Where NJ.com’s social media guru finds your feedback

If there is one person in our organization who embodies the spirit of engagement journalism, it is my colleague John Shabe.

Shortly after NJ.com went online in early 1996, Shabe began working for the company on a freelance basis as a moderator, tasked with listening to readers and leading conversations on the forums. The site was less a news site and more a community bulletin board organized by areas of interest.

Through the website, Shabe responded to comments from Star-Ledger readers and passersby who had found NJ.com to talk about their sports teams. Other comment threads discussed stories and opinion pieces published in the paper — even though the articles themselves were not published on the website at the time.

“Back then, people would tell us what was happening in their community,” says Shabe, who got a full-time job at NJ.com that same year. “That was the hallmark of the site. And for our editorial team, it still is. We tried to spend a lot of time listening to readers and meeting them where they were. I was always pretty proud of that.”

Shabe is the social media manager for NJ Advance Media, which provides content for NJ.com and The Star-Ledger. Essentially, social media is another means for news organizations to distribute content and respond to readers.

As I mentioned before, I want to make sure you benefit from everything we do and highlight the Jersey-centric journalism we create across all platforms. From The Star-Ledger online newspaper and all the supplemental content there, to exclusives on NJ.com – and this week, our social media options.

Over the past quarter century, Shabe has watched the response to our work by readers like you evolve. Readers have migrated from NJ.com’s public forums to Twitter (now renamed X), Facebook and YouTube, as well as Reddit, Instagram, Threads and, most recently, Tik Tok. Our newsroom reaches 1.4 million followers on Facebook alone.

The way he describes monitoring reader comments on the various platforms he oversees sounds like the way a gardener would describe caring for plants. He would ask you to pay more attention to a beautiful, blooming flower than to an ugly weed that needs to be pulled out.

“Most people want to have positive conversations and reasonable discussions online,” says Shabe, 59, who has lived in Essex County with his wife for 22 years. “It’s very easy to focus on the people who are making things difficult, and we often do that. But I’ve always found that there are people who want to feel like they’re being listened to.”

John Shabe is actually quite humorous when he encounters grumpy commentators.

“I’m a big humorous person,” he tells me. “I think if you poke fun at yourself, even as a brand, it calms people down.”

Shabe grew up in a Maryland suburb near Washington DC and studied journalism at Syracuse University, writing for the student newspaper The Daily Orange (“I was in the last class to use typewriters before computers were introduced”). He got his start covering a variety of college sports, including football, basketball and soccer.

He worked for various publications in the Northeast, eventually landing at the Philadelphia Inquirer. After getting a foothold at NJ.com, his career grew as engagement journalism gained popularity – a relatively new specialization that was further boosted by the digital age.

In his free time he gardens at home and in his community.

“In 2010, we helped start a community garden here in our town, and it’s still going,” says Shabe. “It’s a real source of pride. People grow food, flowers, everything, and we donate several hundred pounds of fresh food to local food banks every year.”

He advises looking for people in the garden of social networks with whom you want to talk and have a productive discourse, “and trying to leave behind the people who want to cause trouble,” he says.

On Facebook, for example, Shabe set up a group chat called “Jersey Eats” where people can talk about good food in the state and which has more than 8,000 participants.

“Probably the most exciting thing there is when someone asks, ‘I’m in Metuchen, where can I get lunch?’ Then people respond with restaurant recommendations,” he says.

It was around 2012 when Shabe and I began working closely together. At the time, he was community engagement editor at NJ.com and I was features editor at the Ledger. NJ.com had evolved into something similar to what it is today: a reliable news site that published stories from The Star-Ledger and other affiliated newspapers, as well as original content.

When NJ Advance Media was founded in 2014, we were tasked with leading the newsroom to develop best practices for reader engagement while continuing to nurture and engage with the readership through informal polls, gathering reactions to articles and collecting story tips.

“The current form of reader engagement is really targeting conversations on social media,” says Shabe, who leads a team of three and works with other editors in the newsroom to develop social media strategies. “So we’re always watching where our users are, what they’re talking about and how they’re talking about it.”

A key element of managing social media for a news organization is ensuring that the content we share on social media is fact-based and authentic.

A recent example of reader-driven content occurred during the earthquake we all felt in April.

“We quickly realized that the story was on social media and that people were sharing their experiences there,” he says, adding that his team did an excellent job of verifying authenticity, especially now that artificial intelligence is widely used. “When we saw interesting images or videos, we talked to the person about what was happening and asked them if it was OK to share their videos.”

John Shabe invites you to join the conversation on any of NJ.com’s social networks. Type in “NJ.com” or “njdotcom” on any of the platforms and you’ll find us. You can reach him at [email protected]

Enrique Lavín is the Editor for online newspapers. Call 732-902-4454 or email him at [email protected]

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