CIS-A2K/Media Strategy/Traditional Media Strategy
CIS-A2K's two-pronged outreach strategy helps inform existing Wikipedians but also involve new editors from outside the Indic Wikimedia universe. While social media largely helps achieve the former, it will take a combination of social and traditional media to achieve the latter. Given today's global social media infrastructure, people are more likely to find suggestions based on interests they already pursue. However, being able to maintain press visibility will likely attract editors from a wider audience. Even as newspapers are turning towards digitization, the niche of readers, especially those in regional languages may be the most likely to actually readership to editorship as they already speak the language. The growing digitization of traditional media could also be used to link their stories via our social media channels.
Media lists[edit]
As an organization, CIS-A2K has, over the years, maintained a database of media organizations, members of the press and other media connections in order to help communicate our work to the public. CIS-A2K will actively maintain and update this list from time to time in order to grow our network across different languages and regions in India. This would enable us to serve Indic Wikipedians beyond our Focus Language Areas and ensure Wikimedians all over the country get press visibility for the work they do. If media organizations or connected individuals would like to add themselves to this list, they may email manasa@cis-india.org. Across the languages with which we work on a daily basis, we currently have traditional media contacts across a spectrum of media houses. We have 77 contacts in Kannada, 12 in Marathi, 132 in Odia, 17 in Telugu and 6 in English language press. If you are community member with a story to pitch for the media, do write to us and we will put you in touch with journalists we are connected to.
Press Releases[edit]
CIS-A2K will issue periodic press releases for events and activities taking place across Indic language Wikipedias. This goes beyond our flagship events and Focus Language Areas. For new initiatives and themes, we will provide detailed contextual information to members of the press in order to help them understand how it ties in thematic areas such as education, urban development, etc. Upon request from community members, we will issue press releases to members of the media regarding specific community activities that we support financially or non-financially. If you would like a press release issued for your event, please email manasa@cis-india.org
Working with Journalists[edit]
Maintaining positive relations with media members is important for CIS-A2K. This not only helps us publicize the stories of the communities but also ensures a long term institutional partnership with the media organization. In order to do this, we will frequently liaison with members of the press, pointing them towards important community stories they could cover. We will help contextualize wiki achievements to suit a more general audience in English or in the specific regional language. We will also encourage members of the Indic Wikimedia community to write blogs and stories that the media may pick up for publishing.
Monitoring and Archiving[edit]
CIS-A2K, in its renewed effort to document better, would closely monitor our traditional media engagement in our to map our visibility across languages and regions. We will archive the stories for record keeping and tracking our progress in the eyes of the press. We would also keep engaging comments and responses resulting from the coverage so as to continue our engagement with interested and curious members of the public.