One thing I repeatedly hear from the Beat Bloggers that have networks up and running is that, right now, tending to their network doesn’t jive with their current work flow. This is, of course, an issue – what are the daily duties of a beat blogger? How can this be incorporated into their already busy schedule?

I can see in the long term how having all your sources in one spot to contact could ease a reporters life, just as the Roladex must have in its time. Right now, however, online management doesn’t come naturally to beat reporting – or beat blogging.

I checked in with Wired’s beat blogger Eliot Van Buskirk to see how things are going. Below is part of that thread.

From Eliot

I’m behind the eight ball as usual today (why will this digital music news not stop happening for five seconds?), but wanted to get back to you before too long.

I’m liking it, but it’s still not a natural part of my workflow.  I think I might also need to invite some more people to increase the chance of discussions.  Is there a way to alert all members whenever there’s a new discussion?  I could do that manually, but it adds another step to the process.

I like it so far — setting things up was easy, and I love how simple it is to rearrange the home page (put the discussions at the top, rather than the stale welcome message).  Do you think it would be appropriate to use the broadcast message tool whenever there’s a new discussion?

Nothing fits into my work schedule.  I have thousands of dollars worth of project deadlines stacked up, a disaster area of a home office, and six blog posts per day to research and write before I can start on
anything else, not to mention the over 20,000 (literally) unread emails sitting in my inbox.  That said, I am getting some good feedback from the Ning group and I can see getting to the point where it’s a natural part of the day, becoming something that saves me time.