Recently I’ve begun to hunt down the editors of the beat blogging project to get their thoughts, views, expectations and fears. The goal: Get all 13 on the record and then take a step back to see what the general vibe is (similar to the follow up I did with the reporters who are busy working on their pitches/getting their networks started).

Yesterday I talked with Mark Watanabe, editor of the Seattle Times beat blogger Brier Dudley. Here’s how the conversation went down.

So what’s your general sense of things? What will be your role?

To start off, we haven’t done a whole lot. It’s been difficult to find the time. Brier has been finding the time to do it, but there is still everyday business, plus the holidays and the consumer electronics show right after that. It all really cut into time, he is basically just catching up now.

My role is just being there and interested in what he is doing. I’ll act as a sounding board for some of the ideas he has and participate in the meetings with Cory, who is the point person and initally got us going in this project. She is a senior producer in our staff — she is more aware of the technology possibilities as well as navigating the internal structure that we have and knows when we have exceed our resources. [Note: Cory, I'm coming after you next].

What are those newsroom realities?

A lot of that depends on Cory’s time and inclination. She has been open to trying different things. Brier has had a blog going on almost two years now – so he has established an informal network in that way and can levarage that into building a more structured network wether its a website or something else.

My interest in this is to step back and see how it works and possibly apply some of that to our other technology and more general business reporting, as it makes sense. Our reporters understand this stuff.

How do you see Brier’s network evolving?

It’s kinda of up for grabs. What I suspect:  We will get more regular participation by specific people. One of the things that has developed with the blog, especially technology blogs, it does not evoke as much participation in terms of comments. I think part of that is the nature of a subject – it’s less emotional. And a lot of that is governed by corproate policy –and the reluctance among people to talk about what they do for a living.

On the other hand, we do get a lot of activity via email. One thing that I can see our readers doing and developing is getting more comments not on the blog, but by a select group of people — that would make it more direct conversation and not just idle chit chat.

We are looking at an interesting situation here as much of what we are trying to use is what we do stories about, social networking, the use of technology in business and communication.

The third thing that will be interesting is, and one reluctance we have is the very public nature of this, which has advantages but we are in a very competitive situation on a news basis with the Poste Intelligencer. So we have to balance what can be accessed publicly.

One guding aspect  that we are trying to work with is to try different things, everybody knows this business is searching for itself right now – the more we have a spirit of experimentation the better.

How much time are you willing to let Brier spend on this?

Thats hard to say. It depends on what is working and what pays off. I’m willing to let him spend however much time he wants. He knows what he has to do in any given week in terms of the paper or the blog – persumably if some of this works, it’ll feed back into it. The only caution would be — we are not afraid to drop stuff if its not working.

Tell me about the experiment that Brier updating us on at the end of 2007.

I thought it was a worthy first effort. I would have done some things different if we had to do it over again, there are things I’d be more careful about. I would have made sure we had enough technology. Some of this is just trial and error, and this was a quick idea of a different approach to a year end story — and it worked out in our head. So we tried to translate that into what tools we had available. I tried to do the survey on — Survey Monkey — it seemed that it would work, except the free version only allowed for 10 questions.

Also because of the time of the year we had limited resources and sources were scarce. It really wasn’t the right time for what we were trying to do. But it worked enough that we came up with something and we would do it again, just differently.

I think Brier’s effort will have more concetrated resources. That was a last minute thing, but Brier’s project is something we all know about and people will be able to carry on more and react along with it.