How NPR cultivates community: Talking engagement with Andy Carvin

This is one of two posts about NPR. The other is a conversation with Bob Boilen at All Songs Considered.

In the changing landscape of relationships between news organizations and their audiences, National Public Radio might just be unique. “A lot of people don’t see NPR as a brand or a consumer choice. They see it as a lifestyle choice. They see it as part of their identity,” says Andy Carvin, NPR’s senior strategist. “For the 3 million or so people who donate to their local member stations, they actually have a literal vested interest in our success.”

So when NPR uses social media, it’s definitely not just to distribute content. “It’s a way of furthering our mission to create a more informed public,” Andy says. “It’s a way to empower the people who love us and listen to the people who don’t.” The people on the other end of the relationship feel invested in the success of the product or story, and they seem eager to help.

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Readers, we want your opinion, just don’t get too close

Many journalists have come a long way, but it’s important to remember how far some of us still have to go.

You’ve perhaps read about the transformation happening at the Register Citizen in Connecticut. The newspaper is inviting the public in (literally and figuratively) in envelope-pushing ways. You might call it extreme engagement (like extreme sports, but less dangerous). I haven’t interviewed the folks at the Register Citizen yet — I thought I’d wait until they’ve had a chance to see what’s working and what they’re learning. But I’m excited about what I hear and see coming from Publisher Matt DeRienzo and Community Editor Kaitlyn Yeager.

An editor at a nearby weekly newspaper, The Valley Press, has published her opinion of the project in an editorial. DeRienzo mentioned it on Twitter this morning, then shared it with me when I asked for it. I’d link to it, but it doesn’t seem to be online. Click here for an image of it.

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What “engagement” means to California Watch’s Ashley Alvarado

Since July, Ashley Alvarado has been the public engagement manager at California Watch, a nonprofit investigative reporting group.

Ashley is the third person I’ve interviewed who actually has the word “engagement” in her title. (The first two were at TBD and Voice of San Diego.) One of the things I’m trying to accomplish with my fellowship is figuring out what people mean when they use the word, and I’ve gotten really different answer so far.

To Ashley, engagement means having a conversation with the people of California, so there’s give and take. She wants stories:
— to bubble up from within communities
— for those communities to help guide the work of the reporters
— and for the information California Watch puts out to be easily accessible, digestible and acted upon by those communities.

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What “engagement” means to Tracy Record and West Seattle Blog

Lately, I’ve been immersed In a sea of motivated, passionate, scrappy people making a go of it in community news, trying a bunch of techniques and wondering what will work. It was therefore a yank into another world — an equally hard-working but more grounded world — to spend an hour on the phone with Tracy Record, editor and co-publisher of West Seattle Blog. Don’t get me wrong — Tracy’s passion for her work drives her to work long and hard. But my sense from talking to her is that she’s been at this long enough that she knows what works and does it.

Tracy didn’t set out to create a community news site. She kept an anonymous neighborhood blog as a hobby, then found herself providing crucial information in the middle of a weather emergency. That event spurred more page views, news tips, word-of-mouth referrals and search traffic. “I wrote about things I saw and was wondering about, in a casual, informal way. They were things people ended up googling about,” Tracy says. And they were things no one else was writing about. So in 2007, she quit her job and dedicated her full-time self to WSB, along with her husband and partner, Patrick Sand, who handles sales, does a lot of community relations work and helps with news coverage.

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