The Cincinnati Enquirer

"The business beat we propose for this project ‘Procter & Gamble’ has great potential for covering by using a social network…."

The Beat: Proctor & Gamble. Shinning a light on the the world’s largest consumer products company.

Reporter: Keith Reed, staff writer The Cincinnati Enquirer.

Description Carolyn Pione, business editor writes…..

The Cincinnati Enquirer is thrilled to be part of your new project,
beat reporting with a social network. We are always looking for new
ways to serve readers, and this idea is an interesting extension of
crowdsourcing and social-networking, two tools we’ve found success with
in our newsroom.

In fact, just Sunday we published an A1 centerpiece where we used
crowd-sourcing to help us report on the local impact of the Superbug.
What we found is a dozen local people suffering from boils, peeling
skin, painful rashes and recurring conditions. Many came forward after
the JAMA report in mid-October to tell us their stories.

In August, we used our social-networking site, CincyMoms.com, as a
source for the story behind an elementary school administrator who left
her 2-year-old in a hot car for eight hours, killing her. Several who
posted to CincyMoms had insights about what had happened at school that
day and how someone might come to forget their child in a car for eight
hours. It is a story that continues to draw strong traffic on our
message boards.

The business beat we propose for this project â?? Procter & Gamble
â?? has great potential for covering by using a social network. As the
world’s largest consumer products company and with a reputation for
innovation, P&G is of great interest to media outlets of all kinds.
In addition, P&G’s reach in this region is broad and deep. Their
business hits our economy on many levels, from vendor relationships to
shareholders, former employees who are now entrepreneurs, retirees
volunteering in the community, spin-off industries and community
development organizations.

In addition, we have a new reporter taking on the beat who has just
moved here from the Boston Globe. He needs to learn the city as well as
the beat, and this seems like a wonderful way to help him connect with
and develop relationships with sources of all kinds. The reporter,
Keith Reed, was a Newspaper Association of America New Media Fellow and
created a blog called Ways & Means that helped him report on wealth
and personal finance issues in the African-American community. In a
small way, he’s already tried out what you are proposing.

In addition to reporter Keith Reed, our new media editor is Chris
Graves. I am the editor with direct supervisory responsibility over
Keith.

We are very enthusiastic about the potential for this
project and what we can learn from it in order to do our jobs better.
Thanks very much for including us. We’re eager to get started.

The Cincinnati Enquirer Team: (1.  Carolyn Pione, Business editor
(2. Chris Graves, New Media Director
(3. Keith Reed, staff writer.