During the building communities session at the World Editors Forum in Vienna today, editor-in-chief of the Journal Register Company Jim Brady discussed a number of ways in which you can build communities and importantly, greater engagement with your audience.

One of the ways is through opening up the newsroom, referring to the Register Citizen in Torrington, which opened up a newsroom cafe open to the public at the end of last year.

Members of the community are welcome to get involved either virtually, such as by attending news meetings via Skype or physcially by coming into the newsroom to talk to reporters over a coffee.

I spoke to Jim at the end of the session to find out more about the project, and how it has developed in its first year.

Jim Brady, Journal Register Company by journalismnews

Another member of the panel, Anette Novak, editor-in-chief of Norran in Sweden, also discussed a similar project they run online, called eEditor, which you can find more on here. There will be more tips on building communities from the World Editors Forum session on Journalism.co.uk tomorrow.

The topic of enhancing community engagement was also discussed at Journalism.co.uk’s own event news:rewired, which took place in London last week. You can see a liveblog of that session here, and a copy of the presentations from those speakers is available at this link.