Traditional Media Organizations Involve Audience: Survey Ideas Requested

As noted last Friday, we’re going to look deeply into what traditional news organizations are doing to engage their communities (of interest and/or geography) in the journalism process. Here’s an outline, prepared in large part by Olivia Ma at Harvard University, of how we propose to look at this.

We’d like to hear your ideas. What’s missing from this outline? What should we delete? Is this too ambitious, or not enough? Do you want to help us do the survey? (If so, let us know.) We’ll be creating a discussion board soon, but we can start a conversation here in the meantime.

Traditional Media Organizations and their Community Engagement Efforts
Survey Metrics

Community = Consumer/Reader/Audience/Citizen/Community member
Participation = To engage/contribute/produce/etc.
TMO = Traditional Media Organization, including national, regional and local newspapers, magazines and broadcasters

Introduction

Traditional media organizations are starting to embrace some of the tools of conversational media, including blogging, podcasting, videos and more. To date, however, most such efforts have been extensions of the franchise, such as staff-written blogs and podcasts, rather than more deeply involving the members of the community in the actual practice of journalism. We seek to learn which organizations have taken that major additional step: how, why and with what result.

The Initiative

• What, beyond letters to the editor and staff-created blogs and other new media, is being done by the TMO to engage its audience?
• Is it original? (Have any other TMOs done similar projects? )
• Is it risky? (How much of a departure is it from the TMOs standard operations?)
• What types of media are being incorporated into the project? (text, photography, video, podcasts)
• What is the motivation for launching these initiatives?

Participation

• What, if any, are criteria for participation? (examples: screening or registration process, click-through agreements to behave according to community rules, etc.)
• How are Community members participating? (examples: commenting on articles; suggesting story ideas; creating blogs; posting pictures; writing full-length articles, etc.)
• How are Community members identified/classified/acknowledged within the initiative? (Are there different levels, identified as such? Privileged status for star-contributors?)

TMO Staff Roles

• How much time, resources, and manpower is the TMO putting in?
• Is there active promoting/marketing of the project? If so, what kind?
• What is the role of the TMO’s top editor and/or publisher (or other senior executive) in the initiative?
• What is the TMO doing to filter/control/moderate the content that is being produced?

Technology and Ease of Use

• What software platform(s) are being used?
• How easy/straightforward is it for the community to participate?
• Is the navigation clear?
• Are the project and technology well-explained to users?

Success as Journalism

• Are participation levels among members of the community high?
• What is the quality of the collaborative work being done by the TMOs and the communities they serve?
• Have there been instances of inaccurate reporting or misinformation? If so, what was done to remedy the problems?
• How does the content created by community members compare with related content being created by professional journalists alone?
• Is it innovative? (To what extent is it causing staff members to reconsider traditional notions of journalism?)
• To what degree is it changing the role of the professionals – journalists, editors, TMOs?

Other Measures of Success

• How has traditional audience responded to content?
• Has there been any concrete feedback from other members of the community?
• What kind of traffic numbers are these projects yielding?
• What revenues and/or profits are the projects generating?

Again, we’d like to hear your ideas. What’s missing from this outline? What should we delete? Is this too ambitious, or not enough? Do you want to help us do the survey? (If so, let us know.) We’ll be creating a discussion board soon, but we can start a conversation here in the meantime.