Engaging Your Audience

Engaging with your audience as a journalist should not be a secondary thought anymore. The public is not only the recipient of your journalism, they are often your sources, leads and interviewees. To interact with an audience requires being involved beyond being present on social media platforms or posting polls occasionally. However, that does not necessarily mean that engaging must be a chore or time-consuming activity. There are many ways to build a positive and communicative relationship with your readers, listeners or viewers — however, asking questions about the needs of your audience is a beneficial way to begin the process.

The first and potentially most important question to begin with is: What does your audience want from you? This question might seem hard to answer without directly asking, but analyzing your platform and content can be good indicators. For instance, a local newspaper might be relied on for information about local events, and a national radio station might be a source for entertainment and longer stories for car rides. From here, you can begin to brainstorm ways that your audience might want to be involved in your processes. This step is important because some forms of engagement are more fitting for certain styles of journalism than others; a radio station posting polls on their website, instead of asking for callers during a certain time period is probably not as likely to build up the kind of communication that they are looking for.

The next question to ask is: Where are you dropping the ball? More specifically, what are your missed opportunities to have a positive dialogue with the public? For some, this might be that they neglect to answer questions asked over Twitter or Facebook, or it might be that a tip-line or public email is not being checked regularly. Building a mutually beneficial relationship with your audience doesn’t necessarily require massive changes or innovation, but rather a willingness to engage and perhaps a change in perspective toward your readers. Once you have asked this question, come up with a plan that assigns these duties to someone in particular, or alternates in shifts, so that the responsibility doesn’t get lost in midst of other tasks.

Finally, ask where your readers can help you. Aside from actually doing the reporting for you, there are multiple steps in the process where you could involve your audience. Crowdsourcing is one option that could work for larger stories or more complex topics with information missing. Other options include asking your consumers what topics they would be interested in, which benefits the journalist because it guarantees engagement on the content, or using sources or readers as distributors of the content by directly getting articles that they are involved with directly to them to share with their peers.

To conclude, engaging an audience is not simply replying to comments or answering phone calls. However, innovation and creativity can actually be beneficial in creating a relationship with the public and lead to more relevant content and a more open dialogue.

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