The News-Press’ efforts in beat blogging has been stalled because of what can only be described as ‘market forces.’ The long and short: There has been no specific reporter to work with – to take the helm of the beat that the News-Press has identified as one of the more important enterprise topics they want to cover in a networked fashion.

But the network is there, hidden underneath the coverage that the News-Press has already done around this topic. A networked CMS, Pluck, has just been incorporated into the site. In a few weeks the newspaper is even hosting a public conversation about child services – playing the role of community moderator.

This beat reporting will look slightly different from some of the other beat bloggers, as described below from the News-Press itself.

From Miriam Pereira: "I’m
meeting with some reporters tomorrow to iron out some details for the
project. We’ve started meeting with a couple of people in the child
welfare community here. They said they’re interested in blogging,
although this is a new arena for them so they’re trying to get their
arms around this."

From Kate Marymont:

"While it comes at the project from a slightly different perspective, it holds true to the original concepts.

Please look it over and let’s try to talk another time soon.

Introduction: The child-welfare beat has produced some of the hardest-edged journalism at The News-Press and news-press.com in recent years.  In the past 18 months three children have died at the hands of stepfathers.  The most recent was just a couple of weeks ago.  And today a 14-month-old boy is in critical condition, his mother¹s fiancé in jail.

The Department of Children and Families ­ the state agency responsible for the protection of these children ­ has admitted mistakes and called this region the most violent in Florida.

This story is too big for one beat reporter.  Many journalists are involved in our ongoing coverage, including other beat reporters, the metro columnist, and our community-conversation team.  While the child-welfare
beat is open right now our coverage has not slowed down.

Assistant Metro Editor Miriam Pereira coordinates all coverage.

We propose that Miriam be the beat blogger until we have a reporter hired and trained.  The beat reporter then takes over.  We are negotiating now and believe that the job will be filled soon, but the reporter will need time to get acclimated.

In the meantime Miriam can be the voice of the project.   All of the team members are experimenting with social-networking tools.  They are cultivating sources, testing crowd-sourcing, etc.   The half-dozen people
involved in our coverage form a network that is reaching out to a network of stakeholders.

We have created a Web page that offers the community tools to protect children.  It is a cooperative effort of The News-Press and many of the agencies that touch the lives of children here.  You can see it at news-press.com/children.  On it you will see blogs and forums about this topic that are always lively when we have current news ­ which unfortunately is often. I’ve attached a screengrab with a snippet of today’s conversation, which is a good illustration of the conversation this topic generates.

This project is well under way.  Our efforts so far:

• –  Recruiting members of the external network, which includes a wide range
  of caregivers, child advocates and agency representatives.
• –  Training members of our internal network on the social-media tools.
• –  Training members of the external network on those tools.
• –  Creating the Web page where we assemble the material.
• –  And actively building relationships so that we propel collaborative
  information-gathering.

Miriam can write about our efforts up to this point.

She can blog for the project about our progress ­ and stumbles ­ along the way. And then we can hand off to the reporter later.

If we wait for the reporter to be in place we will miss the opportunity to talk about all the work we are doing right now. It¹s a different approach.  We believe that¹s part of its value."