The power of your network
It’s more effective than you think. Build it genuinely, with care and generosity, and it will help increase your work’s reach and impact.
Having a positive impact on people’s lives is the ultimate goal of journalism. Impact can be measured in different ways, including effectively informing citizens so they are able to make better decisions and hold power to account. But how can we reach and inform citizens in a world that is constantly bombarding us with data? There will be “40 times more bytes of data than there are stars in the observable universe by 2020,” according to the World Economic Forum. That means more data is produced every minute than can be consumed in a lifetime.
Journalists and news organizations work hard to make sense out of all this information. We investigate, verify and clarify to produce journalism that helps communities be well-informed, but that work does not have an impact if it does not reach its audience. That is the challenge I wanted to tackle at the JSK Journalism Fellowships at Stanford. I set out to identify digital tools and processes that could allow journalists to increase the chances of reaching their intended audience and consequently help them amplify the reach and impact of their work. This should ultimately lead to open dialogue, a well-informed public, accountable authorities and a stronger democracy. It should also help generate part of the revenue that is needed to sustain a news organization.
I was both humbled and excited when I was accepted into the program. Humbled to join a cohort of curious, smart and talented professionals with interesting trajectories and backgrounds. Excited about all the possibilities, the access to knowledge, technology and experts who could help me answer the questions I had about what I was proposing to do to help journalists and news organizations increase their impact. We are three months into the program, and I now have many more questions than when I first arrived. The directors, professors, my courses and my colleagues have helped me better understand my idea and try to refine it.
My original plan was to work on technology, to find or develop new tools based on existing ones like CrowndTangle and social media platforms’ open APIs to help identify key engaged audiences that both consume journalism and help further distribute it through their networks. During the first quarter at the JSK program I realized that even though new shiny tools are cool, they are far more complex to develop, pilot test and launch. This led me to think about what my idea would look like as a minimum viable product, and subsequently to realize that in its simplest form, the project is about creating clear and concise guides that explain how to apply the key tools and best practices of digital marketing, advertising and social media to enhance news engagement. We don’t generally use these tools in journalism, but if used with rigorous journalistic and ethical standards they can increase our reach and impact.
I want to help reporters across the country become more effective in getting to their target audiences through short and simple guides that allow them to learn and regularly use the basic concepts of marketing and the best practices of social media platforms on their daily work. There are more sophisticated platforms and tools already out there like Hearken and GroundSource. This idea is simpler and puts an emphasis on small steps reporters can introduce to their daily workflow to build, cultivate and activate their personal networks to amplify their work and its distribution on all formats and platforms.
Going forward I will distill the fundamentals of digital marketing journalists can use on a daily basis and define the best way to present them, but in this post I want to highlight that no tool or best practice will reach its full potential if we don’t first build a strong personal network. In a world that produces more data every minute than we can consume in a lifetime, personal networks that can help us amplify our work are essential. We need to continuously build and grow authentic relationships with peers, friends and colleagues who value journalism and its mission as much as we do. We need to be kind and interested in them, their work, and help them promote it whenever we can and when it genuinely fits within our voice, views, areas of interest and coverage. Let’s do this without expecting anything in return, but just because. This in turn will come back to us when we least expect it or need it the most. Our personal networks are more powerful than we think. Let’s build them genuinely, with care and generosity. They will help increase our work’s reach and positive impact.
Recommended readings
Taking the Work out of Networking: An Introvert’s Guide to Making Connections That Count, by Karen Wickre, @kvox
Follow Professor Sree Sreenivasan and his Sree Tips series for the best communications and social media practices.
