Those files are reflections of the nature of social media, reflecting what people are saying, not just distributing links.

— We’ve created several Twitter lists (including one for MU football folks and one for media in SEC towns) that could be a valuable resource. Unfortunately, we’ve done a poor job publicizing them.

A crowdsourced Facebook photo album of staff and reader photos of Columbia in the fall.

— We’ve had a few successful collaborative efforts, the most awesome of which is the CoMo Fall Facebook photo album, which generated more contributions and interaction than anything else we tried.

INVESTMENT: Significant. There’s no way to quantify the hours spent between my team and the Interactive Copy Editing desk on social media this semester. It would be the equivalent of a part-time employee, probably.

ANALYSIS: Referral traffic is way up. Traffic from Twitter grew 104 percent between August and December. We responded to most of the comments and @ replies to us that merited responses, though we still have much growth to do in how we use social media to listen to what the community is talking about. Traffic is high to the stories we do that aggregate comments or reaction.

Peeking behind the scenes of the newsroom.

We’ve offered users glimpses of newsroom life and plans. We published three behind-the-scenes videos (about a murder trial, the football press box, and changes in newspaper production) intended to personalize some individual people and be transparent and inviting about newspapering. We also looked for ways to share what we were working on ahead of time, including posting a picture of a white board of brainstormed story topics and asking for questions or input about stories in progress.

INVESTMENT: The three videos was produced by the outreach team and did not take more time than other video stories. The sharing of our process on social media did not take significant time.

ANALYSIS: We had more clicks than we expected on the picture we tweeted from a brainstorming session. Traffic was in the high triple digits for each of the behind-the-scenes videos, and time on page indicated that people watched the whole videos.

Updating how we handle comment moderation and participation.

We set out to assess our online comments, to make them more constructive and to increase newsroom involvement in them.

We did a review of media comment policies and examined our own. We were responsive to comments ourselves. We instituted a new method for banning spam and moderating problem users.

We also published a questionnaire, online and in print, and asked the community for input about civility and appropriateness. Afterward, we prepared a tweak to our public policy and, more significantly, a guide for the newsroom staff for participating in and moderating comments. The newsroom has indicated willingness and interest in being more active responding, fact-checking and perhaps guiding online conversations.

INVESTMENT: Significant time on the part of the outreach team.

ANALYSIS: This work involved a lot of collaboration with users. It also has the potential to lead to big changes in our newsroom’s communication with its audience. I’m really excited for the potential here. We will also begin tracking staff comments as part of our analytics reporting.

Newsroom culture.

Perhaps the least tangible but most important change has come in the way our engagement philosophies have been adopted by the newsroom. Our work has been generally embraced. Editors can be overheard asking who the audience for a story is, curiosity about analytics abounds, individual reporters are availing themselves of outreach team services and the culture of the newsroom is shifting more and more toward acceptance of audience-focused principles.

I’ve said all along that my ultimate goal is for the community outreach team to work ourselves out of a job because the newsroom has so embraced our philosophies. We have a long way to go, but progress has been made.

A few other projects.

USER CONTENT: We created a byline for the Missourian Reader Community, and it’s a fun way to track when content has been created entirely by or significantly contributed to by readers. We also are in the beginning stages of a big change: Beginning to publish stories from readers on ColumbiaMissourian.com rather than on MyMissourian.com, a citizen journalism website developed by Clyde Bentley in 2004. We think highlighting stories from readers alongside our own stories will both draw more attention to the user content and make our own report more complete. Stay tuned.

PHOTO ARCHIVES: The CoMo in Retrospect Facebook album has looked for timely and interesting ways to offer a glimpse into Columbia’s past. Two of the posts have led to “where are they now” stories.

MEDIA DIRECTORY: The CoMo InfoHub is a directory of 80+ information sources, about Columbia or based in Columbia. It’s organized by topic, not by type of media, and lets people know where they can learn about parenting, food, sports, hobbies, business, etc., in and about Columbia. It’s nearing publication.

COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS: We’ve developed a relationship with the journalism teacher at an alternative high school and have visited her class twice. She’s interested in bringing some of her students to the newsroom for shadow shifts, and she has called on me for advice and critiques as they restart their school newsletter.

DEVLOPING INFORMATION RESOURCES: We’ve provided context-rich resources, such as this one on understanding the bond issue and this one on the Occupy movement.

What’s next?

As the spring semester kicks off next week, I have some clear priorities in mind.

OUTREACH BEATS. I’m going to attach my team members to reporting beats, so they can develop expertise and get involved in coverage earlier. They can also provide analytics feedback for specific topics, solicit community content on those topics, create social media listening strategies and participate in beat brainstorming.

PUBLIC INSIGHT NETWORK. Our crowdsourcing efforts are about to go to a dramatically new level, as our partnership with the Public Insight Network gets off the ground. The system will roll out in our newsroom sometime this spring.

BEING OUT IN PERSON MORE. My outreach team members will be assigned to go to more community events, to represent the Missourian, answer questions, solicit community content — and listen. In addition, we’re working on how our editors could be more visible and accessible.

COMPARING ANALOG AND DIGITAL CONVERSATIONS. Say we want to ask the community to identify its priorities going into a municipal election. What if we did it on social media AND outside Walmart and at the public library? Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what kind of response we get — both in attitude and in content?

READERS BOARD. We’re going to restart a lapsed readers board, forming a group of people who can advise us and who have an interest in what we do. My goal is to find a way to make that just as beneficial to the participants as it is to us. (I’m especially eager for examples and ideas on this one.)

Thanks for reading. I’d sure welcome your feedback on any of this. What do you predict will have the most impact? What do you wish we’d try and report back about? Get in touch anytime, at mayerj@missouri.edu, @mayerjoy on Twitter or 573-882-8182.

In my class, as with many others at Mizzou, the students are graded largely on their work in the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian. I’m their professor in the classroom, and I’m also their boss on the community outreach team. So while they’ll have some typical classroom assignments, the biggest column in the gradebook is for their newsroom performance and their portfolio of work.

Because of that, I like to include a narrative description of the grade ranges, so students can know what to shoot for and so I have something to point to when grading. Here’s the one I’m working on for this semester.

newsroom success:

The underlying philosophy if this class is experimentation, invention and enterprise. If you show up in the newsroom for each shift waiting for instructions, and do only what you’re specifically asked to do, you’ll get a C, for average performance. Here’s how I would describe what I’m looking for in the newsroom, and how that generally translates into grades (recognizing that no one fits every criteria for every grade range, of course). This applies specifically to the 60 percent of your grade that is based on newsroom performance.

If you earn an A …

You understand and work to carry out the philosophy of the community outreach team. You continually question, challenge and assess our strategies. Around the newsroom, you evangelize for the community and the audience. Your work makes an impact in the newsroom and on the community. You routinely suggest new ideas and strategies. Your work, communication and attitude are thoroughly professional, and you consistently follow through to everyone’s satisfaction. You work well as part of a team. You have a sense of urgency and are a solid journalist. You seek feedback and adjust your work based on what you hear. Your work improves each week. If another editor called me looking for an employee, you would be a strong candidate.

If you earn a B …

You mostly seem to understand and work to carry out the philosophy of the community outreach team. You sometimes contribute by questioning and challenging our strategies, and you understand the basics of assessment. With a few projects, you have made a real impact on the newsroom or the community. You rely on being given assignments more than some students. You generally work well as part of a team. You might sometimes need to be reminded to follow through on tasks, and you might not always remember to communicate with your colleagues. Your work has on occasion included errors or a lack of journalistic urgency. When you have remembered to seek feedback, you have been generally quite responsive to it. Your work improves, though not as quickly as it could. If another editor called me looking for an employee, I would say you had great potential but would likely need some nurturing.

