Today, many online news sites open up discussion on a given story after they publish a completed article. This usually takes the form of ‘Comments’ available at the bottom of the page. Echo has been providing real-time commenting products for many years.
What if, however, they involved their audience much earlier in the news process.
One way to do this would be to publish a list of the stories they’re working on (including links, images and quotes they are collecting) to give insight and get feedback from their readers in real-time – before the story is written!
In short let people comment, before you write the post.
That’s what a Swedish newspaper is doing. And it’s a big hit with their readers! From the original post:
“We believe that we have strengthened our brand,” Novak said.
“Transparency is the new objectivity. We post the job list – the stories we are working on today.
“The instant feedback and the personal reply is extremely important. It’s the feeling that there’s somebody there live now.
“You have to answer in a good way, a polite way and a knowledgeable way, or you can lose trust.”
Novak said some news organisations were so focused on getting a return on investment from digital projects that they lost sight of their readers’ needs.
“If we follow the money… that will make us go for projects that we know will make money and we will keep doing the same thing over and over again. We have to experiment.
“Get readers involved with your brand, engage them with their hearts and minds and the money will follow.”
Using Echo, it would be easy (in terms of engineering effort and zero additional workload for journalists) to turn the lifestream of your news team (Tweets – including replies, FB posts, checkins, bookmarks and more) into an open news-room experience. Perhaps even have the news team tag tweets and bookmarks that are related to their news writing workflow to increase the signal. Readers can track the news room stream and jump in with comments and contributions.
Journalists might even embed Echo items contributed by users directly in their final posts using a simple ‘Grab This’ embed code – essentially rewarding readers and elevating their contributions to first-class content on the site.
It’s clear that planting seeds, curating conversation and aggregating global reactions is the future of news. The only question is which news rooms will deliver the innovation first and benefit from the first-mover advantage.
This is all part of a comprehensive ‘Real-time storytelling‘ strategy.
Learn more about Echo for Social News.
