As many of you have discovered by now, doing real community engagement is a time-consuming task. It is really difficult to be a deadline driven reporter AND build that reporting off of meaningful engagement.

You have to find things to STOP doing if you are really going to engage. If you want to really listen to your audience, build trust with new audiences, and build engaged revenue strategies, you have to re-jigger some of your priorities. If you are a news manager, this job really falls to you!

Here are a few things to consider as you launch engagement, and clear up your calendar to make it happen:

• Ask yourself, and your newsroom: “What are we doing that is not a good use of our time, and why?”

  • First, determine your mission. Are you trying to build new audiences? Increase station brand awareness in new communities? Meet your current audiences’ information needs? Evaluate the work you are doing and decide what you should give up through that lens.

  • Then, create a list of Stuff We Need To Give Up and constantly refresh that list; encourage input from everyone on the staff. Examples:

    • Stop posting to social media accounts that don’t have many followers

    • Stop doing digital versions of ALL your spot news

    • Most importantly: Stop doing work that is not central to your mission, or adding to your bottom line

• Check out the data: What types of stories are not getting the engagement (defined as page views, time reading a story, etc) that you want? Audience surveys have consistently found that consumers want more in-depth stories with context.  

  • Stop doing or assigning stories that no one is reading, to free up time for meaningful engagement and/or enterprise reporting.

Once you’ve identified and cut out the low-value work, you’ll have more time to:

• Engage meaningfully with audiences to find out what’s important to them and then build stories from there. Maybe it would lead to fewer stories, but those stories would be more relevant to audiences.

• Improve source diversity

• Find solutions to long-standing problems, and report on them

• Seek grant funding

• Map networks of stakeholders to really get stories in front of readers/listeners who care about these issues.

Thanks to the American Press Institute for spelling this all out in a series of articles.