If you earn a C …

You go through the motions on the community outreach team but do not seem to fully understand its philosophy. You carry out tasks as assigned but do not generally take them beyond the basics. Overall, it’s hard to see the impact of your work, and you do not often provide adequate assessment of your work. You often need to be reminded to follow through, and you sometimes miss deadlines. Your work is sometimes satisfactory and sometimes contains errors. You sometimes seem to lack journalistic urgency. You don’t actively seek feedback on your work. Your work has not shown significant improvement. If another editor called me looking for an employee, I would not be able to recommend you.

If you earn below a C …

You have continually been unreliable and unprofessional, or have compromised the integrity of the team or the Missourian through your work or your behavior.

As a student in this class, you’d join the staff of the Columbia Missourian, as part of the community outreach team. Exactly what that means will be determined by us, as we go along. We’ll do a lot of strategizing, experimenting and assessing what works. You’d be assigned about eight hours each week to spend in the newsroom, immersing yourself in what’s going on there and bringing the community into the news as much as you can. You’d also be responsible for following through on whatever came up on your shifts, and time outside those shifts would sometimes be required.

I firmly believe that injecting a focus on the audience into traditional journalism is key to its survival, and the community outreach team is about how to find the audience, invite them to interact with stories, capture and value the conversations they’re having (with us and with each other) and look for ways to collaborate with them to do better journalism.
In this class, the experiment is sometimes the point, more even than the content we create. You’d be part of defining that experiment, assessing how it’s going and adapting along the way. It’s not the kind of class where you’d be told exactly what to do. You would need to come to your newsroom shifts with ideas, enthusiasm and the ability to follow through on them.

This blog post about what we’ve been up to this semester might help.

We’re going to focus our efforts a little more tightly next semester, and might not be quite so wide-ranging in our efforts.

Some of the projects I’ve been most proud of and excited about this semester are:

— Taking fliers with important facts to community meetings, such as city council and school boundary forums. The goal is to reach people where and when they most need information.

— Using social media to spark conversations and find sources.

— Diving further into our analytics, strategizing around how we can be responsive to what the community seems to want, and learning more about what local readers want versus overall readers.

— Live tweeting breaking news.

— Producing behind-the-scenes videos with reporters and other staff.

— Working with reporters and editors to get the community more involved in our processes.

— Working on longer-term projects, such as a revised comment policy, a directory of media in Columbia, partnerships with schools to provide student reports for MyMissourian, a plan for how much information journalists should share about themselves on their bio pages, and a Twitter strategy for the newsroom.

There’s a drawing on the wall of the newsroom that’s explained in this blog post, which also might help you understand where I’m coming from.

Please let me know if you have questions, and feel free to talk to the current members of the outreach team. You can find them on this Twitter list.

NOTE: There is also a one-hour version of this class, without the staff requirement. Liz Brixey is teaching it in the spring. It’s a topics class, so you can find it under J4301/7301. Look for the section assigned to Brixey. It’s an awesome option for people who just need one credit, or who want to learn the material without working in the newsroom.

I had my class read it for today, and I can’t wait for the coming discussion.

Yong makes a point I often try to make about the very definitions of “journalism” and “blog.”

When I write for my blog, I do so in exactly the same way as I would for a mainstream organisation. I ask whether stories are worth telling. I interview and quote people. I write in plain English. I provide context. I fact-check… a lot. I do not use press releases, much less copy them. I don’t even own pajamas.

My point, and it has been said many times before, is that blogs are simply software. They are a channel, a medium, a container for all sorts of things including journalism. Meanwhile, journalism is a craft. It is about involving accuracy, the collection of information, the telling of stories, that can be practiced anywhere by anyone with the right set of skills. It is not a newspaper. It is not a job title.

Journalism is a process. A method of collecting, verifying and sharing information. There’s no certification necessary, and no membership card required.

