Why my social media intern must work in St. Louis
Since posting a job for a social media intern in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s newsroom, I’ve been asked twice whether that person will be required to work in St. Louis. It’s a fair question. Certainly in the 21st Century it’s conceivable that a job like that could be done remotely.
The Chicago Tribune folks who take care of Colonel Tribune’s persona on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Digg and other sites could probably do the work in Michigan as easily as Michigan Avenue.
Scott Hepburn, who blogs at MediaEmerging.com, was kind enough to pass my internship along on Twitter. And he’s one of the people who asked why it had to be in St. Louis. In fact, he posted the question to his Twitter followers. Since he indicated he might blog about it, I thought I’d go ahead and post the answer I gave him:
While there is certainly much that someone could do remotely in this job, there are two pieces of it that make it important to be physically present:
- One aspect of this job involves going into the community to promote our social networking site, MySTLtoday.com. It has just launched within the last three weeks. By promote, I mean meet with individuals and organizations who might have an interest in participating, coach them in how to use it, encourage them to participate and highlight their content when they do. I have had three such meetings in the past two days and will be leaving for another one shortly this morning.
- A second aspect is to help coach people in our own newsroom who are new to the notion of social media. I have literally shown people how to send their first text message in order to let them participate in Twitter coverage. There are plenty of similar examples of how I personally — and with help, more effectively — need to bring my colleagues along and show them how these tools can help their journalism.
I think some of your responders also made an important point. Having knowledge of and familiarity with the physical community makes participation in the virtual community more authentic. It can only make your interactions more genuine if you know a little something about commuting around our closed Highway 40, the cult of gooey buttercake and our obsession with where everyone went to high school.
I agree an internship could be structured that accomplishes many valuable things for a news organization and does not require residence in this area code. It’s just not all that I need right now.
Meanwhile, I’ll look forward to seeing the applications. I’m pretty jazzed about the level of interest it seems to have generated already. Now, I just need the resumes.
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[...] Comments Why my social media intern must work in St. Louis | STL Social Media Guy on St. Louis Post-Dispatch seeks social media internGreg Linch on St. Louis Post-Dispatch seeks [...]
Beyond simply going into the community to promote the site, I think it’s essential to be a part of a geographic community because that’s the focus (St. Louis). How can one hope to understand — and therefore better connect with — people if you don’t live where they live, work where they work, shop where they shop, etc.?
Also, how can you host a tweetup in the city if you’re not there?
I was one of the people to ask about this, but your response, Kurt, makes perfect sense. I agree with the importance of human interaction and being a part of the community. Thanks for posting more about this.
The response I got from my Twitter community has been fascinating — pretty evenly split between the “must live here” camp and the “remote work is cool in a 2.0 world” camp.
I’ve posed the question on my blog and around the water cooler, too, and it tends to be a younger crowd that believes a social media employee needn’t live be tied to a geographic locale.
Unscientific, and not surprising, but interesting nonetheless.
Thanks for sharing, Kurt. Good luck with the search.
I thought of asking the “could the intern work remotely” question too, but, as Greg said, knowing the intricacies of any locality really is paramount. The key word in “social networking” is “social,” and I feel that to truly know a society, whether St. Louis or Saturn, one must be immersed in it… and laugh at the mention of Highway 40 and the “high school question”… haha… next to “What’s your major?”, that is the most essential question here at MU
[...] 12th deadline. In fact, even if you’re not interested in the internship, read this post and its followup. They may just seem like posts about internships, but they’re indicative of where the news [...]
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