In January 2015, Rachel Damgen was
feeling excited for her new role as the first-ever engagement editor at the
Island Packet, a mid-sized daily newspaper in South Carolina. But eight months
later, she was already feeling burned out.
“I really struggled to convince my
co-workers that my job was about more than social media,” she said. “That was a
hard thing to explain.”
Job listings for “engagement
editors” have been popping up around the country, but as Andrew DeVigal
explains in a recent MediaShift
article, that doesn’t mean the same thing in every newsroom. At the Island
Packet, for example, Damgen’s responsibilities focused on managing the
newspaper’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, and although she succeeded in nearly
doubling the web traffic generated through social media, Damgen left the paper
last summer feeling as if true community engagement had eluded her
newsroom.
Rachel Damgen, left, listens during
a session on inclusive competitiveness at Experience Engagement. Photo by
Emmalee McDonald
At the Experience
Engagement “un-conference” in Portland, Oregon, Damgen and other
practitioners discussed how to push the definition of engagement beyond clicks,
likes and retweets and toward engagement strategies that amplify diverse
voices, improve civic participation and strengthen communities. Here are four
of their big ideas.
1.
Define engagement goals
In the rush to put out a daily
newspaper or produce a nightly broadcast, journalists rarely get the
opportunity to press pause and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their
engagement efforts. The result, Damgen says, is that newsrooms end up sticking
with the status quo while missing opportunities for more effective engagement.
“At my paper, there wasn’t a
structure in place for us to talk about the values guiding our work,” she said.
“We weren’t sitting down and saying, ‘These are the communities we’re not
reaching. How do we reach them?’”
To challenge existing routines, news
organizations first need to be purposeful about defining engagement goals
within the context of their civic mission. This means evaluating newsroom
practices and identifying where they’re succeeding and where they’re falling
short. Are news and information reaching vulnerable community members? Is the
community’s racial, cultural and socioeconomic diversity reflected in the
newspaper’s coverage? Are reporters earning the community’s trust? To get to
the answers — and then the solutions — journalists can begin by asking the
questions.
2.
Seek out new voices
“One thing that really frustrates me
about daily newspapers is that we call the same sources and see the same people
at the same meetings,” Damgen said. “There are entire pockets of the community
that aren’t part of our normal routine.”
When reporters rely exclusively on
“official” sources in their stories, the news becomes a megaphone for the
powerful rather than a platform for the community’s collective voice. To fix
that problem, journalists need to expand their Rolodex of community sources and
then, as
I discussed in last week’s post, listen to those sources with more than
quotes or headlines in mind.
Meghann Farnsworth, left, talks with
other participants at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.
The good news: In the age of Twitter
hashtags, social media profiles and tools like GroundSource, fresh voices are more
accessible than ever. The challenge, however, comes in breaking journalists’
habitual reliance on sources with long titles and official government
positions. Imagine if, instead of keeping the mayor’s office on speed dial, a
reporter’s first phone call for a story about urban development and
gentrification went to a trusted “community listener” who could connect that
reporter to impacted neighbors and other sources who are less often heard? The
outcome undoubtedly would be a more diverse news product — and, in turn, a more
engaged community.
3.
Look for success stories
Despite their doggedness in exposing
injustice, rooting out corruption and reporting on social ills, journalists
haven’t always applied the same persistence to uncovering stories of success or
solutions in their communities. As a result, news consumers become more likely
to experience “apocalypse fatigue” and to simply tune out the media’s endless
stream of bad news.
To keep communities engaged and to
foster a sense of social agency, journalists need to build more positive
stories into the regular news cycle. But that doesn’t just mean publishing
light-hearted “firefighter rescues cat from tree” stories. It means embracing
emerging approaches such as “restorative narrative” and “solutions journalism”
that give audiences a deep sense of hope and agency, rather than leaving them
feeling overwhelmed and helpless.
It should help that positive,
solutions-focused stories appear
to be audience favorites and that research shows that social media users
are more likely
to share uplifting articles than depressing ones. For example, when CBS
Evening News aired a moving
story in December 2014 about the Kansas City police officers who
handed out $100 bills to unsuspecting motorists before Christmas, the video
quickly received more than 40 million views online and inspired hundreds of
comments like this one posted to Facebook: “Just when the light begins to fade
on humanity,” the message read, “we are sent a burst of brilliance that blinds
our eyes and hopefully inspires all of us to try just a little harder.”
Upbeat stories exist in every
community, but journalists haven’t been trained to sniff them out as vigorously
as, say, cases of malfeasance or corruption. For engaged journalism to take
off, news coverage needs to strike a healthier balance.
4.
Experiment with delivery mechanisms
Most newspaper journalists can
fairly assume that their reporting will end up either in print or online. But
what if a story’s target audience members aren’t likely to have newspaper
subscriptions or even access to the Internet?
In these cases, effective community
engagement requires some outside-the-box thinking about how to get the right
information to the right people. These solutions can be innovative, but they
don’t have to be high-tech. In 2013, when the Center for Investigative
Reporting (CIR) produced a series about the country’s worst charities,
they recognized that elderly Americans were the most likely to be targeted by
scams and the least likely to encounter CIR’s content through conventional
channels. Their solution: distributing informational postcards through Meals on
Wheels in Sacramento.
“The postcards were intended to give
people questions to ask if a charity calls,” said Meghann Farnsworth, CIR’s
managing director of distribution, operations and engagement. “We recognized
that the most vulnerable people for that story probably don’t consume media in
the same way that you and I do.”
Credit: mediashift.org
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