The skill set that journalists use to cover beats and network with sources and communities is not merely a means to an end (articles or other packaged stories). It’s also the core of an emerging role: the community manager.
News organizations have much to gain by taking this role more seriously, particularly by devoting staff and other resources to it. And journalists potentially can expand their career options by learning to be conscious community managers.
The community management role has been on my mind since reading ReadWriteWeb’s the “Guide to Online Community Management.” This report includes an interview with Mathew Ingram, longtime technology journalist and also communities editor for the Toronto Globe and Mail, who offered some specific examples of how his paper has been integrating community management with online news coverage.
In addition to conversing with people directly via Twitter and other social media, community management can also involve collecting, curating and presenting the best of public conversation on current news topics. The Globe and Mail uses CoverItLive for this. Ingram explained how in an e-mail exchange with me:
“We did a live blog/discussion during the Michael Jackson memorial. About 11,000 people took part (or at least watched), which was our best discussion by far,” Ingram said. “We pulled in tweets as part of it. There are several ways to do this through CoverItLive: You can pull in all of a specific user’s tweets; you can pull in tweets from anyone using a specific hashtag or keyword; or you can pull in just the tweets of specific users who use a particular hashtag or keyword.” (You can find out more details about how to use CoverItLive this way in Ingram’s April 30 Nieman Journalism Lab article.)
Ingram observed that although Twitter and CoverItLive may reach only a small proportion of the total population in a target market directly, those people may offer special value to a news organization:
- “Many of those people are likely to be what marketers like to call influencers. This has value because they can spread [the news organization’s] message.”
- “Network effect benefits: Links [to coverage] get retweeted and retweeted, and eventually reach a much larger group than it might first appear.”
He continued: “I would argue that newspapers in particular brag about how many readers they reach — but the reality is a large number of the people we consider readers or subscribers may never read the majority of the articles in our newspapers. That’s not something we generally like to admit. So I think the number discrepancy between social media and traditional media isn’t as large as it might first appear.”
Here’s another example of how social media can increase site traffic: On April 10, The Globe and Mail site published an interview with Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson called “There Will Be Blood.”
Ingram said, “It still holds the title as the most read story in the 10-year history of our site. I can’t prove it conclusively, but the evidence I’ve seen from blog searches and [trackable URL shortening service] Bit.ly leads me to believe that the bulk of the extra page views that pushed that story beyond the average readership came from social media — from people retweeting and clicking on links in Twitter, from Facebook and from blogs.”
Disclosure: Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb’s vice president of content, sent me a review copy of the $299 online community report. Although it’s intended primarily for a corporate/PR audience, I think it offers insight and value that news organizations and journalists could use.
