In a discussion in the comments on a blog post this week, Dan Mitchell dismissed “reader engagement” as a “squishy phrase” with vague meaning and no true value. He called engagement an “overblown concept.”
I’m pretty sure I failed to convince Mitchell of the value of engagement. He has plenty of company in being dismissive of engagement as a buzzword without real value for news organizations. Many also confuse engagement with promotion (some of Mitchell’s points addressed web traffic).
But, as I’ve said for years, engagement is about doing better journalism:
Engagement/social media editor’s job: Lead newsroom to join, lead, enable, curate & listen to community conversation for better journalism.
— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) March 22, 2012
Krystal Knapp, publisher and founding editor of Planet Princeton, provided an excellent example. NBC News had proclaimed that Chief Medical Editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman was in a “voluntary quarantine” following her return from covering the Ebola outbreak in Liberia.
@NBCNews My team and I will head back to the States tomorrow and self quarantine out of an abundance of caution re:Ebola. @CDCgov
— Dr. Nancy Snyderman (@DrNancyNBCNEWS) October 3, 2014
Krystal reported that Snyderman, who lives in Princeton, had been seen out in public in the community. Jeff Edelstein, a columnist at the Trentonian, wrote about the situation and called it to my attention:
@stevebuttry Old pal of yours broke the Ebola and Nancy Snyderman story wide open. http://t.co/V44CL3p6AA @PlanetPrinceton — Jeff Edelstein (@jeffedelstein) October 11, 2014
I praised Krystal for breaking that national story (the state of New Jersey made the quarantine mandatory today and NJ News Commons curated the story):
Nice job by @krystalknapp breaking story on @DrNancyNBCNEWS not really observing quarantine: http://t.co/YQ4YSlGruT HT @jeffedelstein
— Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry) October 11, 2014
And she gave credit to her communty:
@stevebuttry @DrNancyNBCNEWS @jeffedelstein Thanks Steve! I have great readers who send me good tips.
— Krystal Knapp (@krystalknapp) October 11, 2014
That’s why community engagement isn’t squishy and isn’t a buzzword. It’s an essential technique for getting and doing better stories.
Update: After I sent Krystal a link to this post, she added this in a Facebook message:
I agree 100% about community engagement. I measure success based on engagement. If I am not engaging readers in my community I am not doing my job, given that I am a community news site.
Wait, you mean getting tips from readers is what “engagement” means? Cool! I’ve been doing “engagement” for 25 years! I’ll have to grow a neckbeard, get me some hornrims, and start using the word “insane” in every other headline, especially when it’s not merited at all. I’m still not gonna call reader tips “engagement,” though.
And I’m not sure how this maps to the attempt to shame journalists (including the editor of the New York Times) for not being active on Twitter. Nobody tweeted me any tips 25 years ago. And I would bet solid money that all of the working reporters at the NYT who don’t have Twitter accounts nevertheless still manage to get tips from readers.
You continue to misrepresent what I think was a pretty clear criticism: I am not *against* “engaging” with readers, which would be nuts, or against Twitter, where I’m pretty active myself. I’m against cultish, tech-bestotted media critics glomming on to every trend and straining to find reasons to disparage “old media,” even though there actually aren’t really any “old media” (in the bad sense) people around anymore, or so few that they don’t matter.
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Well, if you didn’t even understand what engagement means, why were you complaining about it? I don’t have time tonight to engage further with you, Dan, but I’ll look past the inaccurate name calling and appreciate that you agree with me that engagement is important.
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Name-calling?
You know, trying to talk to you and your cohorts (Jarvis, Ingram et. al) is *exactly* like trying to talk to political ideologues. I mean — exactly, except that the particular concepts and words are algebraically subbed in. You absolutely ignore explicit, clearly rendered statements in order to argue against their opposites, or things that were never asserted. And you wildly misinterpret the statements you don’t ignore. And, like political ideologues, you start from a set of assumptions – like, that government spending is always bad, or that Twitter is an essential tool for every journalist, including the editor of the New York Times — and proceed from there, without bothering to try to support the initial assumptions.
You also tend to think that people who argue with you must be on the “other side,” and similarly ideologically myopic, but from the opposite direction. I’m not some clueless, tech-panicked “old media” fuddy-duddy. My stance is that every piece of technology, platform, structure, and process must be assessed on its own merits — and neither accepted nor rejected simply because it’s new and different, or even because a lot of people are using it.
Clearly, I know what “engagement” means in a general sense. And clearly, my criticism is that you just throw the word around without explaining what you’re talking about in particular circumstances. Some engagement is good, and necessary, and I’ve never said otherwise — I’ve said precisely the opposite, several times. (You know this, of course, but for trivial, transparent rhetorical purposes, you’re pretending that you don’t.)
You, meanwhile, seem to think “engagement” — in particular, on Twitter — is always an unalloyed good, and should be a major, or at least substantial, component of *every journalist’s* job. You have yet to successfully argue your case for this rather radical notion, and in fact haven’t even really tried.
This all started when I asked you to support your assertion that the editor of the New York Times has somehow failed by not being active on Twitter. I wondered how, exactly. What, precisely, would that accomplish, and would it be worth the trade-offs involved with him making the time and effort to do so? Thousands of words later, you haven’t even tried to answer those questions. What you did was address a bunch of stuff I never said, and then tell me that some reporter got a cool tip from a reader and got a good story out of it. Sort of like when an Internet commenter responds to a story about feminism by saying something about Benghazi.
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I answered that question and many more from you, Dan. You didn’t like the answers. That’s OK. I just don’t care to continue an argument that has potential to be endless.
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There was a time when a journalist making his/her rounds would chat up police officers, the clerks and others at City Hall or the Statehouse … and inevitably stop at a local coffee house or restaurant to hear what the locals had to say about anything and everything. It was a part of being a good journalist, keeping a finger on the pulse of the community.
Engagement via social media is no different, and in fact can be far more effective as you engage with more and more readers to get a handle on trends related to reader concerns about what is affecting them, where their interests fall, as well as to gather news tips.
It seems to me that anyone who dismisses social media engagement simply because it is (somewhat) new or trendy is denying that tech changes not only can change what we do and how we do it, but it can enhance it as well.
Denying that is Luddite thinking and extremely short-sighted.
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[…] My Oct. 6 post saluting Matt DeRienzo’s leadership for Digital First Media topped 500 views. Other posts that got a few hundred views told about next semester’s class on interactive storytelling tools, different ways of viewing the size of Twitter’s user base and Planet Princeton’s effective engagement. […]
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[…] also got a mention from my old friend Erik Wemple (for noting Krystal Knapp’s effective use of community engagement in breaking the story that NBC’s Nancy Snyderman wasn’t observing the voluntary […]
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