Advocacy content creation is not journalism, but it is a near neighbour. If you want to know where journalism is heading, and where advocacy will follow, you’d do well to keep tabs on the work of Nieman Lab.

Its aim is to help journalism ‘figure out its future in an Internet age’. Read: AI age. It wants to highlight attempts at innovation and ‘find good ideas for others to steal’. This last part I like.

One of the innovations Nieman Labs has highlighted is the creation of the role of ‘Impact Editor’. The details of this new role were discussed in depth at the Incubator for Media Education and Development (IMEDD)’s International Journalism Forum in Athens in September.

In short, the goal of the impact editor is to ensure the work of a journalist can live beyond what is published. The role is a mixture of audience strategy, community engagement, product management, and coordination across departments to make stories reach the people who need them the most.

This sounds exactly like how an advocacy content creator should be working. It is not enough to write the content. Advocacy content is action-led content; it is of little use if it doesn’t provoke an action. These actions will include:

1.     Make the valued customer feel great

2.     Create an engaged community of advocates, and those who value advocacy marketing

3.     Help the client sell its products and services

In practical terms, this might involve devising ways to create a better interview experience or hosting round table discussions with multiple customers. It could be coaching advocates in media training, or sharing story updates with a controlled community of stakeholders. It will certainly mean a bigger role in marketing content.

This will all need to be measured (you can’t call yourself an Impact Editor and not be able to demonstrate your impact). As a panellist at another event covered by Nieman Lab put it: “If you don’t decide how you’re going to measure your success, somebody else will decide for you.”