Just noticed this feature at NBC Bay Area’s site–it’s a sidebar that sits next to top stories, and displays the audience’s self-reported emotional response. Another place on the Internet to quickly and anonymously broadcast our moods! Yippee!
Ok, NBC Bay Area gives you lame responses to choose from, but the feature itself has cool potential.
At the local news site I work for, Oakland North, the mission is to report stories that local readers want to read. Sounds simple. But since most of our reporters haven’t lived in Oakland or Alameda County very long–we’re grad students from all over the country, and world–there’s an inevitable getting-to-know-you period every semester. Plus, learning how to write and report in various formats is full-time work, so the addl’ work of outreach and audience engagement happens when it can.
So what if every Oakland North story came with a sidebar that asked, “What do you want us to report next?” and gave you a set of options that were chosen by the editor of the story.
Emphasis! On chosen by the editor! Because to begin with, most readers won’t know enough about X subject to articulate what they don’t know. But reporters and editors always leave a pile of reportage and leads on the newsroom floor–snippets that weren’t on-point or complete enough for the current story. Those snippets might get adopted into a story down the road, they might not. It’s kind of a fluke-y process.
Instead, putting those snippets online could become part of the daily workflow. Readers could take a look and choose. I’m thinking of DocumentCloud, which wants investigate reporters and watchdog journalists to submit their source documents to a public database after wrapping up a story. (Sitting in a drawer, I’ve got a pile of old FOIA’d paperwork from Chicago police departments and city agencies. Took me weeks to get some of that stuff, and I probably reported on ~40% of what’s inside.)
Maybe its a (slightly imperious) fantasy for news sites to try and “know” their readers’ whims/needs. Do readers know what they want? Does anybody? (Other than women, bc Wharton decided that one for us: “Heck naw!”) Still, as an editor/reporter, I’d be curious to see which stories got responses, and whether responded-to stories also tracked with high traffic, etc.