Engagement editors: an emerging, important job in Digital First newsrooms

Digital First Media newsrooms have several engagement editors and social media editors, most of them fairly new to these posts.

The duties vary depending on the needs of the community, the size of the newsroom, the initiative and interests of the editor and other duties (some of these editors wear multiple hats). Engagement and social media can be different positions (the New Haven Register has two full-time community engagement editors, Ed Stannard and Angi Carter, plus a city editor who also serves as social media editor, Helen Bennett Harvey.

I’ll blog here with a job description to help these editors as well as to help other top editors decide whether and how to name engagement editors for their newsrooms.

We’ll start with a tweet-length job description, then I’ll elaborate:

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

If some of that echoes my definition of community engagement, which I blogged about last year, that’s intentional. The engagement editor’s job is to lead community engagement efforts.

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