As the use of social media continues to skyrocket, many newsrooms have developed positions called “Engagement Editors.” These staffers are responsible for interacting with news consumers and are tasked with “building a relationship” with readers.
But audience engagement can involve much more than responding to comments or counting the number of shares a post gets. While consumers may create positive associations with news brands via interactions online or on social media, they are rarely engaged with outside of the comments. For some newsrooms, real engagement means getting the audience involved with the content before it’s created, helping to build trust along the way.
Several organizations have emerged in recent years to help newsrooms do just that. Hearken, a consulting and technology company, sees reader engagement as something quite different from commenting on a Facebook post or sharing an article.
Hearken’s model relies on community input for story inspiration. Companies that contract with Hearken learn how to use engagement tools and create a widget on their websites eliciting questions from the audience. The prompts are often open-ended, such as “What have you ever wanted to know about your city?”
Reporters and editors sift through these entries and pursue stories that answer these questions. The readers are engaged from day one; they are the starting point of the story and often act as sources within the story they inspired.
Hearken urges newsrooms to ask themselves “What roles does your audience play in your journalism?” As Hearken CEO Jennifer Brandel says, “Engagement happens when members of the public are responsive to newsrooms, and newsrooms are in turn responsive to members of the public. It’s a feedback loop.”
The University of Florida’s WUFT-FM used Hearken’s software to create the “Untold Florida” project. Reporter Ellie Drabik participated in the project and wrote “School Boards: A Part-Time Job With Full-Time Duties?” after looking into a reader’s question about school boards. The reader wanted more insight into the boards’ role and involvement in the community. Drabik reached out to every school board member in the county and interviewed a dozen people for the story. Drabik’s coverage of the issue didn’t stop there. She wrote a follow-up story about a proposed bill that would limit board members’ terms.
Speaking at the 2017 Online News Association conference, Brandel said involving the public early in the process is key to rebuilding trust. “If we don’t bring in the public until the process is done, we don’t get their help in gathering information and they don’t see how the journalism is done so it’s harder for them to trust it.”
Hearken is a groundbreaking company, but it does come with a price tag: almost $8,000 per year. This entitles companies to two initial meetings: a consultation call to make a plan and a technology call to explain the platform and prep companies for launch. After that point, Hearken provides follow up training and consultation. For many fiscally challenged newsrooms, the price tag might be high.
But there are other resources out there that are cheaper, or even free. Gather, a new social media platform, is one resource.
Gather aims to be the home of like-minded journalists interested in community engagement. It connects journalists and researchers with community engagement projects.
You must apply to join Gather, but the process is simple: Fill out a Google form and then wait a few day for an invitation email (everyone is accepted). Once invited, people set up a profile and explore the many areas of Gather.
Gather contains case studies of projects, resources, a “Water Cooler” where members introduce themselves and connect. You can volunteer for projects and learn effective engagement methods. Gather is completely free. Once you join you are connected with over 1,000 engagement-oriented professionals.
Joy Mayer, community engagement strategist at Gather, created Gather along with Andrew DeVigal, professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism. Mayer said that a group of them were at a conference and discussed how lonely engagement journalism can be. Many of them felt like they were the only people in the field and wished they had a support network. DeVigal and Mayer worked to create that network.
“As a specialty, engagement is growing up,” Mayer said. “But the infrastructure has not grown up around it. We wanted a space that was a way for people to connect.”
Mayer believes that engagement empowers journalists and demystifies journalism by involving the public in the process from the start. “Engagement is about trust, about building a relationship,” she said.
Karen Scherting, digital director for Lee Enterprises in Montana, oversees social media for all of the company-owned newspapers the state and says responsiveness is key.
“If we’re asking for reader thoughts, we have to respond and thank them and ask follow-up questions so they know it matters,” she said. “It’s like any relationship, if it’s one-sided, you’re going to lose trust quickly.”
Scherting has used social media and comments sections to listen to readers, but says small newsrooms don’t really have the time to engage much beyond that.
The Public Insight Network (PIN) offers a way to step up engagement by connecting journalists with audiences virtually. Part of American Public Media, the largest station-based public radio organization in the United States, PIN connects journalists with sources that are willing to respond to questions posed by media outlets. According to PIN’s “about” section, “Every day, sources in the Public Insight Network add context, depth, humanity and relevance to news stories at trusted newsrooms around the country.”
Signing up for PIN as a source is easy. Newsroom questions are sent to you if your personal demographics match the question requirements. Journalists can target questions to different demographics and uncover information they might not be able to access otherwise.
For example, The Salt Lake Tribune asked, “What do you think about ‘free range parenting?’” The question was in response to a recently passed Utah law highlighting the “free range” parenting movement. This question targeted native Utah residents and received 43 responses in just a few weeks.
Although many journalists agree this kind of engagement is beneficial, many newsrooms are focused on the bottom line in an industry that is understaffed and draining advertising dollars. Why should newsrooms focus on audience engagement when marketing, especially on social media, might seem to be a better use of funds?
The truth is, marketing using Facebook doesn’t provide most newsrooms with increased revenue. According to a report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), for the nearly 50 publishers surveyed, Facebook was the source of a median of just three percent of digital revenue.
In January 2018, Facebook changed its NewsFeed algorithm again, creating a challenge for newsrooms marketing their articles. This change highlights personal connections between people and makes posts from Pages a lower priority. Facebook said it will cut down on “engagement bait” and emphasize “authentic” engagement. For publishers, Digiday reported, the change accelerated the decline of traffic to their news content from Facebook.
But audience engagement editors who track analytics on their news sites have found that stories utilizing tactics like Hearken, Gather and PIN typically see lower bounce rates and more time spent on the page. Involving the audience in deciding what stories to pursue and including their voices in the coverage gives publishers confidence that those stories will interest the audience.
And that can have a positive effect on the bottom line. Bitch Media, a Hearken partner, also found that “Hearken-engaged readers were between two and five times more likely to convert to sustaining membership than ordinary readers.”
At the root of this kind of engagement is trust. Audiences have to trust that a news organization that asks them to get involved in coverage will deliver a credible product that’s worth reading. Jennifer Brandel of Hearken says this kind of engagement improves the relationship between the newsroom and the public, which pays off in multiple ways. The way she sees it, “better relationships improve trust, enrich reporting and safeguard financial sustainability.”
Callahan Peel is a senior in the journalism program at the University of Montana. She is President of Chi Chapter of Alpha Phi and works as the social media and web assistant for Montana Public Radio. When she isn’t diving into reporting assignments, Callahan can be found trail running in the wilderness or playing with her two Airedale terriers.
