Community Journalism and Engagement

Steve Buttry, director of community engagement for Allbritton Communications says the key for the news business in the 21st century is figuring out ways to get members of the community directly involved in their news. He writes:

I’m not looking for someone who can cover sports, though Editor Erik Wemple will be hiring a few people to do that. I am looking for someone who can recruit fans to liveblog high school games.

I am not looking for someone who can cover entertainment (though again, Erik will be hiring people to do that). I’ll be looking for someone who can promote use of a Twitter hashtag by people attending a concert and pull together a crowd review from tweets.

I have some ideas and I will be looking for people who can help me execute those. But mostly I’m looking for people who have better ideas than I do about how to engage our community.

Steve's blog is worth a look if you want to see some innovative thinking about combining traditional community journalism with social media.