I tend to define journalism broadly and inclusively. But even when defined narrowly, the definition needs to be separated from its form of publication. Surely we can all agree that whether or not a specific piece of content counts as journalism is not contingent on whether it appears in a traditional news outlet or is created by someone employed by a traditional news outlet.

So if we get that argument out of the way, can we please be less uptight about what journalism is, and let go entirely of trying to identify who is a journalist?

Back to Yong, who shares this useful analogy:

So are these people all journalists? Here, I find it helpful to think of modern journalism in terms of mental disorders. The field of mental health is moving away from sharply defined diagnoses to spectrums of behaviours. In a similar way, there is a spectrum of journalistic values, norms and techniques, which are present to different extents in different people or even individual pieces of work.

I know I fall somewhere on that spectrum. Am I a journalist? Honestly, I care less about the answer than I once did. I am not being blase – I care very deeply about journalism, but there are few things more boring than journalists arguing over what counts as journalism. We live in a world full of stories, about amazing people doing amazing things and terrible people doing terrible things. I will use every medium I can to tell those stories. I will try to tell them accurately so people aren’t misled. I will try to tell them well so people will listen. If people want to argue about what to call that, that’s fine for them.

I would rather just do it.

Sing it.

Seven years’ gestation.

Sort of like childbirth, I knew at the beginning that if I focused on the scary stuff at the end, I just might not make it. So I started off with stuff I knew I’d have fun with and tried not to think about how I’d ever make time to write a thesis.

No one moment during the nine classes I took seems all that difficult. But collectively, I spent a lot of hours reading and writing. And then came the thesis. And sort of like childbirth, there’s no way to skirt around that scary stuff at the end. The only way to the other side is straight through the pain. And in this case, no drugs can help.

I successfully defended my thesis on Thursday, so I’m officially on the other side, looking back at the pain. I’m not sure when I’ve felt such relief. Unlike after the birth of my two sons, I don’t have euphoria to distract me from the bad parts. Just relief. And a master’s degree. And a 5-year-old son who says I should be called Headmaster from here on out. I’ll take it.

Here’s what the dedication page of my thesis says:

To my husband and two sons, who have tolerated years upon years of multitasking.

To my grandfather, Donald Mathis, who is no stranger to fancy degrees, for telling me that a master’s degree is no big deal and that I should go for it.

To my colleagues at the Columbia Missourian, who inspire me daily.

To my first bosses in journalism, Sara Quinn and Janet Coats, for mentoring me and exposing me to what creativity, optimism and a sense of purpose looked like in a newsroom, and for setting the bar high.

And to my college newspaper adviser at the University of Oklahoma, Jack Willis, who quietly held me to the highest of standards, and who asked me when I was 21 if I was sure I didn’t want to stick around and get a master’s degree.

So, can anyone recommend a hobby?

On a Monday a few weeks ago, the Missourian’s community outreach team delivered a product that contributed to civic empowerment and democratic conversation. On the next Wednesday, I spent my day on a task that made me wholly uncomfortable.

All in all, not a bad week.

First I’ll discuss the pride. Then the discomfort.

The city budget was up for review, and the most contentious of the proposed changes affected bus routes and prices. We expected larger than usual turnout at the City Council meeting, and we knew most of them would be there because of this one, emotionally charged issue.

One of my missions for our team is to identify who most wants and needs our content, and make an attempt to help them find it. In this case, we did.

We turned weeks’ worth of transit budget reporting into a two-page handout, and we took it to the council meeting.

Much of the credit goes to reporter Steven Rich and Public Life Editor Scott Swafford, who brilliantly distilled the information. Scott, who has covered government in Columbia probably since before I became a journalist, told me I should make 100 copies and expect to have some left over.

As it turned out, the chamber was overflowing. Kaikang Wang, the outreach team member who volunteered to come with me, and I handed out all 100 and could have distributed another 50. People were coming up asking us for more. Not a single person questioned why we were doing it or whether it was appropriate.

