Our Great Lakes Echo environmental news service once ran an image of a giant Asian carp plucking an unsuspecting toddler from a Lake Michigan beach. Another time we featured Sarah Palin shooting a carp with an automatic weapon. We have showcased a giant carp floating above Chicago like the Goodyear blimp. And we revealed the presence of two fish in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court.
These reader-manipulated images grew out of our desire to build the greater engagement that all community news sites crave.
Armed with a voracious appetite, Asian carp is an invasive species knocking on the door of the Great Lakes. They reproduce fast and are migrating from southern rivers to threaten the ecosystem that Echo covers. All that’s keeping them out of Lake Michigan is an electric barrier near Chicago. And they may have breached that.
After weeks of carp crisis coverage and reports on politicians posturing with solutions to the situation, we invited readers to submit to our Flickr account images of carp inserted into unusual scenes. We even provided carp images as raw materials.
When the entries rolled in, we dropped one “carp bomb” a week onto Echo’s front page. But they soon floated into other media.
One newspaper columnist ran our carp bombs in two of his columns.
Another gave us a picture of her downtown and asked us to help her insert a carp image into it. We ran it on Echo and she ran it in her paper with a story about the threat. We were happy to oblige. We were happier to gain the exposure.
To extend the feature’s run, we compiled a dozen carp bombs into a gallery linked off our homepage.
So while carp are terrible for our ecosystem, they’ve been good for us.
The verdict: Humor works.
Chances are your community has the equivalent of our carp - something picturesque that it can poke fun at while interacting with your site. Everyone likes to tell a joke. Give them the tools and the encouragement to do so. To ease the technical barrier, offer to do the Photoshop work if readers provide the images and the cutlines. And for the extra mile, give them the opportunity to share it with a friend, or post it in a public place so they can point their friends your way.
But wait, we’re a news site! Is this journalism?
At a minimum, features like carp bombs serve the same function as crossword puzzles and comic strips. They bring people into your community.
But they are more than marketing tools. They give readers motivation to become aware of the issues you are exploring in a more serious vein. It’s a bit like “The Daily Show”—you need to bring to it an awareness of the news to appreciate Jon Stewart’s jokes, and you may just learn something else along the way.
Otherwise you’ll never understand why those carp are peering over the shoulders of the Supreme Court justices.