Turning the news into conversation: ISOJ 2021 panel focuses on community management and audience engagement

News consumption doesn’t have to be a passive experience. Readers should be able to participate in the news process, making media and journalism more interactive and accessible to all. 

Five community management and audience engagement directors, strategists, and innovative journalists will take part in an ISOJ panel on this topic, with a focus on how to turn news into a conversation. Through their work, the panelists aim to not only involve readers in news consumption but use engagement as a driving force in content production. 

The panel will be on the first day of ISOJ Online, Monday, April 26, at 4 p.m. U.S. Central Daylight Time (-5:00 UTC). Use this or any other time zone converter to find out the equivalent time in your region. But first, visit ISOJ’s website for more details, make sure you register here for ISOJ.

Irving Washington will lead the panel as the Executive Director/CEO for the Online News Association (ONA), the world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists. Before joining ONA, he worked for the National Association of Black Journalists and the Radio-Television Digital News Association. He’s an ASAE Fellow, Columbia University Punch Sulzberger Executive Leadership Fellow, and ASAE Diversity Executive Leadership Program (DELP) Scholar. Irving has also been recognized as a 40 under 40 honoree by the Washington Business Journal and USAE/Association Forum.

Ready to share their expertise on community management and audience engagement are these five innovative panelists:

• Nisha Chittal will join the panel in discussing audience engagement in digital media. She has developed audience growth strategy for MSNBC, NBC News, Travel Channel and now as Director of Audience and Engagement at Vox Media. She is both a journalist and an editor, and was named one of Forbes “30 under 30” in digital media in 2016. 
• Ashley Alvarado is an award-winning director of community engagement at Southern California Public Radio (KPCC + LAist). Her success in community engagement is clear with the development of the live storytelling series: Unheard LA, where real people share true stories of life in Southern California. Alvarado is also board president of Journalism that Matters and a board member of Online News Association.
• Darryl Holliday is an innovative journalist, participatory media advocate and media entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and news lab director for City Bureau, a civic journalism lab based inChicago. Holliday and his team created the award-winning web app in 2019, Documenters.org, a platform that trains and pays people to hold local public meetings and government officials accountable, and make connections with fellow civic collaborators. 
• Bobby Blanchard strives to expand the reach and engagement of The Texas Tribune across all platforms as the assistant director for audience. He also heads all social media efforts at the Tribune. Blanchard is a native Texan and studied Journalism at UT Austin. 
• Annie Z. Yu is the director of engagement at Politico in Washington D.C. where she created the newsroom’s first ever audience engagement team. She was previously an audience engagement editor for the Los Angeles Times, and currently serves as a board member of the Asain American Journalists Association as an engagement advisor.

Join us at the Knight Center’s 22nd International Symposium on Online Journalism for this panel discussion, and many more. Register now: https://isoj2021.splashthat.com/w