Heritage Media teaches media skills in Michigan communities

Michelle Rogers leads a workshop for the community at the Heritage Media-West Community Media Lab in Ypsilanti, Mich.

Heritage Media-West in the western suburbs of Detroit is providing an excellent model of community engagement.

From Heritage’s new Community Media Lab in Ypsilanti, Managing Editor Michelle Rogers and her colleagues lead workshops for the community to help people in their community tell their stories more effectively using blogs and social media.

“The main focus of the lab is to teach technology tools and reporting skills to members of the community so they can share their voices and document the important events, traditions and news in their communities in partnership with Heritage Media,” Michelle explained in the blog post linked above.

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Observations from October’s traffic record on my blog

October traffic on my blog passed the record I set in April, totaling 32,725 views, more than 1,500 beyond the old record. I thought I’d share observations about what worked:

• Make content timely and useful. Changes to the Facebook news-feed algorithm are a concern for journalists managing social media for news brands, as visibility and engagement have dropped. I developed a webinar and blog post on practices that were resulting in strong engagement on Digital First Media Facebook pages. The post generated more than 5,800 views, becoming my seventh-most-viewed blog post ever. Social media have always driven traffic for this blog, usually from Twitter and Facebook. This post also got a boost from Slideshare, where slides from the webinar have been viewed more than 22,000 times and were featured by Slideshare.
• Post a lot. I posted 34 times in October. Lots of them didn’t get much traffic. But their accumulated traffic set the record. There’s no question in my experience that frequent posts boost traffic.
• Ethics posts boost traffic. My second-most-read post of the month (and the one with by far the most comments, 77) suggested that journalists stop using the term “alleged victims.” The post was already generating some discussion when it was featured on the WordPress Freshly Pressed blog (it’s on the third page now). New posts about Bob Steele’s Guiding Principles for the Journalist, my suggestions for updating the Guiding Principles and the #PoynterEthics discussion about updating them (plus some archived ethics post) generated another 1,500+ views.

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