Brady encourages participants to truly engage their readers for this simple reason: “In the new media ecosystem, you need readers a lot more than they need you. We have assumed for too long that they need us more than we need them.”
True engagement means more just offering comments on articles, which always turn into one-way conversations or “rants,” he says. This isn’t improving journalism, nor is offering user photos of dogs, for example. He goes even further by saying that just slapping Facebook and Twitter sharing widgets on your sites means nothing, if you don’t truly engage with your audience.
True engagement, he says, “is any direct interaction with a member of the community that actually deepens their relationship with the organization. This means spending real physical time with the community, training them in ways it helps you, and truly opening your newsroom to them.”
But first, newsrooms must accept actually giving up control by putting them in the driver’s seat: “Something that is very difficult for publishers.”
Some of the ways JRC has engaged include:
> One of its newspapers in Connecticut, The Register Citizen, has a Newsroom Café, where readers are invited to sit in on newsroom meetrings, watch a live stream or participate in live chats, helping the paper to plan its content.
> Community Media Labs where the company is now working with more than 1000 blogs, who, he says, “are not blogging for us, they are doing it for them.”
> Perhaps one of the most revealing elements of its community engagement strategy is “TDB; Complete This Story…We have no problem admitting that we cannot tell the entire story without their help. … If you do this right, the community will use you as a partner as opposed to a rival. More relevant means more audience, more revenue, more journalists and better journalism.”
