Editor Talk - by Patrick Thornton on Monday, January 14, 2008 15:59 - View Comments

Aggregating Conversation: Pharmalot and the Beat Blogging Experiment

Below is a recap of a post from The Exploding Newsroom on how Pharmalot is approaching our project.
Note the levels of engagement that John Hassell denominates. A beat blogger has so many choices and variables – each network truly is individual.

Pharmalot and the beatblogging experiment

I had breakfast earlier this week with Ed Silverman, maestro of our pharmaceutical industry site Pharmalot, and we spent a good chunk of our time talking about his participation in Jay Rosen’s beatblogging project, which is now starting to gain some momentum with the 13 participating newsrooms from across the country.

So I’m hoping for a little help here. What makes the most sense? I can see several ways to go, but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts about these and others:

Wide open: Jump into Facebook, invite industry experts to join, then accept every friend invitation that comes in and feed the best stuff into the blog and a Pharmalot group on Facebook.

Open, but filtered: Use FriendFeed or Plaxo Pulse to gather stuff from designated contributors

Closed but open: This could involve something like a mini-Reddit

Closed: Employees of the pharmaceutical industry

  blog it

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  • http://www.bestblogposts.com/ Attin

    Hay, Thank you for the useful informations.

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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
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @pwthornton on Twitter.