Analysis - by Jay Rosen on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 11:23 - View Comments

Jay Rosen and David Cohn: Welcome to Beatblogging.Org

We just launched this site with twin posts at IdeaLab and PressThink giving the names, beats and newsrooms in our first wave of participants for "beat blogging with a social network," an idea explained in proposal form here.   

Briefly,  it’s this…

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a “live”
social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the
territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be
better.

Why would you follow this site?  To see what happens when 13 pro reporters with real beats give that idea a go, interpreting it in their own way by building useful networks into their beats.

Beatblogging.org is the third major project of NewAssignment.Net, where we’re trying to crack new media cases:  pro-am journalism, distributed reporting, collaborative information gathering, blog-style reportage.  We think the hyrbid forms are going to be the strongest forms, and this project is a clear test of that proposition.

You can subscribe to beatblogging.org’s feed or email alert in the left column, find the participants and their beats on the right, and comment on anything you have noticed right here.

If you’re an editor or a beat reporter and want to attempt something similar in your shop, tell us about it in the comments.  Or email David Cohn.  We’re still figuring out the terms of some kind of associate membership and it would be good to know who’s interested.

If you’re not a beat reporter but have some other contribution to make, tell us in the comments.  Or email David.

Use this post to comment on any part of beat reporting with a social network, or to just  let us know you will be watching.  Thanks…

Subscribe to BeatBlogging.Org via RSS.



  • http://www.MarynMcKenna.com maryn

    It’s an exciting project and I’ll be eager to see it roll out. Off the bat, I’m struck by the gender balance of the final 13: 12 men, one woman. Was that reflected in the entire applicant pool as well? I’d be curious to know whether this is random, or whether any conclusion can be drawn about men and women’s technology use in newsrooms. (Being myself a geek girl whose male deskmates were always asking me to explain the finer points of programs…)

  • http://www.pressthink.org Jay Rosen

    Actually, it’s one women, eleven men and one “open” slot.

    I was stuck by that too, Maryn. I contacted the news organizations, and they chose their own reporters to try it out. We had a woman reporter lined up in San Jose, but then the paper decided she had too big a workload. Then we had another woman reporter quit the biz the day before the announcement. But it’s still way too imbalanced.

    We’re a little better off on the supervising editors front: about one third women. I’m not happy about it, but I wanted the participating newsrooms to run this their way, so…

    Thanks for stopping by.

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About BeatBlogging.org

BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

About the Author of this post
Jay Rosen is a professor of journalism at NYU and author of PressThink.