Letter from the Editor: Focusing on the audience is crucial to the Daily Trojan

Most people don’t even know that social media is a section in a newsroom. And, for many, a shift in mindset may seem small — after all, maybe it is. But even this smallest shift of mindset can create space for us to better serve our readers and — in turn — our community.

The audience engagement space allows us to meet the moment — one where we spend more time on our phones and computers than we do in many other places in our lives.

With nearly 500 million tweets posted per day, including what our team adds to the already large figure, it felt intuitive at first to call these tweets the work of the Daily Trojan’s social media section. The former name, however, grossly oversimplified the work and overlooked what’s most important — the community.

This new space allows us to expand, humanize and bridge the gap between the newsroom and our audience. When we say we are by and for the students, we must take a step back and consider what that truly means. Our generation is a generation of the undefined and redefined. That’s what expanding our understanding of social media and news communication can do, too. It can bring transparency and access to news digital spaces as they grow and change.

The audience engagement section carries the pressure of navigating ever-changing algorithms to ensure that the work of our own writers finds its way to readers in these digital spaces and that our readers find the material they seek. As a result, crafting a 280-character tweet requires much more thought than you’d expect in order for it to not lose itself in the timelines of a vast audience.

Understanding this space can also help us counter the information overload we face every day and emphasize the difference between simply having information and being informed.

Especially this semester, during unprecedented times (which has become one of our least favorite words) we are committed to continue bringing the news to you.

We are also committed to tailoring the news in a way that acknowledges how every individual has their own identity within a broader community. As each reader craves something different, the challenge for us becomes communicating those demands to our writers and meeting them. We become messengers between the audience and the newsroom, attempting to deliver accessible pieces that, simultaneously, resonate with our audience and maintain their journalistic integrity.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, over eight-in-10 Americans get their news via digital devices. So, when we talk about the importance of social media, the importance of responsible reporting and the importance of using new tools to reach new audiences, it all circles back to making news accessible and sharing stories that build empathy in our community.

As much as we find it amusing to say that our job is to tweet, it is more about giving journalism a purpose — we frame it for an audience in a way that initiates conversation. This connection between the content, the community and the publication is a driving force in why what was once called “social media” is now called “audience engagement.”

Anyone can post on social media and hope for the best. However, when there’s intention and craft behind it, those posts have the potential to live a life of their own and give the journalistic work its proper space in the world.

Social media is both a tool and a space, but in either of these definitions, it can be limiting. Audience engagement allows us to define our own arena.

Audience engagement acknowledges that we interact with readers and are able to make the social media void into something valuable for both ends — the newsroom and the audience. Our purpose then becomes bringing the publication and its creations to life, and for them to interact in ways that make readers care.

After a year where, for many, the spaces we occupied became smaller, we realized that it was important for us to make our reach bigger. We realized that journalism is an avenue for university accountability, but also community. And, by working to know our audience better, we could more accurately tell the stories that matter.