Additional Reading and Resources

Viewing: Additional Reading and Resources

Industry Newsletters

Communities

Gather: A community for people working in engaged journalism and related fields. Offerings include a Slack group, virtual lightning chats, and a slew of cases studies and other resources.
Social Media Managers Facebook Group: A group run by Social Media Pro, an online social-media training company. Although it isn’t journalism-focused, it’s helpful for keeping a pulse on broader trends in social media.
The Social Media Geek Out: Run by the consultant Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra), this group often includes posts about product updates on social-media platforms.

Twitter Lists

Engagement @ sci pubs: A Twitter list maintained by me, including people who work in engagement and related positions, many of whom contributed insights to this chapter.
ScienceWriters on Twitter: Lists journalists, press officers, and other science communicators, maintained by the National Association of Science Writers (@ScienceWriters).

People to Follow on Twitter

Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra): Social-media consultant, founder of the Facebook group “The Social Media Geek Out”
Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz): Follow to find out what the kids are up to.
Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC): Internet linguist and author of the book Because Internet, she explains the ways people use language in a digital context
Amy Webb (@amywebb): Futurist and author of The Signals Are Talking, who urges companies (including media) to look farther into the future.

Pew Research

“How Americans Get Science News and Information” (September 2017): Report indicates that 54 percent of Americans get science news from general news outlets, but that they don’t consider those sources the most accurate. More-trusted sources include museums, documentaries, and science magazines. Respondents reported a low level of trust for the science news they see on social media.

“The Science People See on Social Media” (March 2018): An analysis of science-related Facebook pages, including those run by organizations with a presence on multiple channels (largely media outlets) and “Facebook primary” pages like IFLScience. Take it with a grain of salt, as the data were collected before the big algorithm change in 2018.

“Sizing Up Twitter Users” (April 2019): A few nuggets: 80 percent of tweets come from the top 10-percent-most-active tweeters. Active users are mostly women and focus on politics. Users tend to be younger, more educated, and more likely to be Democrats than the overall U.S. adult population.

Ensuring Inclusion

How Black Twitter and other social-media communities interact with mainstream news. A Knight Foundation report analyzes tweets from three communities on Twitter — categorized as Black Twitter, Feminist Twitter and Asian American Twitter — and includes interviews with journalists and activists connected to those spaces. A few hashtags were STEM-related, such as #ilooklikeanengineer and #distractinglysexy. The report examines concerns and criticisms that members of these online communities have regarding the media, and offers potential ways that journalists can think about better engaging in these online spaces.

“How to Be an Ally in the Newsroom“: One specific piece of advice that is applicable in the audience-engagement role in any newsroom is to analyze your Twitter feed and see who you (or the account) are following and amplifying.

Audience Engagement

“How do audiences really ‘engage’ with news?” A commentary from 2019 probing what the term “audience engagement” even means, and the uncertainty about what the benefits are.

“The business case for listening to your audience is still murky (but early results are promising)“. Will audience engagement actually improve the bottom line? A 2019 report (covered by Christine Schmidt for Nieman Lab) examines the impact of three dozen newsroom experiments, where the answer was unclear.

Limitations of Web Metrics

“It’s 2015 — You’d Think We’d Have Figured Out How To Measure Web Traffic By Now“: It’s no longer 2015, of course, but that doesn’t make this feature by Sam Dean for FiveThirtyEight any less insightful.

“How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.“: A rundown of the types of bots and “fake” traffic, by Max Read, in New York Magazine, 2018.

Mental Health

“Managing Your Mental Health While Managing a Newsroom’s Social Media“: Interviews with social-media managers about staying sane while staying connected, by Chaseedaw Giles for Kaiser Health News.

Watch

Behind the Curve: A Netflix documentary about flat earth believers. It provides insight into the thinking of people who distrust established science, the relationship of that thinking to conspiracy theories, and how it has spread.

Questions or Comments?