Here’s why it worked:

• We provided neutral, authoritative facts where we knew not everyone present would have had equal access to them.
• People were sitting and waiting for quite awhile, and in that situation, many people will read whatever’s in front of them, so we had a captive audience.
• We had established trustworthiness on this issue. A few people actually turned the flier down because they’d brought clippings of Missourian coverage with them.

Unlike with our 9/11 handout, which did not link back to our website, we did put together an article that aggregated our content on this issue. We put the URL, along with a QR code, at the bottom, knowing we might not have a big smartphone crowd but figuring it couldn’t hurt.

And because one of my goals is to look for ways to make our staff of experienced editors more visible, we put Scott’s picture at the bottom, along with contact information for the reporter and me. Our executive editor, Tom Warhover, suggested we include a picture, and no one is more credible on city government than Scott Swafford.

Now, the discomfort.

For two days, I became the Missourian’s marketing department.

I got the attention of our general manager, Dan Potter, when I suggested we find a sponsor for a trivia contest we’re planning. We haven’t done that before (tie a sponsor to a contest, brand the contest with that sponsor’s name, tweet out info about a sponsor, etc.), but I’m eager to try it. And I haven’t run up against any resistance.

Then, a day after having that conversation, Dan said the Missourian had some tickets to a Taylor Swift concert in Kansas City this weekend, and would I like to put together a quick contest or giveaway?

I hate to say no to an opportunity, so we quickly partnered with Vox Magazine, figured out a way to get people clicking around on our website and liking our Facebook pages, put together a quick survey to gather some demographics, organized the logistics of the contest and got going.

I’m really comfortable with many aspects of marketing the news, and I wish newsrooms would relax about the whole topic of promoting us and our work.

There are two reasons I was uneasy about what I did i this case:

• One, there was no tie to content. No news quiz. No helping the journalism. I just couldn’t figure out a way to tie a survey about what city ward people lived in to Taylor Swift tickets. It just didn’t work.
• Two, I missed some real journalism opportunities and conversations while I was figuring out how to embed a picture of Taylor Swift under a story and whether the people coming to pick up their tickets would need to show a photo ID.

I’m glad we did it. We got less participation than I expected, it took more time than I expected and I forgot to ask for email addresses of the people who filled out our survey! But the whole thing was a learning experience.

We’ll be analyzing how many page views our contest page got, how many Facebook fans we gained and what we could have done better.

I’m happy to have been pushed out of my comfort zone. And no harm was done.

Plus, I’ll always have Monday, and the serving of democracy. Not a bad week overall.

Turns out, they’re not so different.

Designers have long been speaking up for the consumption of information. For making information clear, accessible and enjoyable. That focus on the user experience is what I’ve always loved most about design, actually.

I’ll put my slides at the bottom of this post (though I’ve never made the kind of presentations that make much sense without the accompanying words coming out of my mouth).

The main purpose here is to share links to some of the projects and posts I mentioned in my talk. Usually, I make a custom Delicious tag and url, and just share that. But Delicious isn’t working so well these days. So here you go, folks who were in the audience today. And for the rest of you who stumbled by? Good luck making sense of this collection of randomness!

First, some links to my work and research

The final product of my RJI fellowship last year was a guide to help newsrooms talk about their audiences. It’s based on identifying what a newsroom values in its relationship with its community, and then asking questions about how those values are reflected in the newsroom’s processes and products.

The post of mine that explains the whole Dorothy/Wizard/Toto thing: So long, Wizard of Oz journalism. Let’s make margaritas!

Highlights from the survey I did of 500 daily newspaper editors. I mentioned the depressing statistic that only about half actually USE the analytics reports they get to help make news decisions.

Nieman Reports did a whole issue on community, and they published a piece I wrote about how I think journalists have an obligation to identify the people who most want and need their content and make an effort to find them and interact with them.

