Earlier this week, I (finally) read the Center for Citizen Media report, “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement: News Organizations Forge New Relationships with Communities,” by Lisa Williams of H2OTown.com and Placeblogger, Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media and Jane MacKay, a Northeastern University graduate student.
The report briefly covers what worked and what didn’t work for some of the early adopters of community engagement. The report then delves into detail on some 13 examples of successful news and community-oriented sites, such as Morris DigitalWorks’ Bluffton Today, MyMissourian from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and GateHouse Media’s Wiked Local.
The running theme through the entire report, however unquantifiable, is about changing newsroom culture to make community engagement really work to everyone’s advantage. The writers, in detail, note the benefits for a newspaper company of developing a community conversation – and actually listening to the other side of that conversation. The benefits are “regaining a place at the center of the civic conversation,” “enhancing institutional memory,” “reducing bunker mentality” and producing “new stories, new ways.” In addition, the report suggests keeping expectations realistic, pointing out the oft-cited statistic that a majority of the edits to Wikipedia pages are made by a very small minority of the sites visitors.
In addition to covering some of the most common methods of community engagement, the report also talked about “one bad idea” – “Building a community, keeping the walls.”
“Sites with all the latest features, a reasonable degree of user-friendliness, and significant traffic can and do fail to gain traction. Two hallmarks of these sites that haven’t caught on yet: They allow user content but the staff of the newspaper ignores it and never interacts with the visitors who have become participants. They allow user content but users have to conform to some version of existing journalistic norms,” according to the report. “These two mistakes are basically the same: they represent the desire to build a community without having to make any changes in philosophy or work practice on the part of people at the news organization.”
The profiles in the Frontiers report are interesting and informative, and the technological suggestions, such as “make technological flexibility a priority,” are solid. But when you boil it down, the report suggests, real success in community engagement comes from making your newsroom culture flexible, too.