Best Practices for Journalists on Social Media – Page 10

November 11, 2022December 9, 2023 montanajournalism Best Practices for Journalists on Social Media

Social Media Best Practices: Q&A with “Risk!’s” Brad Lawrence

By Kai Williams

Collecting and coaching stories from all walks of life, from all around the world, Brad Lawrence has the difficult task of narrowing down the stories which are shared on a weekly podcast into bite-size pieces to entice social media users to tune into the show.

Lawrence is the casting director, story producer, and social media manager of “RISK!,” a live storytelling show and weekly podcast hosted by Kevin Allison. “RISK!” shares true stories people never thought they’d dare to share in public. As of 2018, on average the podcast has one million monthly episode downloads and has upwards of 14,000 likes on Facebook. “RISK!” is active on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as holding group discussion forums on a private Facebook page and within its own subreddit.

Lawrence has been a part of the “RISK!” team since 2016. He’s a storyteller himself, but also a teacher, writer, and hosts his own science fiction audiobook-as-podcast, “Maxine and the Planets Unknown.”

“RISK!” prides itself on showcasing a wide array of storytellers from as many different backgrounds and experiences as possible. With that, Lawrence has the opportunity to consume all types of stories and work with the storytellers to portray those stories in a condensed and meaningful way for social media.

Lawrence answered questions from New York via Zoom with University of Montana journalism student Kai Williams. Some questions and answers have been edited and shortened for clarity.

Q: You are the casting director, story producer, and social media manager. Can you tell me what each of those things mean regarding “RISK!?”

A: The casting director side of it is reading the pitches as they come in, deciding if a story’s the right fit for “RISK!,” getting a recording and guiding people through that entire process to the point of actually being cast on the show, or not, depending how it all goes.

Then then the story producer part is when we’re actually working on a story and the coaching process falls under that heading. Corralling all the recordings; making sure who needs to hear the recordings hears them; sitting in on the casting meetings and making a case for like, “I think this story works for this reason,” or whatever reason, or, “We think this person should be moved to radio-style or receive more notes in this.” And that’s a lot of people. You end up talking to people on the tech side, the production side, and that kind of stuff, as well as Cyndi [Freeman, casting director and story producer] and Kevin [Allison, host and creator].

And then the social media side is—I am the cheapest graphic designer in the whole wide world because I’m a hobbyist graphic designer. So, a lot of the things you see on Instagram are things that I designed because I’m willing to do it, essentially. A lot of guidance from JC Cassis [producer and business manager] on that. If you look at the “RISK!” Instagram feed and the Story Studio Instagram feed, you will see lots of my graphic design with input from JC and JC oversees that I’m within certain guidelines and guardrails. I run all the social media accounts. But all the aesthetic principles and the voice of those accounts—that was decided by JC and then communicated to me and it’s my job to stay within those bounds, which I mainly do pretty well.

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November 11, 2022December 9, 2023 montanajournalism Best Practices for Journalists on Social Media, J-School

Social Media Best Practices: Q&A with Montana Public Radio’s Katy Wade

By Nicolas Kuster

Katy Wade is the new community media specialist at Montana Public Radio. She’s a 2019 graduate of the University of Montana School of Journalism. Her radio station has 2,806 followers on Instagram, 18,500 followers on Twitter, and 13,432 likes on Facebook. Wade’s “Big Why” podcast is one of the featured elements of the Montana Public Radio social media page.

UM student Nicolas Kuster interviewed Wade over Zoom about her work and her approach to social media. Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited slightly for brevity.

Q: What is the most fun part of your job? What do you do on a daily basis?

A: So, the most fun part of my job is that every day looks kind of different. I work on a lot of little projects but mostly I’ve been working with our news team and our development team to kind of bring in new listeners. And kind of see which listeners we’re talking to and which listeners we aren’t talking to and how to get those people more engaged with the station.

So, that can look like doing some social media work. That can also look like starting a podcast. I helped start a listener engagement podcast called “The Big Why,” and I have also been working on different ways to get sponsorship to kind of help bring in some more money to get those listeners.

Q: What is your biggest and smallest demographic?

A: It’s kind of hard to get a record of who we are listened to most, but I do think we have quite a lot of older listeners. We’ve got quite a variety of listeners as well, which is cool. But we did do a source audit where we looked at everybody over a 3-month period from last summer that we use as the source in a story and kind of broke down the demographics of that. It seems like the people that we talked to the most are older and more white and everything else is pretty matched with the Montana census. It does seem like people we were kind of missing out on, our smallest demographic that we were missing, were younger voices and rural places. So, people in Montana who live kind of off-the-grid, or, you know, not in big cities.

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