PBS MediaShift is launching a new series of online training courses called DigitalEd, in partnership with BigMarker. These one-hour live courses will help teach practical digital skills with experienced instructors.
Title: How to Improve Audience Engagement and Digital Outreach
Instructor: Rebecca Blatt, professor at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and leader of of Cronkite’s Public Insight Network Bureau
Tools and tactics for connecting with your community
Join us for a one-hour training exploring audience engagement and digital outreach. We’ll look at strategies for engaging audiences and communities before, during and after the publication of a story, and how to measure the impact of your efforts.
You’ll learn how to engage a community early in the reporting process to set an agenda for coverage and understand the information needs of the audience. You’ll be prepared to gather personal stories, insights and questions from a range of community members as well as examples of successful projects and a framework to evaluate your work. This session will also identify challenges journalists often face in engagement work and offer resources for addressing them.
This webinar is presented in partnership with the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism.
What you’ll learn from this training:
- The benefits of and opportunities for journalistic engagement
- How to use social media to expand your engagement audience
- How gathering feedback from an audience can complement insights from data analytics
- Strategies for measuring the impact of engagement efforts
Handouts:
- Examples of successful engagement projects
- Frameworks for measuring the impact of engagement
- Event-planning guide
- A list of helpful online resources for journalistic engagement
Who should take this training:
- All journalists or engagement specialists with insights or questions to share
- Journalists looking for ways to engage more deeply with their communities
- Journalists looking for ways to diversify sourcing or find new story ideas
- Journalism students who are interested in learning more about community or audience engagement
- Community-engagement editors looking for fresh ideas or looking to connect with other people who have similar interests
- Web producers interested in expanding audiences or engagement
- Newsroom managers considering an expansion of community engagement efforts
Date and Time: May 19, 2015 at 1 pm ET / 10 am PT
Price: $39
Note: If you can’t attend the live session, you can still register and see the archived video and ask questions of the instructor. Registration for BigMarker is required.
About the Instructor:
Rebecca Blatt leads Cronkite’s Public Insight Network Bureau, a professional program in which students mine news sources and generate story ideas for professional news organizations. Blatt, a former senior editor for special projects at WAMU in Washington, D.C., managed community outreach and engagement efforts using American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, an innovative database of more than 200,000 citizen sources. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including honors from the Education Writers Association, the Journalism Center on Children and Families, and the New York Festivals Radio Awards.
