Interview with Brianne Pruitt about starting a beat blog at a smaller publication
September 11th, 2008 by
Why should you or your news organization start beat blogging?
This question becomes even more poignant if you work for a smaller news organization with limited resources. What are the benefits of beat blogging? We’ve been chronicling the benefits of beat blogging for months on this site, but we don’t have a lot of examples from smaller publications.
Brianne Pruitt is a Web editor at the Wenatchee World, a 25,000-circulation newspaper in central Washington. Her paper recently launched its first beat blog for its education beat reporter, Rachel Schleif. We’ll be following along with this new beat blog to see how a beat blog works at a smaller news organization.
The education beat was chosen because education stories tend to generate some of the most traffic and comments on the World’s Web site. Pruitt said it makes sense to try to further tap into that community.
Pruitt and some of her colleagues believe a beat blog can help them build a community, get responses to posts and questions, foster sources and hopefully generate news and information for a beat. Pruitt has been particularly impressed with Kent Fischer’s work as an education beat blogger.
She is hoping this beat blog can be like Fischer’s where the blog helps cultivate and break stories. The World does not have set metrics to meet each month like page views for this beat blog. The beat blog is more about building a community and innovating and less about just generating traffic.
“We’re really hoping for it to develop into an online community of readers, educators and public officials,” she said. “We’re hoping for it to become a really proactive way for us to report education news around here.”
This beat blog just launched, but we’ll be checking in to chart its progress. We’ll be reporting the trials and tribulations of starting a beat blog at a smaller newspaper.
