Interview with Sarah Glen
Product Associate at Chalkbeat
This interview is the eighth in a series in which I talk to people who are currently working on user engagement.
Sarah Glen is now a product associate at Chalkbeat, but she started out as an engagement associate. That may sound like a drastic change until you realize how Chalkbeat—a non-profit news organization covering education—values the role of audience engagement in the newsroom.
Chalkbeat currently has four newsrooms in the communities around the U.S. that are most in need of change in education policy. Rather than focusing on broad engagement techniques for the company as a whole, Chalkbeat has a product team that focuses on creating ways for the reporters—who know their communities and beats best—to interact with the audience.
At Chalkbeat, there is a broad view of engagement, which can be anything from product management and metadata tagging to outward facing interaction to audience responses and stories.
What kind of audience engagement projects do you work on?
When I first started here, my title was engagement associate. My boss and I were tasked with thinking about how we could interact with our readers. It evolved over time that we realized that it could be more productive with products like MORI (Measures of Our Reporting’s Influence), by using metadata to customize the experience of the readers.
We also serve as an aid for reporters across our network. We’re here to help people do reader surveys or polls, and to help them think about any story they can do to highlight the reader’s voice. We’re here as a sounding board for ideas.
What role does metadata play in engagement?
That’s what MORI does. It tags our stories with information that we can use later about the impact of our stories. We track what people do with a story or what impact our stories have.
There was a recent story in New York, where a woman took a printed out version of our stories to a meeting, and asked Carmen Fariña, the New York City Schools Chancellor, “What are you going to about that?”
What is engagement to you?
Anything a reader does to interact with our products or us is engagment, reading a story on our site, or coming to our engagement events, or commenting on a story, or sharing on social media. Even if it’s someone just passively reading an article, the way they read that article tells us if they will come back and engage further.
Why did Chalkbeat make the change from “engagement” to “product”?
The reason we transitioned away from an engagement team to a product team is because we think engagement needs to be baked into the journalistic process.
It’s also to encourage storing the information and learning from it. You can have all the data in the world but if you aren’t synthesizing and learning from it, then it’s not helping you.
What struggles did you face in creating MORI and other engagement products?
MORI is in beta and it was launched when I came here. Our main struggle is not something that we’ve encountered in our products, but that we’re a small team and there are only 24 hours in the day. MORI has been embraced pretty well throughout our team.
I think another struggle is we were working with an outside development firm. Now we’re trying to hire an internal developer who will embrace our mission instead of working with an outside person who doesn’t understand why this is so important to us.
Why is there such a priority on engagement?
We’re here to help our readers. It’s a philosophy we have as a whole: Journalism is not a one -way street. Journalism is about giving readers what they need in their daily lives, and then seeing how they respond to it, and giving a voice to people who might not otherwise have one.
And also it’s just kind of this idea that we exist to build up a community of informed readers around public education. Because that’s what we’re about and that’s what our readers are about, and that’s not something they have anywhere else.
Chalkbeat has also presented their engagement strategy and you can find more information in that presentation here.
