The Role of Community Engagement
Community engagement is the buzzword of the year for me. I started out the school year by attending Experience Engagement, a voluntary, four-day “un-conference” hosted by Journalism That Matters and the University of Oregon’s (UO) School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC) that built upon the question: How can journalists and the public engage to support communities to thrive?
Since then, the SOJC has taken on new methods of community engagement. For example, the University of Oregon’s FLUX Magazine hosted a discussion on race and provided a space to bring students, faculty and community members together. What they referred to as a “story seeding” event provided FLUX reporters an insight on happenings on the topic of race within the local community. This allowed the needs of the community to be heard, thus reporting stories in an inclusive and engaging way.
Personally, I think community engagement goes beyond upholding a consistent and active social media. What FLUX Magazine did is a great first step in connecting with the community. I interpret engagement as creating human connections and transparent understanding through listening. It is important to be a human first and journalist second. Professors and professionals, including University of Oregon alumni and journalist Ann Curry, have echoed this sentiment too many times.
Over the course of the week, we touched upon community engagement and the role it plays in the content we create as well as optimizing that content after understanding the metrics. Thus, continuing engagement on a digital level than personal level.
The theme of community engagement was first introduced on the trip during our visit to City University of New York’s (CUNY) Graduate School of Journalism. We spoke with Dr. Carrie Brown and two of her students on the concept of social journalism, which is synonymous with the concept of community engagement. Social journalism is flipping journalism into service to meet the needs of community. It is going and listening to the needs of the community, then creating that understanding and trust between the media and the community.
I think community engagement should be integrated in all forms of journalism. CUNY teaches it as a specific type of journalism called “social journalism.” How does this translate into the field? How are people integrating community engagement into their work? Are they developing a new department or creating new positions for community engagement? Does this affect a company’s personal brand? What about legacy publications and their concrete brand?
For legacy publications like The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, they are cemented in their brand, so how do they incorporate this concept into their work as technology forces them into a new era of journalism? There is no doubt that legacy publications have established the credibility and trust to keep their readers engaged, but their struggle to engage the newer generation is what interests me.
“Honor the past but be relevant in the present,” said David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker. This resonates the ideology behind the steps that legacy publications are taking to gain more exposure in the digital age.
An example of how The New Yorker is transitioning to the digital age as a print-heavy magazine is the augmented reality they created on the cover of the May 16 issue illustrated by Christopher Niemann. If you download the iPhone app “Uncovr” you can watch the cover come to life. This follows the release of their new app The New Yorker Today that provides more accessibility to their content, as well as joining the Snapchat community a year before. The New Yorker is taking all the steps necessary to appeal to millennials. However, about 40% of their readership is already millennials.
“You don’t want to publish something terrible,” said Nicholas Thompson, website manager of The New Yorker, in an article with Digiday. “You don’t want the website to change the warm feelings everybody has to The New Yorker institution. It’s a real challenge. You have to be good from the beginning. Everything you publish every day has to live up to the standards of the magazine.”
This resonates heavily with one of main takeaways from our visit with Kelsey Arendt, Customer Success Manager at Parse.ly. The key to community engagement is understanding data. Data can empower you by providing insights on how your audience is engaging with your content and optimizing that. Ultimately, readers come back because of content, so understanding what kind of content brings them back is the key. At the same time, with different mediums you are reaching out to different audiences as well as curating different content.
“The audience opts into different kinds of storytelling,” said Arendt. “Focus the success on the format of the story.” All the big name publications are multi-platform publications, but they are successful because they find individual success with each medium.
“Data is only as powerful as the organization behind it,” said Dao Nguyen, a BuzzFeed publisher, in an article about BuzzFeed’s data science. Although, our visit to BuzzFeed didn’t touch as much upon data analytics as I had hoped, hearing their methods of data analytics and newsroom environment resonated the freedom of experimentation that is attached with BuzzFeed’s brand. Arendt commented, “Their spaghetti strategy has work very well for them.”
Page views don’t correspond with the success of content just like how community engagement aren’t just interactions through social media. There isn’t necessarily a right way to engage audiences, but it comes down to the content. Nguyen said, “Data should inform your choices, not determine your strategy.” Understand what is working in order to determine the next steps. Strong content will bring success. So find out what people like and want to read and build on that. Ann Curry told us, “People do know what good journalism is, but they aren’t sure what bad journalism is.”
Good journalism will keep readers coming back. Good journalism goes back to good reporting. Good reporting goes back to community engagement. Curry reminded us, “Often those who are least heard are the ones with the most to say.” It is about learning the issues and needs of the community and establishing the trust and transparent understanding to produce good journalism.
