A panel on audience engagement at the 2011 International Symposium on Online Journalism, chaired by Jim Brady of TBD.com, put four newsroom approaches side by side.
Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of VG Multimedia in Norway, said he asked his journalists to spend at least a tenth of their time interacting with readers. Three-quarters of Norwegians had visited the site that February, 87 per cent of them arriving at the homepage and only 4 per cent from Google. VG’s method was to help readers help each other: a rough site built during the Icelandic volcano disruption so stranded travellers could arrange lifts home, a wiki pointing people to swine flu shots, and a live Japanese TV feed after the 2011 disaster. It also let a vetted group of readers fix typos — 5,000 applied, 400 were chosen, and 17,000 typos were reported in a year.
Amanda Zamora, social media and engagement editor at the Washington Post, framed her approach as call, response, reward. Success, she said, was whether a call got a response, not follower counts. Google forms collected what readers knew about specific stories, such as power outages in Washington.
Jennifer Preston, formerly social media editor at the New York Times, valued the platforms for reporting, real-time publishing and curation, citing Nicholas Kristof’s Facebook posts from the Middle East uprisings and the paper’s A Moment in Time photo call.
Brady closed with TBD.com, which reached 1.5 million unique visitors by January 2011 and used social platforms to gather news rather than only distribute it.