Three kinds of engagement: outreach, conversation, collaboration

As part of my RJI fellowship, I conducted dozens of interviews with journalists and non-journalists about how a more social culture is changing the relationships between institutions and the people they serve. I talked to academics and practitioners. To people from the corporate world and nonprofit leaders. And I sought out journalists whose job duties include a focus on audience.

That’s what engagement really is, the way I’ve studied it: A focus on, respect for and enthusiasm about the role of the audience.

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A journalistic obligation: to identify and attempt to engage the audience

I was honored to be asked to write for the Nieman Reports summer 2011 issue, which is all about community and is jam packed with awesome resources. Here’s the post I contributed:

Of the many challenges news organizations confront, there is one that inspires my research, informs my teaching, and ignites my imagination. It involves the disintegrating connection between journalists and their audiences — the separation of journalists from their communities that has taken place through the years. With the notion of objectivity having become such a dominant strategy, sometimes this distancing has been intentional.

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Delicious Milk: How two tech tools routinely save my bacon, and my sanity

This is my quick contribution to this month’s Carnival of Journalism. The prompt for June is about lifehacks, websites, tools, etc., that allow us to work smarter.

I play with a lot of technology tools, but two — Remember The Milk and Delicious — are so central to my workflow that I truly have no idea where I would be without them.

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A published report: Measuring the success of audience engagement efforts

I had the privilege of hosting, along with the awesome Reuben Stern, a workshop at RJI last month on measuring engagement. My motivation for the event was really justifying engagement. We can’t value what we don’t measure, and we can’t convince our bosses/funders/supporters to invest in audience unless we can show it works.

After an intense few weeks of editing, Reuben and I published (on behalf of our esteemed participants) the report of suggestions. Here’s the intro we put on the RJI website. Please go there to read the rest, or download the report (the link is at the top of the post). It includes a huge (but easily scannable and digestible) table that shows some specific engagement goals and strategies, what value they offer to newsrooms and how they can be measured.

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Inside the engagement experiments at the Register-Citizen

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For almost a year now, I’ve been reading and learning about a little newsroom in Connecticut making extreme moves (literally and figuratively) on the engagement front. This spring, I got a chance to see it for myself.

The Register-Citizen in Torrington, driven by the vision and efforts of Publisher Matt DeRienzo, has shown the rest of us what it can mean to make community outreach central to what we do. (Outreach is one of my three categories of engagement. For more detail, see this presentation.) Journalists are creatures of habit and routine, and Matt is trying to change his staff’s fundamental outlook, starting with what they see when they walk into their newsroom.

I’ll go over a few of the highlights of what they’re up to, and share some observations.

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At the crossroads of journalists and librarians, we find community engagement

I’ve been at an inspiring workshop the last day and a half. Beyond Books, sponsored by Journalism That Matters and RJI, among others, brought together librarians, journalists and activists. You can see the program, the session recaps and a list of attendees online.

The basic idea is that these groups of people share a common mission of improving their communities through information. Say all you want about journalistic cynicism and profit-chasing. I believe most of the journalists I’ve had the pleasure to work with would say they got into the news biz because they feel like it’s a way of making the world a better place, whether they’re doing that by improving democracy or building connections through storytelling.

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Don’t give your money to me! And other advice for innovation in journalism

The Carnival of Journalism topic this month is innovation in journalism, and how folks with money to spend should spend it. Specifically mentioned are the Knight News Challenge program and the fellowships at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (which I’m lucky enough to be a part of this year).

My advice for folks in a position to invest in journalism boils down to this: Don’t give money to me. In fact, don’t give money to anyone with my skill set or ideas.

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Data! About conversational journalism!

One of the struggles in talking about relationships between journalists and their audiences is that we too often stay philosophical and talk from our gut.

This morning at South by Southwest, Doreen Marchionni presented her dissertation research on how audiences perceive conversational news. I’ve talked to Doreen about her work before and have learned a lot from it, but I haven’t written about it. I apologize to her for the brevity of this post — her work deserves much more detail.

These are the variables that her research attached to the idea of conversational journalism, which she defines as a deeply collaborative relationship between journalists and audiences. Conversation consists of:

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Advice for SXSW presenters: Tell the truth, and lose the pitch

Selecting which sessions to attend at South by Southwest is an art. My general philosophy is to skip the ones that I think will tell me things I already know (including many of the journalism sessions) or that are led by people I talk to all the time. I usually pick something I think will open my mind or give me really practical takeaways, then I follow along on the Twitter backchannel for the rest, saving RSS feeds of hashtags I’m especially interested in.

I’ve been in some great sessions at South by Southwest this week. I’ve also been in some total duds. Some of the duds have been topics that just weren’t a good fit for me. But others were misrepresented or poorly run.

Here’s what I wish speakers would do:
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Social media metrics: No magic answer, but useful tips

I’ve been to three sessions so far at South by Southwest that had as part of their summaries something about measurement in social media. It’s a big theme (for me, but also, it seems, for a lot of people) this year.

I was disappointed in the first two, which seemed happy to stay on the level of “there’s no one good solution.” Of course there’s no one good solution, and of course you should tailor what you measure to your specific goals and strategies. But I don’t want to talk about that for an hour. There’s a nice quick recap of one of those sessions here.

I hit gold, however, with the third. “Analytics and Social Tools in Practice” was presented by Chris Traganos, a web developer at Harvard, and Sean M. Brown, online manager for the MIT Sloan Management Review.

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