This morning I spoke with Scott Clark, general editor and Dwight Silverman, online editor, of the Houston Chronicle.

The purpose of the conversation, which I will repeat with all the beat
blogging online editors (get ready editors) is to find out what the realities
of the newsroom are in relationship to what the beat bloggers ideally want. They each want to build a social network to aide their reporting, but this requires some time from the tech-savvy developers in their newsroom and those people are always high in demand.

If the beat bloggers want to build a Facebook group there are no
bottlenecks, other than their own technical ability. But if a beat
blogger has more ambitious ideas, as Eric Berger the science reporter for the Houston Chronicle does, then there is a technical and bureaucratic bottleneck.

As explained earlier
Eric doesn’t want to just create a social network that guides his
reporting, he wants a social network that actually reports. Eric uses
Moveable Type for his blog, which means he needs to turn his single
blog into a multi-blog site where each blog or category has a different
author who can manage it.

Before he can even ask people to contribute, he wants to make sure this is possible.

Not only is Dwight Silverman and the online crew at the Houston
Chronicle behind Eric, they are starting to think about what
collaboration software they will need in order to get the project off
the ground. Right now they are leaning towards Pluck,
which looks like it has all the tools one would need to not only build
a social network, but get user-generated content from it.

The difficult aspects, according to Silverman will be finding a way to
make the collaboration of the network public and "working like a wiki,
but not as geeky."

There is a good chance that Eric won’t have to worry about being "too
geeky." His topic, along with the MTV Multi-Player blog and Wired’s
Listening Post, lends itself to net-savvy contributors.

But Dwight is right to be concerned about this in general, as should
other beat bloggers. The more user-friendly you can make the tools of
collaboration, the higher your rate of success.

In general, Dwight is optimistic about the ability to pull off a
structured site that will get at Eric’s final vision. The next step -
Dwight, Eric and another online editor are going to have to sit down
and really commit to a technical strategy. When that is figured out -
you will all be kept in the loop.