Planning multi-platform coverage to enhance audience engagement

Student journalists who have been through the print production process know and understand what it means to think of a timely and unique angle, report for a period of time, then produce and publish their story. It’s a production process that’s linear and has a clear beginning, middle and end.

Transitioning to a digital first mindset, though, can be difficult even for the most experienced student journalists. Because of this, many advisers like me struggle to prepare our students to produce multiple stories around an event that utilize multiple publishing platforms. Instead, our students run “news” websites that look like a digital wasteland, unloved and unupdated.

To help my own students transition to the digital first approach to covering events, and to get them to think about audience engagement in a different way, I developed a wrap-around coverage planning guide that I plan to use in the first few weeks of school to get them thinking a little differently about how they cover an event.

The wrap-around coverage planning guide is something I’ll have them work on together in small groups. We will plan several different packages related to known events throughout the year, then I’ll have them put those stories on the staff’s online coverage calendar for the appropriate dates.

The measure of success here will be better online coverage that leverages all of our various publishing media to better engage the audience. We’ll see how it goes!