Social & Digital lunchbreak: the engaging, managing & uplifting edition

Lessons from the WSJ's audience engagement strategy

This is a great read, full of ideas you can plunder for your own strategy.

Connecting With Readers During a Crisis

Seven ways the Wall Street Journal’s Audience teams engage with readers during the Coronavirus pandemic, from reader questionnaires to experiments with poetry and audio

WSJ DXSCarrie Reynolds

Incidentally, my audience engagement course kicks off in the morning - we have a few places left, if you'd like to up your skills in one of the most in-demand fields in journalism. (Plug over.)

Community management lessons from the Gather ModSquad

I've had this tab open for a week, and finally read it last night, while procrastinating over something else. Some good insights about how to shepherd a volunteer team and delivery a good experience for a community.

What We Learned From Starting the Gather Slack ModSquad

When we started Gather Slack in early 2018, the idea was that it would be a place for our community of practice, to, well, gather and engage with one another. At that point, Gather as a site was just…

Let's GATHERGracie McKenzie

Civil's End

Well, I was able to cross something off my "to do" list, just by reading a headline. I like that efficiency. "Figure out what Civil is actually doing" has been sitting there for over a year, and perhaps that was the heart of the problem. When someone with 15 years of interest in journalism innovation can't quite figure out - or isn't inspired to understand - what you're doing, how are you going to get the word out?

R.I.P. Civil — Lessons from a failed startup - Poynter

The blockchain-backed attempt to nurture digital news sites is shutting down. Direct financial support for member organizations stopped earlier this year.

PoynterRick Edmonds

Social Video Positivity

Forget "if it bleeds, it leads". How about "if it's cute, it shoots"? CBS have been finding that a positive style of social video is massively over-performing for them:

• They generate nearly 200% higher link clicks per post
• Reach 500% more people per post
• Receive nearly 2,000% more engagements (comments, likes, shares) per post
• Have an 18% higher completion rate with an average video length of 1:19

Here's an example: