By Scott Shulick, Vice President and Group Planning Director

Communication technology has ushered in a new pace of news consumption.

Gone are the days when we would come home from work and cozy up with the evening edition of the paper to take in full-length, well-researched articles. Instead, we’re bombarded all day long with alerts and tweets, pics and posts about what’s happening: from a crisis around the world to an accident down the street. It is those messages that keep us in the know, yet we consume them through the filters of our own impressions, experiences, biases and more. We are, after all, only human.

This rapid (and often competitive) pace of the modern news cycle creates unique challenges for law enforcement. News media, along with citizen journalists, are pressured to get information out to their constituents and followers faster than ever before. They leverage tweets, teasers, soundbites and click bait that rarely carry the context of the story and sometimes are flat out wrong. Yet that context is often critical if police want to keep the public in the know, foster collaborative relationships with citizens and build trust. In other words, it is necessary if they want to be more effective.

On Monday, March 14th, I will sit down with Chief Edward Flynn of the Milwaukee Police Department at SXSW to better understand why brand image is such a critical issue to effective municipal policing. We’ll discuss C-K and MPD’s partnership over the last 8 years, including the department’s use of social media, online video and the award-winning, internationally-recognized MilwaukeePoliceNews.com website.