Engaging a community: bunga bunga, potholes and paywalls
Part of a panel this morning at the International Journalism Festival on engaging communities in journalism which managed to tread its way through 'bunga bunga parties', paywalls and potholes.
It was an interesting debate to get the morning started where we considered some of the ways news organisations used social media in particular to start conversations with their audiences.
Peter Gomez from Il Fatto Quotidiano gave an insight into how he and some friends had started up their Italian news and debate website from nothing. An investigative journalist by trade Gomez now runs a site which averages 4.5million unique visitors a month and their following and traction on Facebook and in the comments would be envied by many sites.
The interesting thing they've done is used their online brand to launch a print product - and engage their readership through a paper format as well. A true multimedia start-up? They also started their site by asking for subscriptions and donations from readers, and raised around $6million to kick-start the production of their newspaper. They focus away from the mainstream news and provide an alternative and have clearly captured the 'Facebook generation' market - and their journalists have become stars in their own right, with Gomez having nearly 20,000 fans alone on Facebook.
Is this something we're going to see as a trend across media, not just in the UK but worldwide as media organisations look to create 'social media stars' out of their journalists and promote them as much as the product they write for. I know it's something we'd definitely consider doing at Media Wales.
Gomez also touched upon their use of Facebook to find exclusive stories. Some of this may have been lost in translation, but he described how they'd found a young girl who had been to a 'bunga bunga party' with Gaddafi and Berlusconi, and through her Facebook profile - which was public - gained access to loads of photos of her drinking and doing naughty things. This was in contrast to an interview she'd given to the Italian media about recently converting to Islam, all thanks to Gaddafi according to her.
On a more local, and perhaps more creepy level, I described how we used a site called OpenBook, to search public status updates in the event of a death or emergency and find people who know victims - and contact them asking for information, photos.
The panel also heard from Josh Young, who used to work for the Huffington Post, and he described their 'Off the bus' section from the 2008 American elections - and the exclusive they got from Obama's "red-neck" comments about Conservatives in the States. This story blew up, and was provided by a 'citizen journalist'. We didn't get much chance to explore the verification of that story or the editorial processes involved but I can only hope the 'Welsh Watch' we're running on WalesOnline in conjunction with The Guardian provides a similar scoop!
We got onto some specifics about how you can encourage comments on your site, and here's a few pointers:
- It doesn't matter if people are writing mundane comments, at least they are doing it on your site - Allow the option to recommend or rate stories, not everyone wants to comment - People will tend to comment on things they know and feel comfortable about, don't be disheartened if your great piece of investigative work doesn't get any comments. People might be too afraid to comment. - Make your site showcase the best comments and show the best ones - Ensure your journalists are engaging in the comments and involved in the debate
Paola Bonomo, head of online services for Vodafone Italia, brought a different dimension to the debate. She spoke about the 'My190' community they were creating, where people logged in to find out their balance, how many extras they'd used etc - but also get the latest on new products. This is the beauty of the web, you can create a community around any topic and Vodafone Italia seem to have the balance right.
Bonomo spoke about how they offered exclusive use of new products to their most committed users, posted videos giving sneak peek of new mobile phones and generally just engaged with people who are for want of a better word 'mobile phone geeks'. The challenge for UK media is how do we engage with people who are 'news geeks' and get them involved in our reporting?
The debate then moved onto crowdsourcing, as no panel on engagement can be complete without said buzzword. I was able to show our example of the South Wales train disruption was a great local example of using our readers to show the disruption caused by a power outage during the morning commute in Wales last month.
We were also questioned about paywalls, and whether these hampered efforts to engage with a community. I think this all depends on what the paywall is there to do - if you want to create an exclusive community which you can sell to advertisers then it's not such a bad thing. Of course, if you're trying to be mass market and reach as many people as possible then a paywall is not for you.
Justin Peters, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review online, who was chairing the panel, managed to bring the debate onto potholes. I congratulated Italy on some spectacular potholes and spoke about how we'd used crowdsourcing to get people to send in their pothole sightings and that crowdsourcing worked really well at a local level - especially when you found an issue people cared about or got riled up about.