As siab recently pointed out, Community engagement and participation is down. There are myriad reasons for that, and nobody here has pinned it down to just one issue. As the person who leads the Community Contributors team, there’s one way I think we could help. If I’m right, it could have twofold benefit for the Daily Kos Community.
My entire job is to help Community writers create more, better content, and help increase that content’s visibility. As such, it deeply pains me when I read comments and stories that insist there’s some broad conspiracy to eliminate that component from our multi-prong offerings as a site—namely News, Action, and Community. In the most simplistic of terms: On the staff side, we deliver news that we hope will kick our Community into action, because when y’all are activated, watch out!
With that in mind, we’d like to create a writing workshop for the Community. What could that look like for you?
Two recurring complaints in siab’s post led some of us in the Content Division to identify areas where we think we can inspire change: the lack of “quality” Community writing leading to less reading by the Community, and a lack of confidence in their writing ability suppressing people’s willingness to send a post out into the world.
At my first Netroots Nation, New Orleans 2018, we had a brief Daily Kos caucus. I was pretty new to DK back then, but I was most intrigued by the conversation that started in the final minutes of the caucus, before we all had to rush to the next panel or meeting. Writing tips! Y’all wanted writing tips! Staffers raced to explain ledes and offer headline tricks, even as people packed up their belongings.
That brings me back to the point of this post: We want to give Community writers the tools to succeed, if you want them. My beloved CC Team is welcoming a new senior editor soon (more on that later!) so we can, in turn, bring more writers into the Community Contributors fold, which pays and develops writers, among other initiatives I can’t quite discuss yet. And I used to squeeze writing and publishing tips into my Picks of the Week series, but so much of that was style, not substance.
Yet we can do even more, for even more people. We can offer a writing workshop to help with storytelling. Is this something you’d like, dear ones? This would be a collaboration across multiple departments, with help from better souls than me.
So my question to you, dear ones, is simple. If we build it, will you come? And if we build it, what do you think would make it most useful to you?