Other resources or projects I mentioned

Poynter’s EyeTrack07 research, which, among many other interesting findings, gave us some data about how readers respond to alternative story forms. Turns out, they actually remember more of what they read.

California Watch’s coloring book on seismic safety. Take the content to the right audience, in a format they can relate to.

The Rapidian’s ladder of community participation. Issue invitations, and make it easy.

The Chicago Tribune’s crowdsourced snow map. What story can we tell together that we’d never be able to tell on our own?

The Great Lakes Smackdown! Prod people to interact with your content, even when it’s a serious topic.

The Guardian gives readers credit in the form of a byline. How do you recognize when non-journalists have helped guide your work, or even contributed directly to it?

When should we get out of the way and highlight readers’ own words? The Washington Post used Facebook posts to tell a woman’s story. (Kleenex alert)

The slides, without the accompanying funny anecdotes, are below.

Here’s some of what I learned and want to take back to my community outreach team at the Columbia Missourian.

— Engagement efforts can’t be the frosting on the cake. They’re the meat and potatoes and should make up your basic approach to community interactions. Don’t report a story, then figure out how to share it. Have a specific audience in mind from the idea-generation stage, and go about your reporting in a way that figures out how you can make sure the people who most want and need the content will find it.

— If you want to grow your audience, make sure leaders in the community know what you’re all about. When Front Porch Forum launches in a new town, they personally get in touch with librarians, city council members, school board members, etc.

— Don’t expect your presence, or your message, to stick with people the first time. It often takes nine impressions for a message to resonate.

— Personally thank people. For registering, for contributing, for sharing, for reading. Sometimes it’s appropriate to do that publicly.

— Live and work socially. This does not mean just the digital tools we’ve come to know as social media. Be social in your community and in how you gather, produce and distribute your content. Make it easy for others to be social around what you’re doing. The Rapidian posts an image with every story in a Facebook gallery, with a link back to the site. They then tag every person connected to the story in the image. Simple, and brilliant.

— Get comfortable with the idea that growing audience involves some marketing. It’s okay to get excited when people wear your t-shirts or participate in your contest. Those things, while not traditional journalism, create a space where journalism can happen.

— Happy hours increase readership. This reminds me of a success metric that was suggested during the Engagement Metric workshop we hosted at RJI last spring. Our report (downloadable here) included the idea that community meet-ups could be judged on the number of empty beer bottles at the end of the event. I could get on board with that.

— When you invite people to get involved in your site, approach the interaction not from a position of what you need, but of what the people might have to contribute. Do you have two minutes? An hour? $10? A story to tell?

— MyVerona has a photo contest, in which they post old photos of community members and invite people to guess who it is. For a bonus, you can name someone they’re related to. I sure wish I lived in a town small enough to try this.

— A value of comments that we shouldn’t overlook, and should actually recognize and encourage, is their ability to keep a story alive. The shelf life of a story grows significantly when the conversation around the story carries on. A huge opportunity lies in what journalists choose to do with that.

— Chataratti posted complicated documents on Document Cloud and invited questions. They ended up with readers helping each other understand an important civic issue.

— How about a blog for advertisers, sharing success stories, interactions and site statistics. Actively show your value.

— We’ve got to think more broadly about the incentives we offer to contribute. How about pairing with advertisers? The more you interact, the more actual dollars or savings you earn? Or public recognition and identity building? Think of how a casino draws you into its fold by promoting you to new levels in their loyalty programs. “This is Joy. She’s one of our most valued/frequent/thoughtful contributors.”

— Google Trends and Twitter trending topics are so valuable. What if we shared information about that more actively with our users? Here’s what we see you’re talking about today.

— Livestream community events. NOWcastSA streamed high school graduations. Family members from across the world watched. Now that’s community service.

In August, I wrote to Missourian readers about what I hoped my new community outreach team would do. Now I’d like to share some of what we’re doing day to day.

