Community Outreach Team: What We Do
The relationship between journalists and the audience is changing. At the Columbia Missourian, the outreach team worked to engage with the audience in an authentic way. Instead of lecturing readers, we wanted to join and promote conversations that were already taking place. We hoped to invite community members into our products through the use of social media, aggregated content and reaction stories. Below is a collection of my work.
Aggregated Content
With this photo gallery, I hoped to complement the Missourian's sports coverage, connect people with the Missourian and attract new readers. Many people attend games because they are social events. Fans may not care about the game itself or seek out game coverage, but they may visit the site if their tweet or photo is featured in user-generated content.
Through social listening on Twitter, it was clear that fans had strong feelings about Missouri's 40-34 loss to Kentucky during the 2017 season. The reaction story allowed fans to read what other people had to say about the final moments, and it provided a forum for further discussion by encouraging readers to comment at the bottom of the story. The article showed readers that the Missourian was listening, that it cared about the audience and that it wanted to engage with them.
Community Groups
For many Columbia residents, Missouri athletics are an important part of their life. In an effort to join community conversations and provide a forum for further discussion, I created the Tiger Sports Talk Facebook group, which has more than 100 members. It was created to provide specific sports coverage for audience members who get their news primarily through Facebook. Not only did I want to post informative story links, I wanted to create an engaging space where people could ask questions, respond to polls and post comments and pictures.
Social Posts
Enrollment figures became a divisive topic in the community after dropping significantly following the 2015 racial protests on the University of Missouri campus. This breaking news tweet was written from a press release and posted without a story link, but I included a sentence that encouraged the audience to check back for updates. In a subtweet, I also linked a story to our previous coverage to provide context and drive more traffic to the site. This tweet was a great example of knowing the audience and providing content that people want to read.
This feature story was first tweeted on the Columbia Missourian sports account. The sports account was intended for a smaller audience specifically interested in sports coverage. However, I thought this story would appeal to a larger audience because it focused on a person instead of specific game coverage that might not have interested a general audience. I tweeted it from the main account, hoping to promote our sports coverage, advertise our sports account and reach new audience members.
This localized story of a national issue received a lot of engagement and was a good example of using different platforms to achieve different results. I posted the story on Twitter and Facebook, but it performed much better on Facebook because it elicited an emotional response. Whereas Twitter is an update tool, stories on Facebook stay on news feeds longer, so audience members have more time to engage, especially if they feel strongly about an issue. This post was a good forum for discussion and a good way to keep readers informed about how local officials responded to national issues.