The Business of Beat Blogging: My Next Endeavor. Community Building Remains Essential and Will Continue to be Our Focus

I will be working on a new project at Spot Us. In many ways it is complimentary to beat blogging. The idea is to create a social network that funds independent journalists through micro-donations.
More details on my personal blog.

What does this mean for beat blogging?

• I am not going to disappear, although I will take a bit of a back seat to…..(coming soon)
• We have another very talented journalist who is going to come in and pick up some slack.

What to expect?

More affiliate beat bloggers: Yes… more more and more. Creating a vibrant network around a beat isn’t a science – but there are best practices and we will continue to find reporters who are actively working on developing and perfecting them.

Tomorrow’s post, for example, will be an interview with Matt Neznanski – a reporter who has built (emphasis on already built) a network that aids his reporting on city politics and business. Stay tuned.

Our 13 guinea-pig reporters are still going to try and make headway learning from the practices we set out.