By Brooklyn Grubbs
Joshua Burnham is the digital editor at Montana Public Radio. He manages the station’s social media pages, website, podcasts and email newsletters.
Burnham recently answered emails from UM student Brooklyn Grubbs about how he uses social media in his work. Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited slightly for clarity.
Q: How do you keep your personal interests, opinions and biases from intersecting with the interests of running a social media page? How do you choose what other pages to interact with?
A: Everything you do on social media has to be guided by your organization’s mission and an understanding of the audience you’re trying to serve. Those are the guardrails you have to maneuver between, and they’ll be different depending on where you work.
What I always tell the reporters is to behave like a journalist on social media. It’s ok if some personality comes through. I can express an opinion about things like proposed state flag redesigns, or daylight saving time, or the best beer in the state, without sacrificing any journalistic integrity. Part of what you have to do on social media is to be social and build relationships, and nobody wants to build a relationship with a bot. Just stay between those guardrails.
I don’t really have any method for deciding what pages to interact with. I’ll tag and share things posted by shows or podcasts we run. We collaborate with other news organizations, so I’ll interact with them. When someone publishes something good about us, I’ll share or comment. And on Twitter, I’ll share any piece of Montana news important to our audience that we’re not covering. But, again, within those guardrails.
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