How our “engagement” team has evolved into a “product” team

One reason I love what we’re doing at Chalkbeat is because when we say local first, we really mean it.

Our Tennessee bureau created a voter guide for the Shelby County school board election. Our Colorado bureau invited a principal to write about changes to his school’s International Baccalaureate program. Our Indiana bureau wrote about an Indianapolis charter school’s questionable enrollment fee. Our New York bureau wrote a time-stamped account of how one summer school teacher runs her classroom in the Bronx.

But this local-first mentality has also made my job as the director of engagement incredibly difficult.

Being based in New York and working at Chalkbeat’s “network level,” doesn’t allow me to be totally embedded in the day-to-day of what our bureaus are working on. There’s just no way to hear every single story pitch, give advice or support on ways to make it “more engaging” for our readers, make sure that after it’s written it gets distributed to the right places and then find ways to build conversation around the content. Even if I was a brilliant superwoman who was 100 times more efficient and could do all those things for each bureau while sitting in New York, it wouldn’t even come close to the “authentic engagement” that I’m always preaching.

The part of our engagement work that depends on building community and conversation around our reporting has to be led by and owned by each of our bureaus.

So, I’ve suggested creating a community editor position in each bureau who will be responsible for answering questions like: Who is our audience and how can we better serve their interest in and need for education news? How can we find ways to reflect our readers’ voices in our reporting and on our website? How can we grow our readership?

Yes, my solution requires a substantial amount of money, but I firmly believe that this role will ultimately help us not only improve the quality of our content, but also our reach, reader loyalty, and ultimately, our bottom line.

If it happens, the community editor role is exciting, but what does that mean for me and our engagement associate?

When I think about where I’ve been able to add value for our organization, I think about how I helped launch a daily newsletter for our New York bureau, helped relaunch, maintain and add new features to our websites, and design and build our MORI impact tracker tool. Along this same vein, I want to improve all our bureaus’ newsletters, improve our jobs board, help bureau chiefs use digital storytelling tools in their stories, and find ways to repackage our reporting into things interactive databases, resource guides or e-books.

I’ve been told that all these things are “products” and that I am actually a “product manager.”

Yep. Another day, another title.

But, actually I think the distinction is important.

Our definition of engagement at Chalkbeat is the work of maximizing our readers’ opportunities to access, learn from, interact with, contribute to, and act on our journalism.

And the fact is, this work should be done from a content, interaction and product standpoint.

Reporters should primarily create content that maximizes readers’ opportunities to access, learn from, interact with, contribute to, and act on our journalism.

Community editors should primarily create interactions (whether online or in person) that maximize readers’ opportunities to access, learn from, interact with, contribute to, and act on our journalism.

And the product team should primarily create products (templates, tools or resources) that maximize readers’ opportunities to access, learn from, interact with, contribute to, and act on our journalism.

Now I am curious what product teams look like in other newsrooms.