Engagement editors: an emerging, important job in Digital First newsrooms

The Buttry Diary reporting: igital First Media newsrooms have several engagement editors and social media editors, most of them fairly new to these posts.
The duties vary depending on the needs of the community, the size of the newsroom, the initiative and interests of the editor and other duties (some of these editors wear multiple hats). Engagement and social media can be different positions (the New Haven Register has two full-time community engagement editors, Ed Stannard and Angi Carter, plus a city editor who also serves as social media editor, Helen Bennett Harvey.
I’ll blog here with a job description to help these editors as well as to help other top editors decide whether and how to name engagement editors for their newsrooms.
We’ll start with a tweet-length job description, then I’ll elaborate:
If some of that echoes my definition of community engagement, which I blogged about last year, that’s intentional. The engagement editor’s job is to lead community engagement efforts.
Before I dig in with the details, I should make one important point: Community engagement must be a high priority for the top editor in a newsroom. The engagement editor should help the top editor carry out his or her engagement duties, not take them over entirely. So as I elaborate on the list here, coordination with the top editor will shape how the engagement editor handles these duties. In some cases, the top editor might take the lead in a duty, assisted by the engagement editor. In others, roles might be reversed. And certainly some duties will be carried out entirely by the engagement editor.
Just as important, community engagement must be a priority throughout the newsroom, not just one person’s job. In the same way that having copy editors does not mean that reporters don’t need to worry about clean copy, having an engagement editor doesn’t mean that other journalists in the newsroom don’t need to engage the community. The engagement editor leads, guides and stimulates the newsroom’s engagement efforts.
http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/engagement-editors-an-emerging-important-job-in-digital-first-newsrooms/