What “engagement” means to the Chicago Tribune

My conversation last week with James Janega at the Chicago Tribune surprised the heck out of me. After spending several weeks interviewing folks at small community operations, I expected my interviews with with large organizations like the Tribune to be more like the one I had with the Associated Press, whose focus is on social media strategies.

Nope. The Chicago Tribune is all about face-to-face interactions.

James is the manager of Trib Nation, which is the paper’s blog and the umbrella for outreach efforts. He says his job is to build bridges between the newsroom and its communities. For James, that means being in constant conversation with readers — with an emphasis on listening — and doing that primarily in person.

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What “engagement” means to Honolulu’s Civil Beat

John Temple, editor of the Civil Beat (and formerly of the Rocky Mountain News), poses this question: How do you behave when you’re a trusted friend? On John’s staff, the people known as “reporter/hosts” are working to build relationships with readers, and a relationships involves sharing information about themselves and being present in their coverage.

“Readers actually do want (reporters) to tell it like it is, tell them what it means, cut to the quick,” John says. His staff has heard that refrain from readers enough that they’re seeing the value in it. “It’s made them more comfortable over time with a combination of news and opinion.” The reporter/hosts spend most of their time reporting, but they’re also charged with interacting meaningfully with readers, online and in person.

The seven-month-old Civil Beat doesn’t accept advertising and is built on a membership model. President Randy Ching (formerly of eBay) said the goal was to invest in investigative journalism in a commercially sustainable way. They want to build a product people value and are willing to pay for. Non-members can read discussions, and they have access to some articles free. Membership options include $1.49 for a single day and $19.99 for a month.

So, how do you go about becoming the readers’ trusted friend? Here are some strategies that Randy and John (in separate Skype interviews) shared:

— Participate in conversation, listening as well as talking. The online discussions and comments are treated as a priority. Staff members answer questions and clarify points raised by members. They behave in a way that sets the tone for the conversations. Randy says they’re also encouraged to share their own perspective and analysis — not to convince people to agree with them but to be transparent about what they believe. John talks about transparency in terms of not pretending the reporters weren’t there. He used the example of a war correspondent who is less concerned with balance than with painting a realistic, personally observed picture. “(Readers will) actually read the same sort of report about city hall,” he said. “We’re definitely present in our articles and in our stories … I’ve never seen any traditional news organization do what we do.” (Find the Civil Beat at @CivilBeat or #becivil on Twitter.)

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What “engagement” means to The Terminal and Andre Natta

Kathleen Majorsky is a Mizzou masters student. She is fascinated by new media, and this is her second involvement with an RJI project. She is working with Joy Mayer this semester on how information providers define engagement. She interviewed Andre Natta and wrote this post.

The Terminal, a hyperlocal news site in Birmingham, Ala., is relaunching later this month to try new ways to tell the city’s stories, and Publisher and Managing Editor Andre Natta says one of his motivations is to increase his engagement with the community.

“I think engagement means building a relationship with the community that likes your site. It is thinking of ways to make it easier to have those conversations, whether they are online or offline,” Natta says.

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Who needs “engagement” training most: worker bees or queen bees?

I’m lucky enough to be spending eight months learning from the best about what it means for journalists to engage with their communities. I’m getting interesting and varied answers. For some folks, engagement is about listening to the community. For others, it’s more to do with inspiring civic activism and involvement. And sometimes it really comes down to brand loyalty and page views.

Where does the responsibility for audience engagement fall within a news organization? Part of my mission is to make sure working journalists get to benefit from the information and tips I’m gathering, and I’m thinking about who I should target with my evangelism.

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What “engagement” means to Chattarati’s David Morton

You had me at “Chattarati.” The name of the 2 year old hyperlocal online community that features Chattanooga news would absolutely draw me into the site. I also appreciated the site’s organization, with five color-coded categories: Metro (red), Culture (lime green), Editorial (orange), Neighborhoods (blue) and Calendar (purple).

But David Morton, editor-in-chief of Chattarati, emphasizes more than just user-friendly Web design. There are three areas Morton says are important to the mission of Chattarati: passion, conversation and commenting. These three areas are cornerstones in supporting the sites mission of building community both on and offline.

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What “engagement” means to The Rapidian’s Denise Cheng

Denise Cheng is making a go of listening to and engaging with the people of Grand Rapids, Mich., and it sounds like she’s at it pretty much every waking hour.

As the only full-time staff member for The Rapidian, she says her primary goal is citizen engagement. That makes her a natural fit for my google spreadsheet listing all the people I hope to talk to while on this fellowship. Denise’s take on her staff’s mission is this: The Rapidian is a platform for citizens to engage with their city and their neighbors by submitting content that bubbles up from their experiences. She hopes that by creating media content, contributors become more media savvy and civically engaged.

Denise doesn’t like using the phrase “citizen journalism” unless she needs it to to get her point across. She likes “participatory media” and “civic media.” She also avoids calling The Rapidian’s writers “journalists,” because she’s found there’s baggage around that term. She calls them “citizen reporters” or the nice, neutral “contributors.” She doesn’t want to spend time arguing about what is and isn’t journalism, and she’s not too worried about the craft involved in information delivery.

She spends most of her time working on behalf of, talking to and listening to community members. She goes to as many events as she can, often with listening as her primary task. (I’m really interested in listening. Check out this book in my stack of things to read. What else should I be reading?) If she writes for the site, it’s on her own time. Her actual job is more organization and outreach. She says she tries to hear what is and is not being said, so The Rapidian can better meet people where they are.

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Using social media analytics to measure “engagement”

Read Write Web yesterday published the results of a fascinating analysis of news outlets’ social media efforts. Adam Sherk used an API from an analytics company called PostRank to take a look at how news organizations’ traffic compares to their engagement. He came up with an “engagement per unique visitor” ranking. The results are interesting (at the top of the list, by a wide margin, is The Guardian, followed by Slate and The New York Times). But what’s more applicable to the work I’m doing this year is the measurement tool itself.

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The nonprofit world’s “ladder of engagement”

When we talk about “engagement” in the news, often that includes the desire to motivate users to action of some variety.

We want to take the casual readers and increase their loyalty and commitment.
We want the loyal readers to start sharing our content with their friends.
We want the sharers to take our polls and comment on our content.
We want those easy actions to lead to more involved contributions of content.

Grant Barrett at the Voice of San Diego just told me this week that one of his jobs is to move people along a similar spectrum. And the goal isn’t a revolutionary one: Nonprofits have worked for years to motivate interested observers to get more and more involved. I’ve heard the concept referred to as the “ladder of engagement.” I set out to find the origins of the term, and I struck out. (If you have info on this, will you let me know?)

So I emailed Beth Kanter, who has been writing for and about the nonprofit sector for a decade. She said she has also had trouble nailing down where the idea began, but she’s written about it in general here, and specifically for Twitter and Facebook. She says it’s a commonly used concept in her world.

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What “engagement” means to Voice of San Diego’s Grant Barrett

Grant Barrett, Voice of San Diego‘s new engagement editor, knows his job title is a funny one. But he doesn’t think the work he’s doing is new. Engagement is just “putting a name to a job that anybody who’s been on the Internet for awhile is already doing,” he says. “There’s nothing novel about what I’m doing, or any engagement editor is doing.”

Maybe that’s true, but the concepts are sure new to bunches of news providers. Which is we why so many of us are curious about what people like Grant are up to. The job title, Grant says, could be called a web editor or community manager in other places. It’s just a combination of skill sets. (Here’s how VOSD advertised the position.)

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