New Job for Journalists?

At the EuroBlog 2006 Symposium last week, Steffen Bueffel of the University of Trier in Germany presented his observations of a local German newspaper and its engagement with bloggers (PDF Download here).  During his presentation and the Q&A afterwards, he defined a new role for journalists and/or newspaper publishers:  community managers.

Today, I read a story in the Online Publishing Insider (free signup required) about Google Finance written by Mike May.  In it, he writes:

But increasingly the quality of a publication's audience, as determined by their refusal to remain solely "audience" and insist instead on joining conversations everywhere, will influence advertisers and their budgets. This means that a publisher's job is not just to publish content and start conversations, but to house, nurture, promote and sanction those conversations.

In other words, to become community managers!  This makes a lot of sense to me.

Comments

[Tac]

Shouldn't that be the job of anyone that's publishing content? Whether it's a journalist or a company that blogs?

[Elizabeth Albrycht]

Yes, but I think journalists, for example, could play a particularly civic-community role here.

[Steffen Büffel]

I agree with both of you... Especially journalists that work for a local/ regional newspaper can play an important role in building and nurturing civic communities. And yes, Tac, it schould be anyones job that is publishing content to engange in community managment. The problem seems to be that those peopkle are not prepared to do so... They are not used to their formerly passive audiences to talk back to them with strong and public voices... The industry is changing and gatekeepers have to realize that.

[Gary Bourgeault]

I'm not so sure the idea of a "community manager" is a good one.

I think the concept of "user-created" content is where things are going, and those creating it do not want to be managed.

[Dennis Howlett]

Surely the 'engagement' part is a matter of publishing policy and not editorial? The editorial element trips in when thinking about moderation - IMO. What I see happening is a publishing management squeeze where advertisers on the one hand are going direct to the blogger/journo either in comments or over email. Publishing terms are not always clear. I have what I hope is a very clear publishing policy. No profanity, personal attacks, no straying way off topic. Anything else is fine + no filtering.

[David Phillips]

So, can we drop the word Advertising?

[Elizabeth Albrycht]

As regard community manager vs. user-created content - if you are going to have an online community of some kind, it does require leadership, rules etc. Otherwise it will likely degenerate into chaos/spam/trolls/flames etc. It is possible that publishers could play that role via their community journalists. It would require new skills and thinking from everyone. The question is, are there new ways for mainstream media to add value in online publishing. Providing community space plus leadership could be one of those ways.