Questions I have coming out of the first session:
- For newspapers with community sites, like Bakersfield and Raleigh, who is the go-to person in your newsroom for managing threads, policing comments, and general cheerleading for the site? Do you have a dedicated position leading it or is it rolled into other Web roles?
- Is cloud-seeding on these sites only necessary in the early days of the site, before the crowd starts to manage itself, or is encouragement, seeding, and moderation from the newsroom an ongoing task?
A quick informal poll: Who handles your community site, and is it an every-single-day job or just an occasional role?
Comments
One response to “Who’s your community site manager in the newsroom?”
Good questions.
Although it isn’t a newsroom persay, we have an editorial outfit at Ragan Communications that closely resembles a newsroom. Ragan is a niche publisher covering the corporate communications field. We have a networking site, MyRagan.com, the first such site for the profession. I’m the site manager, which started as part-time to my writing. It’s now changed. I spend most of my week on MyRagan, and less and less writing stories.
At the site we have a homepage, called the What’s Hot page, which is updated daily and completely refreshed every Friday. This is among my tasks, and one that requires a certain amount of editorial judgement as well as headline and blurb writing.
To your second point about seeding. The community is pretty self-sustaining. So as someone who’s interested in the corporate communications profession, I simply start and add to thread posts when one interests me.