Here’s a running list of the tasks we’re assigned, beginning with some routine ones and leading up to some exciting experiments. Many of these come straight out of the community engagement discussion guide I published as part of my fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Many are also inspired by or directly borrowed from what I learned through a series of interviews.

Daily and weekly newsroom duties

• Monitor and, when appropriate, participate in comments on ColumbiaMissourian.com.
• Take charge of and strategize for the Missourian’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
• Monitor email that comes to the newsroom for story ideas and for posts for our citizen journalism site, MyMissourian.
• Attend daily news meetings at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., as well as individual beat meetings, looking for ways we can contribute.
• Review the daily news budget for stories that would benefit from discussion about audience, in terms of collaboration, online conversation, comments, etc. — or in terms of finding the right audience and taking the content to them. Suggest to the reporters and editors how the community might help us report or share the news.
• When appropriate, tweet out reports after the news meetings of what our staff is working on.
• Search social media for what people are talking about. Report back about what you’re hearing. Monitor Google alerts and Twitter searches for the newsroom, and see if any beats or topics would benefit from having new ones set up.
• Be ready for breaking news. Be prepared to help find sources, solicit community content, live-blog and use social media to report to the community, hand out fliers door to door — whatever makes sense for the situation.
• Look for chances to share the story behind the story, by doing a podcast, Q&A or video interview with the journalists.
• Look for archive coverage or CoMoYouKnow posts that could be relevant to users today. Consider adding them to our coverage online and sharing them on social platforms.
• Look for ways that content being produced today will be relevant or could be repacked in the future, and for ways that content in our archives might be useful today.
• Leave the newsroom. Find a place to listen, and report back about what you’re hearing.
• Compile weekly analytics reports for the Missourian. Share highlights at a news meeting.
• Aggregate the best of Missourian comments, for Web once a week and print twice a week.
• Look for opportunities to create Twitter lists to help people follow or digest the news.
• Look through plans for event coverage for opportunities for live blogs or live chats.

Longer-term project ideas

• Assess whether the Missourian should be offering an email subscription or text message service.
• Update and improve our about page, contact us page and staff bio pages.
• Craft or update newsroom policies for social media and for contributing to comments.
• Come up with new ways to share analytics information, both internally and with our users.
• Make a list of all the ways users can get in touch with the newsroom and individual journalists — all of them, from online comments to letters to stopping journalists on the street. Figure out which ones we want to encourage, and turn that into a list for publication and for internal use.
• Make a list, with descriptions, of campus and city media, blogs and other information sources, and figure out how to make that a community resource.
• Determine if there’s a Columbia or Mizzou network of people on social media sites such as YouTube, Quora, Google+ and LinkedIn. See if there’s a way to share that information with our users.
• Create a Facebook welcome page. Assess what we’re learning and could be learning from Facebook Insights (the analytics tool).
• Come up with a plan for introducing users to each other. Should we feature a Facebook fan, Twitter follower, frequent commenter, blogger, etc., each week?
• Think about what we’d like to enlist our community to help us cover, from sharing photos of JV basketball games to live blogging community meetings.
• Brainstorm how we could bring more users into the newsroom — for budget meetings, story help and special events.
• Brainstorm how we could use our photo archives to interact with the community.
• Brainstorm how we could share information about Columbia’s history or Mizzou’s history. Could we do an oral history project? Or ask people to share memories about a specific time, place or event?
• Figure out how the Missourian could take news tips and photos via text message — and promote that.
• Consider creating a Twitter account just to retweet interesting things from campus — or the whole city.
• Consider how we could steal an idea from video stores or bookstores and create a “staff picks” or “what we’re reading” section.
• Brainstorm ways to make our staff of editors more accessible to the community. Stories? Videos? A Facebook album?
• Brainstorm ways the Missourian could be using check-in platforms like Foursquare and Gowalla to interact with the community and add a location-based element to our information.

I know we won’t get to all of this, and I truly hope it’s just the beginning of our experiment.

What are we missing?