Audience and Engagement, Spring 2016
Blair Hickman
ah3421@columbia.edu
@amandablair
Class time: Tuesdays from 6 pm to 9 pm, March 22 to May 3, 2015
What we’re doing
To goal of this class is to get you thinking about how to practice journalism both with the audience, and with the audience in mind. We’ll look at how the shift from print to digital opened opportunities for an entirely new type of journalism, and the digital tools that facilitate this practice. You’ll gain a basic understanding of both qualitative and quantitative metrics, and how to create an engagement strategy, set goals and evaluate them. Through a combination of lecture, discussion and hands-on activities, we’ll work to develop both practical skills and the ability to critically think about how to involve the audience while producing credible and impactful journalism.
Other notes
There won’t be a ton of homework, but please do the readings before class.
Participation will be a part of your final evaluation.
Keep an eye out for interesting things you see newsrooms or individual journalists doing in the audience engagement space. We’ll spend a little time at the beginning of each class talking about active projects that use the principles you’re learning. You’ll be expected to bring projects to discuss to class.
Week 1, March 22: What exactly is audience engagement?
Week 2, March 29: The new tools of storytelling and getting news out
Week 3, April 5: Newsgathering with the social web
Week 4, April 12: Listening and design think
Week 5, April 19: Participatory Journalism
Week 6, April 26: Participatory journalism, part II
Week 7, May 3: Analytics and metrics
After getting to know one another, we’ll explore how the shift from print to digital changed the relationship between newsrooms and their readers. We’ll talk about the new crop of roles that support this evolving relationships (what is the difference between an audience editor and a growth editor, anyway?), and why individual journalists also need to concern themselves with the audience.
SLIDES: What exactly is audience engagement?
Suggested readings:
Assignment: Readings for next week.
Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram, WhatsApp...we’ll look at the bevy of social media tools available for telling a narrative that reaches your audience where they are. This will be a class about how to build community around yourself, engage with your audience and tell stories through the social web. We will also get into how places like AJ+, BuzzFeed and NowThisNews think about publishing.
SLIDES: New tools of storytelling and distribution
In-class exercise: Split up into groups to create a Snapchat story
Readings
Resources
Last week, we talked about pushing stories out. Now we’ll talk about collecting them through the social web. We’ll discuss how to engage with existing communities in a way that builds trust, and can help you find sources and story ideas. We’ll also review how to find and verify embeddable media.
SLIDES: Newsgathering and verification
Readings
Resources
We’ll shift toward looking at how journalists can build and engage communities. We’ll explore the definition of community – particularly in a news context – and talk about one of the core functions of audience-powered journalism: listening. We’ll review tools and techniques for listening, and talk about what journalists can learn from the world of design think.
Guest: Dr. Carrie Brown, head of CUNY’s Social Journalism Master’s program
Delving deeper into how to build and engage communities in a way that helps you produce journalism. This class will focus on tools and technology that will help you put into practice the theories and frameworks discussed the week before. And we will discuss the elephant in the room – comments.
Readings
In-class activity: Cards Against Community
SLIDES: Building and Engaging Communities
Now, we’ll really start to talk about how communities can contribute to your reporting. We’ll break down different types of crowdsourcing, and how to effectively run a crowd powered project. Looking at newsrooms who are doing it best, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of this type of reporting.
Guest: Ciara McCarthy, reporter on The Guardian’s The Counted project
SLIDES: Crowdsourcing
Readings:
Assignment: Create a callout. Identify an online community (preferably for a story you’re currently working on. Stories you’ve already finished are OK, too) and think about the information they have that would help your reporting. Think about the audience you’re trying to reach, and design a callout that works for them.
We delve into how to compile an engagement strategy and review key metrics on major social platforms. We’ll also discuss the pros and cons of using out-of-the box tools for analytics, or doing your own.
SLIDES: Analytics overview
Readings