What does ‘community engagement’ mean?

When you tell the family you have a new job, the initial response, of course, is to congratulate you. If your new title is director of community engagement and social media, the second response is: What does “community engagement” mean?

I’ve been answering that question some since joining the Journal Register Co. (and answered the same question last year when I went to TBD to lead community engagement efforts).

Journalists aren’t as puzzled by the phrase as relatives, but I get questions from journalists, too. Some are skeptical, as journalists tend to be (and should be) of any buzzword. Some are enthusiastic about the general topic, but unsure what all it entails. Some suspect that community engagement is more about marketing than about journalism. Some fear that community engagement is one more chore stacked upon the already heavy workload of journalists in shrinking newsrooms.

My new Journal Register colleagues have been quite supportive of my new responsibilities. They are asking excellent questions about what we will be doing together to deepen engagement with the communities we serve.

I’m going to address all these questions in a series of blog posts that probably will take several weeks. Today I will provide an overview of community engagement. In coming weeks, I will dig into the various engagement techniques that I will cover only briefly here.

Let’s start with a tweet-length definition: Community engagement = News orgs making a top priority to listen, to join & lead conversation to elevate our journalism.

Update: Jeff Jarvis and Matt Terenzio said on Twitter that they thought I should have used “enable” instead of “lead” in the tweet above. I agree that enabling conversation is an important aspect of engagement (and I’d say it’s included in good leadership). But I’m not sure it’s more important than leadership. The community is pretty well able to converse already and is already doing so. But I’m pro-conversation, so I welcome this crowdsourced editing help:

Community engagement = News orgs make top priority to listen, to join, lead & enable conversation to elevate journalism.

I’ll elaborate on some key words there:

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The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

Yesterday I criticized ASNE’s report on best practices in social media. Today I’m going to take a positive approach, suggesting alternatives. Here are my 10 best practices for social media (written for newsroom leaders; the list would vary for other journalists):

1. Smart and frequent conversations among newsroom leaders and their staff members are the best way to guide effective, ethical use of social media.

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ASNE offers good advice on social media, but too much fear and not really ‘best practices’

Update: I’ve added a response from Pam Fine, co-chair of the ASNE Ethics Committee at the end.

Editors are starting to accept social tools and understand their importance. But they remain afraid of social media. Their need to control remains an impediment to innovation.

That’s my quick take on the American Society of News Editors’ “10 Best Practices for Social Media.”

The report is a PDF, which indicates the group’s continuing print orientation. It would be much better as a blog, starting a conversation by inviting comments on each section. The structure is thoughtful, providing some discussion, a “teachable moment” and sample policies for each of the 10 points. An appendix of social media policies is helpful, even if the policies are far more fearful and restrictive than they should be.

For instance, this sentence wanders in entirely irrelevantly (it’s the first sentence in a discussion about whether to break news on Twitter):

Social media can become a gigantic time suck, distracting reporters from conducting traditional reporting or executing their job duties.

Insert “telephones,” “the Internet,” “your computer,” “your co-workers,” “your children,” “your spouse,” “your editor” or “most newsroom meetings” for “social media” and that sentence would still be true. But no editor would write it. But fear of social media is strong in newsrooms, especially among top leaders, so this document is loaded with unnecessary warnings and discouragement. The fact is that social media can also be excellent tools that help you beat journalists who are stuck in traditional reporting. And social media are essential now to executing your job duties (yes, for the top editors, too). Social media can also save you time. Someone needed to take a very traditional red pen to that sentence.

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