News

Kapost is engrained in the online and digital journalism industry. Our customers are online publishers and we seek to fill a need for those editors, contributors and publishers.

We were intrigued by the recent Journalist Engagement Survey, administered by the Center for Advanced Social Research (CASR) of the Missouri School of Journalism so we wanted to share the statistics and key findings (I geek out over the facts).

I added a “Kapost note” with each point with our thoughts on the findings…

High level highlights:

• Editors are thinking about making the news more social and participatory.
• Editors see engagement as part of good business. Over and over in the open-ended responses, they said connecting with and listening to their communities is vital to their newspapers’ survival. That said, they don’t know how to fit it in when newsroom staffs and resources are shrinking.
• 45% say they do not interact with their audiences in the comments section of their websites. Kapost note: I wonder why? Aren’t the audience and readers part of the lifeblood for your publication? Furthermore, you can learn a lot from comments and another post may even spur up.
• The majority of editors receive reports about their website analytics, but only half say they use the reports to make decisions about what to cover.
• Editors often have a narrow view of what engagement can mean. The industry would benefit from more discussion about best practices and strategies. Kapost note: Our new performance metrics including social tracking from retweets to Facebook likes could help editors learn which writer and post is most popular and read.

The engagement facts:

• 89% of editors say their newsrooms have conversations about how to make the news more social or participatory.
• 44% of respondents reported that their newspapers’ involvement with their communities would increase over the next 12 months.
• 50% of newspapers with a circulation of 25,000 or more plan to increase involvement, compared to 43% of newspapers with a circulation of less than 25,000.
• When asked if the newsroom invited the audience to contribute their own stories, 76% of daily community newspapers said yes. Kapost note: I think we will see this trend increase, with the specific growth around hyper-local.
  

You can find the survey and background information here.
What do you think of these statistics? Promising? Growth? Stagnant?