Miriam Pereira: The News-Press – “To Provide a Forum So People Can Help Each Other.”

The lead reporter who covered the child welfare beat at Florida News-Press left the paper to work with the child services PR firm. As a result, Florida is still in the early stages of the beat blogging project – trying to figure out the best way they can move forward without a beat reporter at the helm. That makes for a sticky situation, because as I explained to Miriam Pereira, one of the assistant metro editors, if you build something, they come, and nobody takes the helm you may end up with a dead network in a matter of weeks and a few burnt sources.

That said, Meriam is interested in either building the network or finding a way the paper can build the network together. They hope to have a reporter on the beat by the end of February or early March. They are also moving to Pluck soon, which will enable social networking on their site.

Tell me about the beat and why you stuck with it as the beat blogging project even though the reporter is gone?

"I get calls from people about children issues all the time. Whether these cases are true, I don’t know, but we need somebody there full time pretty soon. It’s a high profile beat because our Child and Family Services is not in the best shape. They’ve had some high profile deaths of children in their care over the last few years.

It culminated last year when we had a round table with the judge that oversees child welfare cases and the head of the child welfare in the state and 20 other people from child welfare services and we started talking about why the system is so scewed up and what we might do to help. We have made some progress and certain records have become public and child services has become more forthcoming, but now we get calls all the time from people wanting us to help them. I guess they think we are social workers, which we are not because there is stil a fine line about what we can and can’t do to aid sources. But we do want to provide a forum so people can help each other.

Then we started pulling together most of the coverage that we’ve got or have done and we have a database of daycare centers and the total number of children that have died while in contact with the department of child and family services.

What will we be able to do when we get a reporter?

At that point we will have better social networking tools and a new design. We can use that software for this page and we can get a group of people to start it for us. Whether it’s another organization to be a resource and help this page, we aren’t sure. It might be something simple like inviting one of these people to blog for us once a week — or come in and do a chat with us: if you have questions about child welfare issues you can do a QA thing.

Right now what we are doing is a team effort and it will have to stay that way until we get that department of child services reporter and then have that person be the gatekeeper.

[Next we talked about what the beat bloggers have done so far. The cliffsnote version is: Thought about tools, have started writing a pitch letter and a few have launched new blogs or started Ning social networks. The best "team" network advice I could give (and comments are welcome if there is a better way to do a team network) was to start a Google Group and invite sources and reporters into the group. Again, however, I advised to only do this if somebody would make sure it was seen through and continued.]