Social media platforms like Facebook are deemphasizing the “news feed” model on which news orgs have relied. Instead, they’re prioritizing the power of private groups and online communities, worlds of intimate conversation entirely independent of algorithmic updates and brand-written headlines. This presents us with an amazing opportunity: to create online communities around our work, targeting existing places that exist for this (like Facebook groups again, or even Reddit, comments sections and more). In this workshop, we’ll discuss the ways reporters and editors can think of online communities, how to create and launch them, how to select the platform on which it exists, how to sustain and stoke conversation and more.
