Annmarie Dooling, a community strategist who has worked with The Huffington Post, Salon.com and Yahoo, said that just because a news organization has an audience does not mean it has a community. “An engaged audience and a community are two totally different things,” she said. An engaged audience is “more about one-on-one communication” while a community “revolves around the idea of group think.” During a July 23 #WJChat with ProPublica’s senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora, tweeters discussed the subject of audience versus community. #WJChat participants attributed more value to communities than audiences, noting that community members participate, engage and are invested and willing to listen, read and contribute.
Zamora tweeted: “You can scale a cheap audience, or develop a more valuable community.”
Read the full piece at How to choose a commenting platform for news sites | American Press Institute
