The afternoon session at the Online Journalism Symposium focuses on the shift from passive audiences to online communities.
Jim Brady, executive editor of the WashingtonPost.com makes a compelling argument for engaging with audiences online.
The Post’s strategy is smart – it tries out a lot of different things, from blogs to live discussions to comments on articles, to see what works and what doesn’t.
“Out of all the things we’ve done, engaging readers was the one that had the most resistance from the print side,” he admits.
But he argues that not involving your readers means they won’t be your readers for long. This is important now where many readers are fickle. Whereas, argues Brady, getting someone to post a comment or join a discussion, turns them into a loyal reader.
It is also a way of trying to keep someone on your website. “Engagement means that readers park the car”, says Brady, in a reference to the web notion of drive-by traffic.
In a world where news is a commodity, engagement creates something unique to your site. For Brady, communities you build on your site, are on your site, and this is a key way of standing out in a crowded online market.
But interestingly, he says that the hardest thing for the print side to accept was that journalists can learn a tremendous amount from the readers.
This harks back to Dan Gillmor’s idea that the audience knows more than I do, and it can be hard for journalists to accept that the audience can answer back and question. But rather than fight this, journalists stand to gain by listening.
Jim Lenahan, strategic development manager at Gannett Newspapers picks up the theme. He says the new beliefs at Gannett is that our readers are experts and we will let them debate and share.
However, he offers a model of this where the professional journalist is at the top of the pyramid, creating or editing content. In fact, Gannett encourages every newspaper to have a social media champion.
In this pyramid model, there are then a handful of generators who are the super-users who start discussions, then a group of responders who react and the reminder are readers.
The challenge, says Lenahan, is to find ways of having more people take an active part in generating discussions and responding to comments.
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