[image|position::right]S. Mitra Kalita is the incoming managing editor at the Los Angeles Times. She was previously executive editor for Quartz and served as the site's founding ideas editor. At the Wall Street Journal, she oversaw coverage of the Great Recession, launched a local news section for New York City and reported on the housing crisis as a senior writer. She also launched Mint, a business paper in New Delhi, and has previously worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press. She is the author of three books related to migration and globalization, (notably "Suburban Sahibs: Three immigrant families and their passage from India to America") and has studied seven languages (but only speaks four of them half decently). She has taught journalism at St. John's, UMass-Amherst, and Columbia Jschool, and previously served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association. She is at work on a book about school choice through the Spencer Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, Mitra was raised in Long Island, Puerto Rico and New Jersey—with regular trips to her grandparents’ villages in Assam, India. She lives (and eats) in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City, along with her artist husband, two daughters and one mutt. She tweets @mitrakalita and her website is www.mitrakalita.com.

1. QUARTZ
How to integrate audience into every work flow
Dissecting engagement
March 30, 2015
S. Mitra Kalita, outgoing executive editor,
Quartz
incoming managing editor, Los Angeles Times
@mitrakalita * mitra@latimes.com

2. The rules
1. Engagement is not a separate function in a
newsroom
2. The internet expects interaction
3. Sometimes, engagement IS the content
4. The conversation is probably NOT
happening on your page. Go meet your
readers.
5. Journalists are members of a community
too.

3. Your inbox is a goldmine

4. Behold,
traffic gold
The story

5. Cede the floor
to your readers
The story

6. About those conversations..
They can get nasty…
They happen elsewhere

7. QUARTZ strategy
- Accept the role of other platforms
- Join/stoke/moderate the conversations (yes,
it can feel like client services but that is
opportunity on social; embrace it)
- Innovate what you can offer that others
can’t.
Enter ANNOTATIONS

8. How it
works

9. Among our most annotated pieces
yet...
- Modi is the gift that keeps giving

10. Figure out who your most engaged readers
are -- and meet them
- Quartz India readers spent six times with us
compared to average reader
- And our inbox always busted with comments
- Plan ahead to include them
- Multiple pieces of content might result

11. Now the hard part: Cultural shifts in
newsrooms
- Think shareability and audience at outset of
story
- Reporters need to jump in; no more guise of
objectivity; distance doesn’t work online
- Don’t discount email
- FINALLY: Machines don’t commit
journalism. Humans do.